[Plugin] [CityGen] - Street Generator [WIP] (0.5.2a)

[Jernej Vidmar]

Maybe It wouldn't be bad if Street Generator would automatically assign different corner radius based on width of the roads connecting? Something like (in pseudocode):

Code: Select all

if both_roads == 6m
   radius = 4m
elsif road1 == 6m && road2 == 12m
   radius = 5m
else #both roads == 12m
   radius = 6m
end

just an idea..

[Chris Fullmer]

Thats a good idea! I think it could give some really interesting results

Chris

PS - After about 48 hours of straight pain, I think I finally got tortoise to work on Vista 64 bit with Google code - woohoo!!!!!! So we'll look into goole code and compare it with the others. I wouldn't mind one that had a better forum built in and maybe even an IRC channel. But perhaps I'm dreaming? Thanks for the help so far!

[mitcorb]

Thomthom and Chris:
The way you guys are throwing ideas back and forth-- are we witnessing the first global collaboration on Sketchup plugins or have I missed a bunch of stuff? I say more power to you, and the more collaborators the better for the community. You guys are awesome.
mitcorb

[thomthom]

Maybe It wouldn't be bad if Street Generator would automatically assign different corner radius based on width of the roads connecting? Something like (in pseudocode):

I guess then we'd need some input to approximately it'd be calculated.
Not even sure if the radius depends on the road width? (I'm not trying to make this completely accurate to reality, but a simplified approximation.)

And I forgot, did we decide that the street generator should create the sidewalks, or is that going to bein the block module? Or de we plan on their being a sidewalk module?

Don't think we agreed. I just threw the question out there.
I think I favour that the module that takes the block and splits it into building footprints does that. Maybe, what the street generator can do is instead of making just the block face, also define the sidewalk face.

PS - After about 48 hours of straight pain, I think I finally got tortoise to work on Vista 64 bit with Google code - woohoo!!!!!! So we'll look into goole code and compare it with the others. I wouldn't mind one that had a better forum built in and maybe even an IRC channel. But perhaps I'm dreaming? Thanks for the help so far!

Good work Chris.
I still haven't had time to look into the various solutions. (Ben struggling with my website that suddenly went offline. apparently lots of stuff has expired without any prior notification... *grumble* )

I say more power to you, and the more collaborators the better for the community.

Yes. More collaborators please!
Man, after watching that Google Wave Demo I keep thinking how nice it'd be if that service existed now...

[remus]

Man, after watching that Google Wave Demo I keep thinking how nice it'd be if that service existed now...

I kind of wish i hadnt seen it now, then i wouldnt keep thinking how good it would be

[Chris Fullmer]

Don't think we agreed. I just threw the question out there.
I think I favour that the module that takes the block and splits it into building footprints does that. Maybe, what the street generator can do is instead of making just the block face, also define the sidewalk face.

I think I'm tending to want a separate sidewalk module. It would accept a single face as input and then inset all edges to create the sidewalk. This way it would be easy to make different sidewalk generator modules. So a simple prototype that does an offset can be made quickly, and then others that add scorelines, materials, streetposts, random components, etc, could be added later.

Chris

[thomthom]

The street module would have to deal with the rounded street corners. If it's doing a blind offset you'll end up with some strangle lines at the corners. I'd think that the offsets would most likely end up having sharp corners. (which I think is better for the parcel generator?)

[Chris Fullmer]

Hmm, that might require some modeling for me to think through. I am thinking that it should be the sidewalk generators that decides what type of inside corners to make for itself. Perhaps it could be given a face and also the centerlines, or the offset street edges(pre curving) so it could use those if needed to calculate its inside edges.

Again, maybe I need to model it so I can think it through.

Chris

[mattg]

Seriously, how have Google managed to swindle us all so we they sit on their arses doing nothing while all you guys work so hard at developing their product for free! Its absolutely insane!

Anyway all I'll say is thanks so much for all your hard work - been said before - but everyone appreciates it!

This thing looks so freakin awesome!

[Chris Fullmer]

Some of think of it more like "Google made a platform that has 1 million differet users a week using it, and maybe there is a way we can somehow make money off them eventually". So far all my scripts are free, and this is will be opensource, but eventually I'll get good enought to write something and sell it. eventually.

And seriously, doesn't this project look awesome! I'm very excited about it. Thanks for the comments

Chris

[thomthom]

Some of think of it more like "Google made a platform that has 1 million differet users a week using it, and maybe there is a way we can somehow make money off them eventually". So far all my scripts are free, and this is will be opensource, but eventually I'll get good enought to write something and sell it. eventually.

Most of favourite applications are applications that allows users to develop plugins and extend it as they see fit. Firefox for instance...

