Morning all! (If it's not where you are or when you read this... just pretend!)

I'm starting to make good use of this forum as I get a bit more au fait with this whole scripting business and I still have a few questions... rather than creating a 'help Kyben' thread I figured I'd post them under their own topics so others can learn or track them down too.

Anyway, my question for today is on getting spawn locations. Currently, I know about the get next position on street one, but are there others? I wasn't able to find anything throughtout the Rage documentation and I'm not smart enough to work any out myself.

Now, in order to maximise my one post a day, I understand I can manually enter a vector3 to spawn at a specific location - how can I find a locations vector3 ingame? I'm happy to spend time driving around to a bunch of different places to collect the coordinates but... How do I collect them and then how do I use them in the plugin?

Thanks guys! 

Edited July 24, 201510 yr by Kyben

The most basic way is to write a script to manually collect SpawnPoints in-game and save them into a textfile. Using string.Format you can create an output lines like this (from my helper script to IV):

//custom_txt[8], East Holland, Denver Ave, Wardite St
new SpawnPoint(96.22984f, new Vector3(-140.3506f, 1406.302f, 20.42387f)),

then you paste it into an array (list/dic etc.) in your code. Unfortunately I don't have my script converted to V yet.

BUT you can extend this idea and use *.xml serialization: create a class of YourSpawnPoint which would contain not only position and heading but also name of an area, city etc. XML files can be modified and read (load by your plugin) without compiling = time saving and extensibility. Additional fields like area names would let to add to your plugin a zoning system -> you could divide map into regions on basis of names of areas. Ask if you need more specific info/examples.

There's no way to automatically get 100% safe spawn locations, GetNextPosOnStreet and a native function which returns safe pos on a pavement (described by me on RAGE hook forum) don't guarantee a success.

It's not so much getting safe spawn points as specific ones, eg. Train stations, bus stops, houses and stores. 

Rather than writing a script, is there any way to just pull coordinates out through the console? Just seems simpler. Otherwise I guess I shall get started on a script!

I don't really know anything about XML files but that does seen kind of awesome and handy. You're saying that if I set that up, I'd be able to get the plugin to randomly select from locations that are automatically saved to the XML file by me driving around and pressing a button? Then I can categorise them to only be used for specific callouts? Eg: train stations only used for train station callouts, stores only used for thefts and hold up alarms, etc. 

Thanks again for the help and patience. =p

Getting specific spawns on button press or console command is what I'm talking about. 

You HAVE to make the process of collecting efficient, printing coords in console/on screen and writing it manually down will work for 15 mins, V map is huuge and getting all interesting spots will take alot of time.

I'll try to write a simple open source RAGE plugin to collect SpawnPoint, name of the area etc. and append to *.xml file, expect the result in a while.

I included the project, source code is available to read and edit but please don't upload it as your own work. To use the plugin you need to copy the CoordSaverV.dll to Plugins\, use SetFileName to set the file name and press LShift + F12 or run SaveSpawn to save the current location with other details into the xml. You can also use AddTag before saving the location so you can select spawns easier by finding by tags. The instruction is available in-game by running "CoordSaverV" command.

CoordSaverV.zip

Edited July 25, 201510 yr by LtFlash

Thanks so much. That's incredibly helpful!

 

We should really get a team of people together to drive around and collect locations for us developers. It would give us all a repository of locations to work from. Maybe not everyone in the community, but a group of well-known members who are willing to do this.

I personally know of one person who volunteered to drive around to collect locations for me.

Edited July 28, 201510 yr by Stealth22

We should really get a team of people together to drive around and collect locations for us developers. It would give us all a repository of locations to work from. Maybe not everyone in the community, but a group of well-known members who are willing to do this.

I personally know of one person who volunteered to drive around to collect locations for me.

I've got some locations in the mountains for my callouts if you want them tell me.  

I meant more in terms of like, houses and stores, etc, in the city, as well as in the towns out in the rural counties.

I spent yesterday driving around Vespucci and collected about 400-600 doing businesses/commercial premises only. They're all really well documented in terms of the business name, location (suburb) and where at the business it is (eg: dining area, front door, pool, etc.)... then the unique places like some of the places at the pier I've noted that I'll do specific callouts there.  I'm going to do residential spawn points in the next day or so.

After doing that and realising just how much attention to detail is in this game and how awesome the world is, I've changed my callout mod to be based on specific policing areas... first roll out will be just Vespucci callouts... then I'll do up another district in due course.

Happy to share my spawn points though!

Happy to share my spawn points though!

That is...very generous of you! I'm sure every developer could benefit from that! 

I included an example callout to show how you can use spawn points collected via CoordSaverV in an actual mod.

Regarding collecting spawn points; in the nearest future I'm gonna release my mod to IV with a feature which is unknown yet: a zoning system. It lets a player select a way how a patrol area is divided to (1, 2, 3, 4 sub-sections) and receive calls only in the sub-section he's currently located in (eg. Northwood, East and North Holland). What I'm going to say; if you'd be interested in implementing sth like this in the future (with perspective of many years of developing for V) it is necessary to save your points with area names (CoordSaverV does it for you).

After doing that and realising just how much attention to detail is in this game and how awesome the world is (...)

Hell yea, when you start to place certain incidents on streets, backalleys etc. the fun begins - you see details you wouldn't see while *just* playing, driving around.

 XMLSpawnsLibExample.zip

lol is it me or am i the only one picturing someone driving around like the google car gathering these spawn points...  Sorry i know this is not developer related but a thought that came to mind while reading through.

If there was a google car model, I would totally use it when driving around for those spawn points. 

Will get a file up in the next day or so with everything I've done so far. 

On 7/24/2015 at 10:41 PM, LtFlash said:

I included the project, source code is available to read and edit but please don't upload it as your own work. To use the plugin you need to copy the CoordSaverV.dll to Plugins\, use SetFileName to set the file name and press LShift + F12 or run SaveSpawn to save the current location with other details into the xml. You can also use AddTag before saving the location so you can select spawns easier by finding by tags. The instruction is available in-game by running "CoordSaverV" command.

CoordSaverV.zip

This is an amazing tool! I've made a couple of minor tweaks just to add blips as locations are saved since after an hour of mapping out locations the buildings can kinda start to blend into one another lol

7 hours ago, Darkmyre said:

This is an amazing tool! I've made a couple of minor tweaks just to add blips as locations are saved since after an hour of mapping out locations the buildings can kinda start to blend into one another lol

Great to hear that. I was about to add blips and couple of other things myself but I'm totally out of free time atm. Feel free to modify it as much as you want.

On Tuesday, January 05, 2016 at 2:42 AM, Darkmyre said:

This is an amazing tool! I've made a couple of minor tweaks just to add blips as locations are saved since after an hour of mapping out locations the buildings can kinda start to blend into one another lol

LOL I was thinking about doing the same thing

We should set up a GitHub repo or a Google Doc or something with a list of locations that people have gathered.

Has anyone (@Kyben or anyone else) got a list of locations they have gathered so far?

I'm actually going to need a list of houses to work with for my next callout, so it would be really useful, not only to me, but other devs as well.

I don't have a list of what I've got, but I've gathered a bunch of locations so far for my callouts. Residential's the largest with around 600ish from memory across the map.

Generating 600 blips does some..... interesting... things to the game lol