Database Creation Tools
Although it is a daily task for all of us who prefer driving to work, driving requires a well defined environment (road) and a set of quite strict rules (remember your driving license exam). Naturally, simulation of this environment demands powerful tools to create the virtual environment for driving simulators. While there are numerous different uses of driving simulators, all driving simulators basically need a 3D virtual environment and road network database.
Visual Database Creation
The 3d visual database is one of the fundemental pieces of the game. Therefore, many engineers and modelers have quite good modeling capabilities. The challenge in building databases for driving simulators is the scale of the work. It is quite common that each experiment would require either a new database or modification to an existing one. Similar to just-in-time terrain generation functionality used in military training simulators, the databases shall be generated rather than hand crafted. The software tool which OKTAL offers for this purpose is called Evariste and works hand in hand with SCANeR II.
Evariste is an integrated software environment to build roads. It offers the choice between building roads manually or importing GIS data. The last point is very important, because it permits to create your big database quickly. Evariste can generate the complete 3d visual database as well as road network and surface files.
The good thing about Evariste is that it doesn't need a road design expert or a 3D modeler to build a visual database. The tool is rich in features and you can find more information here and here.
The Road Network
RoadNet (the road network authoring tool) can be used to create and edit the path of the roads where vehicles drive from the flt/pfb terrain database. Users can add and edit lane definitions as well as traffic signs and lights. These definitions are stored in RNS (road network and signs) files. Further more it is possible to merge several networks to create one big network.
The second tool, RoadSurf can create Bezier Patches from flt/pfb files. The bezier patches have advantages in comparison to flt files at runtime, since it is faster to make terrain queries, the memory footprint is small and most importantly the surface quality is much better compared to OpenFlight© polygon road. Furthermore it is possible to define road characteristics which are used by the driving dynamics models.
