Show us Your Interchanges!

[krenemo 81]

just build this to so my 6 lane avenue can cross the river...


i know these are close, but the one on the bottom isnt really ment to be a full highway...

[Haljackey 17,270]

i think im starting to ge tthe hang of RHW   

the breidge design was used from Haljackey...

 

Very cool I have actually made a somewhat similar pair of interchanges, complete with the river crossing.

 

Click for full size.

[krenemo 81]

this took a few hours, but this is the end result...

[iLoveMusic 66]

One cloverleaf interchange that has just broken the grid.

This loop... It's unachievable with the current NAM plugin.

Another shot

And please have a tour

 

We actually have a handful of freeway interchanges like that here in Southern California.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

This interchange took me 25 weeks to make. Think about it for a bit and see if you can tell me why is that.

 

[TopDeej 254]

This interchange took me 25 weeks to make. Think about it for a bit and see if you can tell me why is that.

You had to code new rhw2 wide ramps right up to the beginning of the flexheight?

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

This interchange took me 25 weeks to make.

 

RHW in a nutshell.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

You had to code new rhw2 wide ramps right up to the beginning of the flexheight?

Close, but one of those features isn't dependent on the other.

[Compdude787 916]

 

This interchange took me 25 weeks to make.

 

RHW in a nutshell.

 

Still quicker than the amount of time it takes to build an interchange IRL.

[cromabianca 158]

And still quicker than make a prefab RHW interchange for that matter, or am I wrong?

[cromabianca 158]

OK.

 

Now, I know you're all crackshots at this whole RHW thing, while I myself am just a little novice, but, look what I did just now. And I can assure you this i kind of a big deal for me!

 

Well, actually I've done some other things (turbine changes and cloverstacks are my favourites), but this here is special. Because it mixes Project Symphony with RHW network... and also I was in the mood of uploading

 

Check in out!

 

(notice the transition to mahw... who said they weren't compatible?)

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

And still quicker than make a prefab RHW interchange for that matter, or am I wrong?

One prefab would take probably a few weeks, accounting for real life. To account for every possible permutation of networks would take... Take the sum of all of the L0, L1, L2 networks, including asymmetrical RHWs and multiply it by the sum of all of the Road, One Way Road, and Avenue networks, including NWM networks and TRAM networks and RHW-2, including L0, L1, and L2 variants of all of those networks except for the TRAM networks. Multiply the product by 4/3, and multiply that number by one month per prefab.

RHW-2, 3, 4, MIS, 6S, 8S, 10S, 6C, 8C, RHW-"5S", RHW-"7S", RHW-"9S", RHW-"7C" = 13 networks.

Road, One Way Road, Avenue, TLA-3, 5, 7, AVE-2 and 6, RD-4 and 6, NRD-4, OWR-1, 3, 4, and 5, TIA, TIR, and TOR, RHW-2 = 19 networks

4/3 = Four directional permutations (orthogonal×orthogonal, orthogonal×diagonal, diagonal×orthogonal, diagonal×diagonal), and excluding combinations that would result in both networks being on the same height level

13×19×(4÷3) = 329 permutations.

Assuming that 5 months out of a year are usable for the average NAM Team Member to devote toward NAMdev, and it would take 66 years to create every possible permutation if one person were to do all the work, without any other assistance. Where would you put it all, and how do you get a user to tab through 329 puzzle pieces?

Now, take that same number of RHW networks, exclude all of the asymmetrical combinations of networks, and assume you were to only work on just the Type A1 Wide Ramp only. How long would it take to make every possible ramp? About a day to a week, depending on the amount of debugging and texturing that's needed. How long would it take to make the height transition that's needed? Also about a day to a week, probably a little more, so let's just say that all of that work will take a month.

One month of work to get over 30 ramp interfaces versus nearly 800 months of work to get every possible permutation down.

There's another alternative: Flex the Prefabs. It takes everything that you've already made and unifies them into a prefab (or part of a prefab) that is an entire Flex piece. No need to place down miles of anything, or even search through hundreds of puzzle pieces in three or four different places. Everything you need is already there. (Thing is, we've already done so, but not many people have noticed.)

 

Still quicker than the amount of time it takes to build an interchange IRL.

Ah ah ah!!! This is RHW we're talking about, not IRLHW. I'm not involved with IRLHW. <Cue laugh track>

[Compdude787 916]

Okay, I finally finished this sucker. I've been working on it sporadically for, I don't know, the past few weeks. Anyway here it is:

 

Zoom in:

So yeah, this is on a medium-sized city tile, so it takes up the SW quadrant of the tile. I basically sketched it out on paper beforehand and tried to replicate it as well as I could in-game. I had to sacrifice a connection from eastbound to southbound because it was just too much of a pain to try and fit in (I wanted to have a cloverleaf loop ramp), and it would probably work better once I have a certain feature that will be available in NAM 33. The highways going south and the one going east meet up again in the city tile to the south, so it's not a big deal to be missing this one connection.

