The DST Project (Diagonal Street) Thread 1

[Karybdis 34]

Well, following some more work and research and information, I've decided to post up this thread for the Diagonal Street project I started awhile ago.

This thread will outline the currently remaining tasks that need to be done and the things that need to be figured out for this to be completed. A list of our tasks below

1. Figure out how to draw streets diagonally like roads (data based)
2. Import and redesign road rules for streets with additional data
3. Design unique intersection tiles for the diagonal street based networks. These are all individually created and are linked to both the intersection INI files and to the actual rule files.
4. Create intersection and diagonal street texture tiles for each zoom and wealth type.
5. Design sc4path files to account for the new diagonal streets.
6. Cleanup, exemplar data, and modifications of existing data to clear bugs and make release worthy.

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Currently as far as I can see the only two that really pose a thread to this project being completed are number 4 and number one

With 4, the problem is simply that we dont know a ton about the individual intersection layouts. Thats not saying that this is impossible to figure out, because it isnt, but we need people working on the ini files to figure out exactly how to intersect everything. I'm also working on this at the moment.

1 is our huge problem really and the one that's held me up until receiving word awhile ago that its possible. I'll cover this in a bit more detail so that I can hope everybody understands.

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Current work and the diagonal draw problem
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The original work that I based this project on was with rule import and street redesign. basically I tested every rule file that had to do with rules to see exactly which ones were roads and which were streets and which influenced every part. I believe the two we need to be concerned with briefly here are 00000007 and 00000009 Which are the normal street and road rules.

After figuring out exactly which these were, I removed all rules from the road only rule file I stated here (not including the intersection rules) and then tested the compatibility in game when having no rules designed for that tile type.

When attempting to plop rules with no rules files defined for the network, everything just remains red and doesnt give you errors. Kind of like when trying to plop a diagonal bridge per-se.

Diagonal roads were still able to be drawn without these rules in place and just refused to plop. IE they would show up as red diagonal lines with the applicable tiles staying highlighted.

Following this, I then removed all the rules for streets, which behaved in much the same way as streets normally do. Keep in mind that whenever you try to draw a street diagonally normally, it just snaps to the nearest 90 degree angle. It doesnt even give you the option to drag at 45 degrees like the other networks.

My idea to overcome this was to import all of the road rules into the street rules. When I did, sure enough all street tiles were replaced with road tiles, however the snap to 90 degree problem still remained. Even with the import, streets could not be drawn even non-functionally at a 45 degree angle, and even with all their rules deleted, roads still could be drawn at a 45 degree angle.

Now its been confirmed that this is a data based thing that's occuring here, so somewhere in the data files, must be a piece of data that when its influenced must decide whether you are allowed to drag that network type at a 45 degree angle even if it doesnt work correctly. So that's really what we have to find to make this come about.

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My ideas for this problem sort of center around it being based either in the INIs, the RULs or the Exemplars, at the moment. Another option is that this is somehow based inside the sc4paths and that they also can influence how the game treats a network.

This is a significant game change that I'm trying to make though and I really need as much help as you guys can give for tracking this down. Once we figure out how to drag streets at a 45 degree angle. We can move on to the more important things such as textures and pathing of the network.

Wew......well I'm out of breath......or maybe finger strength, but regardless that's the current overview at the moment. Hope you guys can help

[Teirusu 38]

Try changing some of the values in the Street Placement Tuning Parameters Number# 2420

I fiddled with it some but not a whole lot.

[Karybdis 34]

hmmmm. ok, I'll have a look at that one when I get home. are there a lot of properties or any booleans etc?

Also is there a similar road placement parameter exemplar? I feel so cut off without reader or the game ^^;;;

[6459978. 106]

Quite frankly, I don't think this is a job for the modd squad. This is something that should have been in the original game, and if not that then at least in the RH transportation expansion pack! It is impossible to recreate a realistic city without diagonal streets, and I know that I feel quite ripped off.

 

That said, I think if anyone is going to make diagonal streets happen, it should be the people at Maxis, who 1) know how to do it properly, and 2) owe it to us big time. They should put it out as a patch or something.

