I think there was some talk about this somewhere a while back, but a search yields no results.

Since reloaded is currently best used for outdoor terrain, we could really do with a proper fencing tool. In my level I've laid out a lot of fence pieces, probably 200 - 400. It takes ages, is awkward on slopes, and consumes far more poly's than required, after all its doing every post twice, just for starters.

At some point (ASAP ) it would be good to have a tool where you draw a line, similar to waypoints, and then do properties and select a fence 'entity' (?) to apply. This could then create an almost 2D boundary fence by tiling the texture along the line, and adding posts at regular intervals and changes of direction. It would also supply an easy way to make invisible barriers efficiently and see them in the editor. There are also many more uses such as background planes:

The tool would let the user select:
Fence texture
Fence plains (Put texture on front and back, only 1 side if viewed from one side, or no sides for invisible wall)
Fence height
Fence post (selectable entities)
Posts on/off
Posts interval (how often excluding change of direction posts would appear
Collision on/off

A further implementation would be to make a background scene in reloaded. Then the scene could be screenshotted into 2d onto the 'fence' to make a background plain, cutting polys in scene right down. The user could add a nearer fence to stop users getting right up to the backscene.

In the future, these plains could be used to show distant stuff in 2d, up until the point when the user was a certain distance, where the background would be loaded in 3d and the plain faded out.

See my poor quality sketch:


Opinions?

I know at the moment they've got plenty of feature requests already, but even at a basic level just doing fences with posts this would save an awful lot of polys.

A bit disappointed despite the potential for this, that its received no acknowledgement from anyone



Maybe the title badly describes it.

No not at all, This could apply to roads and rail tracks and anything that could be lofted or sweep. Would come in very handy and be a great time saver, when laying down miles of fence, track, or roads.

Maybe a modified marker, which you set the points like a waypoint and then choose the object you want to be set along this marker.

Would be a great feature down the road.

indeed, i hate trying to place straight roads and such without an actual entity it's far too tough and even with an entity it can take forever, good idea

I love that idea! I've seen similar tools in games. I'm sure it's a pretty complex to implement, but it would really make life much simpler.

Glad I have some support

Must admit when I posted the second post I was having a particularly bad day (ebay 'buyers', need I say more?). Obviously it has a lot of potential as you say for roads etc., but even if those were left to the future, I could see the planes feature result in a good framerate boost.

if it's same farcry 2/3 level editor which support the snapping itself, it would be handy and easy to use !!