StreetMkr: build streets really easily

Hey everybody!



So while I was working on my last game, I realized that one of the things that was a pain point for me was laying out streets. Things like terrain are really easy to do quickly with pretty good results, but if you want nice looking roads you either have to use powerful general purpose modeling tools that might be a bit awkward from a workflow perspective to integrate with the rest of your scene (IE, your Max/Maya/Blender sort of deal), or you're working with tiled prefab assets (some of which are quite great, but tiles limit your flexibility).

What I wanted could be described as "Sim City for designers" (the road part, anyway), so I tried to put that together. Basically, I just wanted to say "there's a road here" and for the system to come up with something that's good looking.

Here's where I'm at so far: http://u3d.as/content/street-mkr/street-mkr (Also website: http://www.streetmkr.com ). The "getting started" video gives the best feel for this. (Sorry for my scratchy voice... I had a cold)


This is a 1.0 release! So I'm really interested in any feedback, positive or negative, even if it's just based off the video. What works, what doesn't, what could this do to make things easier for you, what features would you totally kill for?

Thanks!
--Ian

 

Looks very interesting! Nice and simple. I like how it works with the existing terrain, which is sometimes more desirable than deforming the terrain like EasyRoads does.

I don't see any documentation about the Bottom or Skirt options, and not much on Sidewalks. Can you explain those?

 

Join forces with the map-ity dev to get him to add support for your system and you got a guaranteed customer here.

 

Sure, I'll make sure to add that to the docs. So sometimes your road might hover off the terrain a bit, if you have a height offset on either of the intersections. The "has skirt" option just means it triangulates the sides of the road, so instead of being a flat object it has sides. "Bottom" triangulates the bottom of the road. When the roads are pressed to the terrain neither of those options are super useful, but at some point I intend to make it so that it can do things like highway overpasses and bridges. (You can kind of do those things right now with height offsets, but they're a bit awkward).

 

Thanks for the heads up! I wasn't aware of that project. I actually have an OSM importer built in, although I haven't featured it prominently since it's in a bit of an early stage. Map-ity looks much better than what I've done with that so far. I'd love to figure out a way to integrate with that... I'll go buy a copy of that this weekend and see if I can figure something out, and maybe reach out to the developer to see if I can provide some API's or something along those lines to add some compatibility between our products

 

Thanks for the brief explanation. More details would be very helpful (like how do the skirts work -- are they adjustable in height? In angle?) I've purchased plenty of asset store packages that look good but don't end up working quite how I need them, so the more documentation available pre-purchase, the better.

 

Right now skirts aren't adjustable in heights or angle -- it's a 1 meter height and a 90 degree angle. I'm going to make that customizable for the next release. Right now I'm waiting for the current update to get approved (added some optimizations for large maps), so maybe like a week or so from now for that feature. I'm trying to iterate quickly, so keep any feature requests/ideas coming and I'll try to fill out the documentation a bit more

 

Great, that'll seal the deal for me.

 

Well done, great start for a 1.0! Bookmarked.

How difficult would it be to allow a side view road profile curve to define the road shape across the width? For example - if you specified a 'U' shaped curve, you could create troughs / river beds on the terrain (although it would probably have to be above the terrain at the lowest point?). It that case you would just specify a 'M' shaped curve or something.

Is the road texture customizable? Can we create dirt roads (on top of grass) for example?

 

With regards to your first question: I've thought about that a lot. It wouldn't be super hard, but it's not trivial either (it's easy to do on the roads themselves, but it gets a little complicated for joining with other roads at intersections -- then your geometry has to integrate gracefully with other roads that might do something different. Not impossible, but not easy either).

The trough/river example is interesting, but it also presents a challenge, in that you'd have to carve the terrain to do that. I'm not against modifying the terrain, but to make this easy to use I've been trying to make it so that it tries to adapt to whatever situations its placed in, rather than the other way around. (IE: I'd rather deform the road to interact with weird terrain, rather than force the terrain to update to satisfy what works for the road). The problem is that you would (probably) have to change the terrain geometry to do things like rivers, and if you're doing that you have a bit less freedom just to drag around objects to see what happens, because now there are a lot more side effects.

Long winded way of saying: I'm considering the idea, but I'm hoping to do it in a way that is nice to use.

Road textures/materials are customizable (roads end up just being standard unity meshes), so, whatever you want to use there totally works. I didn't show it in the demo, but I did play around with dirt roads that had some alpha testing to create some holes to make for more of an authentic dirt road sort of aesthetic.

 

Hey, just checking in about the improvements to road skirts (angle and height). Is that coming soon?

 

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