[mastrobrace 1]

This is a very important tread
I doubt that is possible to do it only modding dat files,
but i hope i mistake.
It is very boring that after 4 simcity releases, we are
playing again with a single square grid!!
Crossing 2 square grids with a 45 degrees angle
could solve the problem of diagonals roads definitively.
The new dual grid would be divided into triangles
instead squares so it would be a very good effect
on lot shapes fantasy too!
For example, we could plop lots with many shapes:
square and rectangle lots (They follow the straight grid
or the 45 degrees angle grid direction), triangle lots
(They follow both the two grid), and so on...
So, if we had a so dual grid, we could have building with
walls oriented with the diagonal streets direction too!!

I hope that maxis will upgrade this obsolete grid.
More simcity players will agree with this upgrade,
more chances we have that maxis will do it.

Tell me what do you think or if you have better ideas...

[Karybdis 34]

Actually it should be possible to only do it modding the dats. We asked

And if people dont want it done, then I wont do it. Fair enough. I dont see them doing it any time soon though.

I agree that more types of grids will be nice, but dont hold your breath until simcity 5 or 6 at least. Its just the processing power required that holds it back.

[mavere 0]

I wonder why Maxis didn't bother making streets that can go diagonal? Is there a reason? Cuz it just seems like a hard thing to miss or look over.

Anyway, I hope you guys succeed! I would love the extra flexibility in my road layouts.

[Aalox 0]

I wonder what maxis was thinking, streets go in funky directions more then roads.

[The_Dalai_Llama 15]

I don't own a single mod, and I don't plan to use the diagonal street mod, but this looks very promising.  Maxis should have done this, but maybe they said, "Hey!  Let's have Simtropolis do it for us?"

 

Good luck, even though I won't be using it.

[the7trumpets 10]

Karybdis, please don't give up!!!

 

 

With my work on sc4path and RUL files to fix bugs, I am feeling much more comfortable editing and working with them, and pretty much the only format I don't completely understand yet is all the overrides (INI RUL 0x10000002).

 

Also, I think I should mention that until we have the ability to edit 3dm files (BAT), we will not be able to intersect any diagonal streets with elevated highways, ground highways, monorail, or el-train.

 

This will require a huge ammount of textures, depending on how many intersections we want to be compatable with these diagonal streets.  Let me know if I can be of any assistance in the sc4path/RUL department

[Karybdis 34]

hmm....the overrides. I remember those. I'll have to have another look ^^;;;

The only way I'd give up though is if it turned out that problem 1 was unsolvable and it was impossible to drag streets at 45 degrees without coding.... since it shouldnt be, I dont really have plans to stop unless the majority tells me to

And we can edit s3d files... well sorta. the problem is the unknown data covers a lot of things that we'd have to duplicate along the way which takes ages longer than maxis took.

[Karybdis 34]

ok. I've imported an entire copy of the road placement tuning parameters exemplar file and had it impersonate the streets one

Nothing changed, so this doesnt seem to be it. Back to the the drawing board

There's roaddiaeven and roaddiaodd exemplars I just noticed. Has anybody tried anything using these yet? Checking if they disable diagonal road drawing when attempted if set to blank would be sufficient ^^;;;

[Larsz 7]

As for why the question: "Why weren't streets diagonal to begin with?" I think the answer to that is fairly obvious, Autostreets. Being able to disable Autostreets may also be the key to allowing streets to drag diagonally. Or, am I like talking out of my ....

[+Guest]

Personally I think auto-streets was the reason diagonal streets weren't in the original game. Auto-streets would screwed everything up, and would be LOTS harder for Maxis to code if they had diagonal streets.

[Teirusu 38]

Karybdis,

All those Odd/Even and Dia stuff are actually the lots for the street/roads/highways... etc... They contain all the props like stop signs, street lights, and stuff. They don't really have anything to do with ploppin' networks and stuff.

[Karybdis 34]

Well I guess more work to do then. I've been slowly going over all the exemplars I can find concerning roads and streets so something has to turn up somewhere.

[qwerty697 2]

I also think the auto streets are the reasoan for no daigonal streets. Have you tried disabling auto strees? I know I wouldn't miss them if the were disabled.

[Karybdis 34]

Well yes I've thought of that, but its not exactly something I'm familiar with how to do

[Karybdis 34]

Bad news guys. I just got news from higher up that street anti-diagonal code is pre-programmed and hard coded into the game.