[spider74]

interesting,i haven't downloaded it yet but from the pics it looks good.It would suit me for my push/pull cities.Also
i will recommend it on the skyscraperpage forum-google sketchup section as a lot of people there do cities.Usually
they do street plans to show the layout etc.

push/pull city 1-sampadoria

in the above pics there are no road plans,if i had the plugin and put the roads in a different colour
it would have been way cooler.Iwill try street gen and plus make a new push/pull city ...it all so may
be great for faces of skyscrapers....

[halroach]

Very nice stuff you guys have going on here!
Just a short question:
How did you color the lines in the posted model? Coloring lines is a very useful tool in itself!
Is it something specific to the model? cause I wasn't able to copy and paste the colored lines into another model.

Thank You!

[Jim]

Hi Halroach (Hal?)

You need to set the Color By Material option for the Sytles. Then you can paint them using the tool.

But I think you make a good point - it isn't particularly easy (for me, anyway) to paint lines. It is sort of hit-and-miss.

[thomthom]

But I think you make a good point - it isn't particularly easy (for me, anyway) to paint lines. It is sort of hit-and-miss.

Yea, I was thinking of maybe adding a brush painting tool. Where you can sweep. Or maybe have a large hit-radius.

[Chris Fullmer]

Yea, I was thinking of maybe adding a brush painting tool. Where you can sweep. Or maybe have a large hit-radius.

I think that would be a welcome addition to the plugin. I was having frustration issues when I tried to paint lines earlier for my demo too.... They are tricky little things to pin down with the bulky paintbucket.

Chris

[thomthom]

Yea, I often find that it's easer to select the lines I want to colour and use the Entity info to apply materials. Lines just have too small hit-area.
But I don't see any better way to pre-visualize the road construction. Or any other means of defining road width without it quickly becoming too complicated and bulky.

[Chris Fullmer]

We could also offer a way for users to select all boulevards and then pop up a dialog for "assign road widths" and then the plugin does the coloring for the user also.

Chris

[thomthom]

We could also offer a way for users to select all boulevards and then pop up a dialog for "assign road widths" and then the plugin does the coloring for the user also.

But how do you define a road as boulevards?
Applying materials to the lines was what I meant to be the method of defining what the road was. The Material name contained the road type name and width, and the colour was the means of providing visual feedback to the user.

[Chris Fullmer]

Right, I just meant that they could have all their default black road cenerlines set up. Then they selec the ones they want to be a certain type - lets say they choose all the ones they want to 40m wide. Then they have the option of painting them, or they can pop up a road width assigning window that allows them to enter the width and the color, and the plugin does the width association and the coloring for them.

Its just another method of associating the color and the width to the centerlines. Its not necessary, but I think some might like it?

Chris

[thomthom]

I'm working on some webdialogs to provide a UI for the read widths.

There would be one that would list the road widths and their associated colour. The default setting would be at the top. You could then select the items on the list to make changes to them. Or create new definition. So when you generate the streets you won't be promted every time. It just uses what you've set up. And if nothing is set up, it uses the defaults. (Defaults would be a setting that's stored between sessions.)

[Jim]

I have been adding webdialog support to my inputbox class. Same dialog using UI or WebDialog, persistent storage, array and hash-like access to the values.

I could add it to the repository, if you like it. The plugin page is here.

[thomthom]

Thanks Jim, but I'm making some illustrations and extra description to go along with the UI elements. So I need to do this by hand. And the Road Type list will require some special UI elements.

But good to know that that plugin class exists. I hadn't noticed it before.

[Edson]

thomas,

what if a boulevard had its lanes divided by median strips? how would SG deal with it? and how would one have to introduce the lines before running SG?

[thomthom]

what if a boulevard had its lanes divided by median strips? how would SG deal with it?

At the moment you'd have to create the lanes as separate streets. Though I'd expect there'd be issues with the rounding as I've yet not made it handle radius' that doesn't fit the space.

I think that median strips would be an advanced feature to add. So when you define custom street types you can specify median strips - I expect that an offset from centre would be useful here in case the lanes are not symmetric. (though asymmetric lines would complicate things...)

[thomthom]

Test comment.

[thomthom]

Pushed my work on SG 0.5.1 into the repository. Added a base for webdialogs. I added the jQuery Javascript framework to the project.
I'll make the Street Property editor before I publish the 0.5.x version here. I also want to test it against Mac before 0.5.x goes gold.

[Chris Fullmer]

Looking great Thom! I guess I am going to have to learn me some Javascript now so I can keep up

Chris

[thomthom]

If you use the jQuery framework you save yourself allot of work. Does much of the nitty gritty boring stuff for you.

I'm also planning to better organize the CSS files. What I'm doing now is that the ui.css in the citygen folder defines the looks of the core UI widgets. For each webdialog I make it's mostly a matter of just defining the correct class to the HTML elements and position them within the window.

[thomthom]

Btw, does the descriptive text and illustration of the Angle Threshold property make sense? You can understand how it works from that?