Anyone used A.L.E for a proper project?

I'm looking for a landscape genrator for use in an overhead game, I've played with ALE (in the toolbox section) and it seems really good. It did crash when I tried to use the lightmapper. But otherwise it seems really really good.

After repeated emails to the Author about the lightmapping crashes and getting no replies I went with T.ED by dgraphix.

T.ED really is a very good terrain editor with more features that ALE.

i am using ale. lightmapping is done via giles. works pretty fine here. maybe ted is better, but i have only ale and it works ok for me.

I bought ALE a while back and messed about with it for a while. I never tried the lightmap option but overall I thought it was pretty good although I would use Terragen and then just texture in ALE. Never tried Ted. Maybe you should look at other people's projects and find out what they used.

I do really like the texturing in ALE, how would I do roads though, do you make a road mesh in a modeller then import it as prop? Or is there a simpler method I'm missing?

For roads, I would have just drawn a spline along the XY plane and created a new road mesh on top of the terrain that was cut up according to the polygons and sections of the terrain.

If you were using Blitz3D's terrain with dynamic LOD though, you'd be screwed. Roads really aren't anything difficult to do as long as you know what you're doing.

Let's just pretend for fun, that I don't entirely know how to do that, can you that in a terrain editor, or are you talking about something DeleD can do?

Not unless ALE, TED, DeleD, etc. have changed since I last tried them. You'd likely have to write a small tool to do this. It's not terribly difficult.

How you'd do this, off the top of my head without any actual thought going into it:
First, you'd need to create a spline, then along the spline for each increment of some arbitrary amount along it, you would create a new quad that represented the road, just flat along XY (or XZ, since I guess I'm thinking in Max terms again). Now, for every edge of every triangle in a terrain mesh (I'm sure you could just handle a whole terrain in one go, but it might be messy), create a vertical plane (not CreatePlane, I mean the mathematical term) that is lined up with its respective edge.

Now take each edge of the road mesh (NOT terrain) and if it intersects with any of the planes and it is crossing that plane's respective triangle (obviously, you can't have other planes that intersect cutting the triangle if it's not even needed), split it where it intersects and create a new triangle. This is not the most efficient way to do this -- this is probably close to the least efficient way, so you'd want to work on that bit. This is just the gist of it.

Afterwards, set all the Y/Z (depending on the system you're using) values such that they line up exactly with the height of the terrain. Following that, use the initial terrain mesh to write the depth of everything, then draw the road (as you'll likely be using alpha on its edges) so that it conforms to the terrain without (many) alpha issues.

That's the general idea, anyway. I make no promises about it working, as I haven't tried this, but it should work for Blitz3D if I recall the way it works correctly.

It's a while since I used ALE but wasn't there a flatten tool you could create roads with or was it just a raise/lower tool?

There's a flatten tool you could use, then texture small areas to make the road look. You're not going to make the road look like a proper road, just a dirt track like in most RPG games. This will probably do for my game though.

Someone posted a link on the forums to a prog that makes roads. I'll try and hunt it down. It could be what you're after.

[edit] I found this but it's for race tracks. There's no reason I think why it couldn't make standard roads that you could then place on a terrain.

http://www.16vmini.co.uk/rtc/index.php?page=screenshots&name=screenshots

That wouldn't work.

Just make a function that accepts a string of x,y,z waypoints for your road. Then create a quad every x length based on the curvature of the waypoints and alter each of the 4 vertices according to the terrain height. That's what I would do. I don't have a use for this type of road atm tho or I'd code it and post in the archives.

I've decided to go for Ted. I think once I get used to it, I'll be able to make the type of maps I want for my game.