This means that:

a) diagonal streets are nigh impossible using standard types.
b) new network types are probably impossible because they'd require the same type of code to allow them. There may be ways around this.

There are still ways around this. Of course we need to know if the community thinks they're worth while.

It may be possible to make lots that can be placed together to form a diagonal, however, these are quite complex, would require a lot of time, and you would not be able to grow houses along them, (and probably not commercial/industrial)

Another option is that the dirt roads may be able to be swiped into place of diagonal streets since they can be dragged diagonally, and then coded to appear as streets with diagonal dragging rules. They could then be coded up to attach to streets and behave like them.

The disadvantage to this is that they will probably not be able to grow stuff along them, and there's a good possibility we may not be able to make them functional at all.

Opinions?

[Teirusu 38]

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Another option is that the dirt roads may be able to be swiped into place of diagonal streets since they can be dragged diagonally, and then coded to appear as streets with diagonal dragging rules. They could then be coded up to attach to streets and behave like them.

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Me and 7th were discussing something like this the other night. It seems like a waste (To me at least) to use them as dirt roads seeing as they can be much more then that! The only problem is getting the sims to actually USE the dirt roads. There must be a way. I doubt Maxis would put them in there only to tease us!

[Karybdis 34]

Maxis people have told me before that data like that which gets left over is often just a mock up, or data that was being tested in the game at one point, but just got left in by mistake and was never meant to be seen by the public

Personally I think whoever was doing the cleanup, wanted to throw us a bone lol

I personally believe there's a switch somewhere to allow people to exit a dirt road into a house, but I cant prove it yet.

I also believe that we should be able to get them to act convincingly as streets with the exception of getting stuff to grow on them. However we dont know how they'll act once they're joined up to other networks either. Maybe they'll suddenly work if they're just being used as diagonal sections.

Either way, the intersections, textures, rules and paths are the easy part. The hard part is just getting them to grow properly and to get people to actually use them properly, but we can never know until we try right?

[the7trumpets 10]

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On 10/17/2003 1:18:16 AM Karybdis wrote:

Either way, the intersections, textures, rules and paths are the easy part. The hard part is just getting them to grow properly and to get people to actually use them properly, but we can never know until we try right?

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LOL, after drowning in paths and rules for the last two weeks, I can say diffinitively that it will NOT be easy.  However, it is the part we know how to do at the moment.

So, once we find the flag, that will be the easy part.  The textures, paths, and RULs will be the hard part.  The challenge is that we have not found this flag...yet.

[Marc Collins 36]

Diagonal streets would be awesome and should have been programmed by Maxis, at least in RH.

Auto-streets sucks for the most part, so it is pretty disappointing that it is the likely reason we can't do diagonal streets.

I guess all we can do at this point is ask that they include the option of manual diagonal streets in the RH patch, which better be damned good since the folks here have already fixed all the major bugs (that wouldn't have been in there in the first place if they had competent testing).

If that fails, then SC5 better have them. Maybe by then they will have figured out a better auto-streets code that can handle diagonals, or, dumped the whole concept

[Trekk 0]

Karybdis, don't give up.... I am sure there are alot of people out there they would drol on the prospects of diagonal streets and I am one of them.

 

You guys are just amazing... when i see all the Mods 7 trumpets did to fix traffic and avenue to 1-way street it is just awesome

 

Keep up the good work!

[DarkMatter 21]

Any progress on this lately? Or is it a known fact that, due to hardcoded limitations, we can't make diagonal streets?

[Karybdis 34]

Well, true diagonal streets are impossible completely except by recoding. That's care of Maxis

I WAS going to do something with dirt roads to try and have them functional as diagonals or something similar

However, that new thread was made asking what networks people wanted, and this was overruled. Therefore this project is cancelled unfortunately due to the team doing something else with the dirt roads which were pretty much our last option. There will probably be a light rail thread opened by someone at some point which will pretty much replace this.

I mean I guess I could make individual ploppable tiles, but as far as I know the very most these could be used is one tile long stretches because of the roadside transfer property these would have to use.

Guess that about wraps it up though.

[Jayayess1190 3]

[Jayayess1190 3]

This has been done: Forums

[greyveil 37]

This thread is ancient, and yes it is being rediscussed in a newer thread

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