Gameplay Start, Recovery, and Roads

RoadCraft · 6 min read

Place the RoadCraft start and recovery objects, then use road Buffer state to choose Ready Roads or Road Plan baselines.

Choose the road result with Buffer

A RoadCraft road line with a positive Buffer radius is a Ready Road. Export paints its mapped asphalt, gravel, or ground material and adds the matching editable native road overlay. The radius is half of the painted road width.

An unbuffered road line is a Road Plan baseline. With Road Plans enabled for the export, MapToPlay leaves the terrain material unchanged along that line and adds a native Road Plan with an editable spline plus generated runtime points, lanes, zones, and domains. Ready Roads are clipped to the exported terrain boundary. Road Plans stop 40 native RoadCraft metres inside it so their terminal gameplay zones stay on playable terrain; a plan that does not reach this safe interior is omitted.

Road Plans is enabled by default under RoadCraft settings in the Export dialog. Turn it off when you want a clean native scene and will author every Road Plan yourself in Integration Studio. This omits all unbuffered Road Plan baselines from that export; buffered Ready Roads remain painted and exported. Buffer still decides what each road represents, and there is no separate per-road Road Use setting to maintain.

Buffer chooses each road’s intended result. The export-wide Road Plans switch only includes or omits the unbuffered baselines; it never converts them into Ready Roads.

Create the Gameplay Zones layer

In Layers, choose +, select Gameplay Zones, and create the layer. Open Collections → Gameplay Zones. RoadCraft provides exactly two built-in presets: Start Spawn and Recovery Point.

Select Start Spawn and click clear, firm terrain near a usable exit. Only one can exist. Use the Transform tool to move and rotate its 20 × 12 meter footprint; the four spawn slots follow that heading.

Add and configure Recovery Points

Select Recovery Point in the same collection and click to place it. One or more recovery points may be used. Open the placed object from Objects → Attributes to edit its Recovery target name and Radius.

The circle shown in the viewport follows the saved Radius. Keep it on firm terrain, leave enough room for vehicles, and inspect its relationship to roads, water, buildings, and the Start Spawn before export.

Review gameplay setup before export

Export grounds all four Start Spawn slots independently on the current terrain and writes Recovery Points and Ready Road overlays into the source scene. When the default Road Plans export setting remains enabled, it also writes the unbuffered baselines as already-generated Road Plans. The source-kit diagnostics record the emitted actors and their positions.

In the Editor, inspect Start Spawn heading and clearance, every Recovery Point target name and radius, all Ready Road widths, and every unbuffered line intended to become a Road Plan. Wait for those changes to save. On the project page, decide whether the Road Plans export switch should include those baselines, then follow Export and Integration Studio for the source-kit handoff and its native gameplay review.

A map without a valid Start Spawn is not a usable gameplay handoff. Export can still create an archive, so review this deliberately rather than treating export success as proof of playability.