StRoadDesign

StRoadDesign (a brochure is available on request) is a designer for creating graphical databases and logical databases for the intelligent interactive traffic to drive in. A logical database describes all relevant road characteristics in mathematical terms for the intelligent traffic, and the human simulator driver, to drive in. Often, building the databases consitutes a large part of the total costs of development of a driving simulator. However, because of the facilities the designer offers, users are now able to build 3D databases in a matter of hours or days, with all road geometry, roadsigns and markings required, including fully textured environments populated with trees, houses, road furniture and so on. This gives the user a high level of flexibility and greatly reduces costs.

To mention a few features of this package:

• All graphical databases that are build are in the industry standard OpenSceneGraph format. One advantage of this approach is that the databases can be editted and refined further by other modellers, although completely textured databases with many 3D models can easily be created with StRoadDesign. Another advantage may be that the databases can also be rendered with other rendering software, although StRender is ofcourse fully suited for that.
• All graphical databases are in multi Levels Of Detail (LOD), resulting in very fast realtime performance. LOD is one of the features that can be configurated by a resourcefile.
• The user makes a 2D design of a network of roads and intersections. The 2D design is then converted into a 3D database automatically. There is no other designer or modeller on the market by which creating complex road geometry databases is so easy and fast.
• Because graphical databases and logical databases are created from the same source, a geometrical match is guaranteed. The intelligent interactive traffic agents in StTraffic are able to drive autonomously in these databases, and this is displayed graphically with StRender. A big advantage then of this designer is that it guarantees seemless operation of all simulations of StTraffic.
• All kinds of roads and intersections can be designed, ranging from simple one-lane roads to complex multiple-lane roads. Different kinds of lanes are supported, such as exit lanes, bicycle lanes, pavements for pedestrians, complex lanes for weaving on highways etc. Complex multiple intersections can be build easily. Also, roads may split in more roads, and multiple roads may merge together into a single road. Because of these facilities different kinds of roadstructures can be designed, such as mini-roundabouts, large roundabouts, multi-lane highways with complicated exits and entrances and so on.
• Different kinds of traffic lights can be added to intersections. The control strategy of these traffic lights can be completely adjusted. Also, setting the control strategy of traffic lights on complex multiple intersections is feasible.
• Complex road structures can be selected as a group and saved to file for reuse, or copy and pasted to another position in the road network. Also, these groups may be rotated as a whole and moved to another position, and a group may be connected to another part of the road network. Because of these features it is easy to design and save a specific road structure once and then import the group as a whole into a road network as often as needed. A group may consist of any number of roads, intersections, structures where lanes split or merge, 3D objects, trees, landscape polygons or whatever, including all specific traffic lights, signs and markings. ST-RoadDesign comes with a whole range of pre-defined roadstructures like roundabouts of different types and complex intersections that can be used immediately in the databases.
• The database can be dressed up with any number of landscape elements (textured planes), trees and bushed, vertical panels with treelines and other items to cover the horizon, and any number of houses and other buildings, road furniture like street lamps and so on. All these objects and their textures are defined by the user in resourcefiles, to which new textures and 3D objects can be added easily. Because of this, you can configure StRoadDesign as required, and design a typically British database, or a Chinese database, or a typically Dutch database.
• ST-RoadDesign comes with a set of small databases and resources like textures, 3D objects and groups of road structures to give the user a quick start.
• All kinds of road markings and road signs can be added. Since road signs are defined in a resource file, it is easy to convert all roadsigns in a database to signs that are used in another country. The user may add specific roadsigns to the designer via a resource file or change the characteristics of existing roadsigns. Internationalization of databases is made easy by this.