rickets007

I have done some thinking about the spirals. In the Unites States engineers use the term 'superelevation' to describe the angle a banked corner makes with flat ground. It looks like your super elevation in the picture is about 45 degrees. There are two ways to deal with the transition from flat ground to the spirals superelevation. 1. Make the spiral have a constant superelevation and add separate transitional sections at the ends. 2. Make the superelevation start at zero and gradually increase until the middle of the spiral and then gradually decrease until the exit. This is similar to how I designed the loop generator so that the entrance and exit are strait.

Hedning, I see what you mean. That, however, would best be done by a separate program. I might look into making one sometime.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Like if you made a larger offset and rotated the entrance and exit 90 degrees?

I finished the spread sheet. MTA Loop Generator Here is a screen shot of a loop with the following parameters: radius = 30 # of pieces = 96 Offset = 60 # of loops = 2 Rotation = 22 degrees

I think I got it. I am now going to work on optimizing the spread sheet. I will release the newest version within a few hours.

Alright, I will try to work out the trig for rotating the spiral. It might take a while because I have been smoking pot all day and I'm really high.

Here is an example map with two loops. Double Loop Map

I have a really good and clever response to this post but I have not decided what it is yet. ________________I'll update it later when I get some ideas.

Well, entering the parameters is pretty straightforward so I think you may be having trouble exporting the data. You need to select everything in yellow on the left. You will see that each line is one object and there are always 96 lines. If you enter in a smaller number in the '# of pieces' field you only need to select the lines of code up to and including that number. Then paste all this into a text editor. The file will contain many tab spaces you need to convert the tab spaces to regular spaces. This can be done with the replace feature. You can not type a tab space so you will have to highlight a tab space and copy/paste into the find field. Once the tab spaces have been converted to regular spaces you may add the code to your map file.

Alright, I have added a '# of loops' parameter. You can also control the direction of the loop (right or left handed) by making the offset negative. I will look into adding an 'initial rotation' parameter. This will likely only be for rotating around the z-axis.

Okay, the problem is using commas as the decimal separator. It seems that the rotation values need to have a period as the decimal separator. It's puzzling why this only seems to affect rotation. I never had the problem because being an American I don't use commas. ;p

Well, I actually just made the excel sheet to prove that it could be done. I never intended to distribute it as a program. As far as a front end and a better tutorial, I'm afraid there is not much else I can do. I have some theories on how to improve what I have but lack the programming skills to impliment them. We need somone who can build a program using my equations. It could have a nice frontend GUI and would automatially generate a text file with the values input into the correct syntax. What i'm saying is that I require help to to improve the program anymore. From looking at the screenshot it is difficult to tell what the problem is. I suspect there is an error with the rotation syntax in the map file. I think that the rorations are correct in the map file but a syntax error could cause MTA to ignore the rotation values.

The best way to continue the loop is to create additional loops but adjust their starting position by your offset distance.

Check out this 100 radius 96 piece 100 offset loop. It is almost too big for the draw distance limitations. I put this huge downhill section before the loop so that you are going insanely fast when you get to the loop. You can just barely make it in the Infurnus if your lucky. It's not easy. Here is the map in case anyone wants to try it. Insane 200ft Loop Map w00t!

I did some more work to the spread sheet and improved the results even more. I also started a new thread for this discussion. The following link goes to the new post where you can download this improved version. If you still are having trouble post in that thread and I will see if I can help MTA Loop Generator Discussion

I was trying to find a way to easily make loops in the map editor for MTA. It sucks trying to place each piece one by one. I decided to try to calculate the coordinates and rotations in Excel. The spread sheet I made accepts input for the following parameters. center coordinates (the coordinates of the loop in the world) radius of the loop # of pieces to use for the loop offset (lateral distance between entrance and exit points) The results were very good. This is a loop with radius 30, 44 pieces and an offset of 20. As of now the spread sheet can only be used to make loops along the x axis and the data exporting part is a little tricky. Here it is if anyone is interested. MTA Loop Generator I'm looking for suggestions on how to make this program more efficient and possibly add more parameters. I am not a programmer so I don;t think there is much more I can do with it.

Here is what the loop looks like when the radius and offset are 50 and it is made from 48 pieces. The center coordinates i used are 0,0,300. This is where the exact middle of the loop will be. At this size the Infurnus can just barley make it with Nitro. Use a smaller radius for other vehicles.

Well, like I said, I am not a programmer. I'm sure there is a better way to do this. This excel program is capable of creating loops along the x axis only. However, if you really want it, here it is MTA Excel Loop Generator Maybe someone could improve it by figuring out how to make the export process easier.[/url]

Nope, I re-calculated the loop with 1/2 the radius and I was just able to make it then.

Wow, thats a lot of work. It would be cool if someone built a program to do loops and stuff. I am not a programmer but I'm pretty good with trig. I decided to do a proof of concept using Excel. I created a spread sheet that would accept values for the following parameters: Starting position (where you want the center of the loop to be in the world) Radius (the radius of the loop) #of pieces (the number of pieces to make the loop from) offset (the lateral distance between the start and end of the look) The spread sheet then generates the position and rotation of each piece. I have not found a good way to convert this spread sheet data to the map file so it took me some time to get it into the right format for the map. Here are the results (i did not make any part of this using the map editor) It seems to me that someone who is good at programming could make this work more efficiently.

Hedning, I'm curious, how do you place all of those track pieces so accurately? I am new to MTA mapping and its hard to believe that you placed each piece one by one.

Also, about the rotation angles. I was confused too until I realized that for some reason they were in units of radians instead of degrees. You need to multiply by 0.0174532925. That is pi/180. Therefore 30.66 degrees is 30.66*0.0174532925=0.5351179 I can not fathom why radians would be used.

I agree with these suggestions. In fact I was going to suggest adding orthographic views. At minimum there should be an option to snap objects to integer coordinates. I just started mapping a few days ago and I already find that I spend more time mapping in notepad than the actually editor.