Although there was much rage-quitting after an hour of work on this interchange, no computer equipment was harmed in its construction.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

One word; WOW!

 

The complexity of the routes is making my head hurt, mind you trying to visualize geometric objects and their orientation has always giving me head aches. Great job.

[Haljackey 17,270]

Compdude: Fantastic job! I didn't even know about the missing connection until you mentioned it

 

---

 

I've built my first 3-way interchange in a couple years.

 

Click images for full size.

 

Before:

 

After:

 

Zoom in:

 

Location in the region I am working on:

 

Transport map just for fun:

[zimmie 521]

Wow, Haljackey - 21 million in that region. All these years and I've yet to stick with something long enough to reach 1 million.

 

 

Not an interchange in the sense of two highways intersecting. Just a series of on/off ramps through a little suburban area I'm working on.

 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

@ zimmie: Great realism in that pic! I'd love to see the final result.

@ Compdude787: Wow. Just wow.

[Haljackey 17,270]

Excellent work Zimmie!

 

---

 

New 3-way interchange: reverse trumpet!

 

Click images for full size.

 

Before:

 

After:

 

Zoom in:

 

Edit: added some eyecandy:

 

Location in region:

Region View

Transport view

(not posting region images here to avoid clutter)

  Edited October 23, 2014 by Haljackey  

[47ply 1,100]

starting to get the hang of it

[nathanthemayor 1,261]

First picture I have posted in a while; an interchange I made in a city that will eventually densely populated; the expressway(East to west) interchanges with the main highway(North-south) here; the expressway continues to the east and eventually ends at a major transit station. 

[Haljackey 17,270]

Complicated stuff!

 

Something simpler... working on a diamond at a highway terminus.

 

Click for full size.

 

 

  Edited November 2, 2014 by Haljackey  

[MandelSoft 2,769]

Airport interchange at Kerbin International Airport in Noroway:

 

 

Best,
Maarten

[henrys1996 127]

@MandelSoft: Your interchanges are so inspiring! I love the that busy highway/quiet nature feeling you incorporate into your interchanges; I feel they're so realistic.

 

Anyway, just a little concoction of mine:

In raw form

Now, add some trees, grass, and lights:

Add signs and soundwalls and done:

What do you guys think?

[Compdude787 916]

Airport interchange at Kerbin International Airport in Noroway:

 

[snip]

 

Best,

Maarten

Awesome! Looks like a great thing to post on the NORO thread at SC4 Devotion. Now I'd like to see the airport, too, if that's done yet!

 

The roadgeek in me cringes whenever I see two branches of an RHW-4 merging together to become an RHW-6S. (this is a pet peeve of mine) So, where possible, every 2-lane onramp should result in 2 lanes being added onto the RHW, even if those lanes end soon after the onramp. Entering traffic should always be given plenty of space to merge with freeway traffic. This is how it is with all two-lane onramps that I've seen on freeways in my area; anything deviating from that strikes me as unrealistic and, more importantly, unsafe.

[henrys1996 127]

 

Airport interchange at Kerbin International Airport in Noroway:

 

[snip]

 

Best,

Maarten

Awesome! Looks like a great thing to post on the NORO thread at SC4 Devotion. Now I'd like to see the airport, too, if that's done yet!

 

The roadgeek in me cringes whenever I see two branches of an RHW-4 merging together to become an RHW-6S. (this is a pet peeve of mine) So, where possible, every 2-lane onramp should result in 2 lanes being added onto the RHW, even if those lanes end soon after the onramp. Entering traffic should always be given plenty of space to merge with freeway traffic. This is how it is with all two-lane onramps that I've seen on freeways in my area; anything deviating from that strikes me as unrealistic and, more importantly, unsafe.

 

Agreed; I typically avoid Type A-C entrances (especially when I'm building highway x highway interchanges) and opt for its non-merging counterparts, Types D-F. From a highway safety perspective, it's easier to have a Type A, B, or C exit because slower traffic is on the right anyway and traffic is LEAVING the highway. But in an entrance, it's better to have the acceleration lane for traffic to merge onto the freeway in the quickest, but safest way possible.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

The roadgeek in me cringes whenever I see two branches of an RHW-4 merging together to become an RHW-6S. (this is a pet peeve of mine) So, where possible, every 2-lane onramp should result in 2 lanes being added onto the RHW, even if those lanes end soon after the onramp. Entering traffic should always be given plenty of space to merge with freeway traffic. This is how it is with all two-lane onramps that I've seen on freeways in my area; anything deviating from that strikes me as unrealistic and, more importantly, unsafe.

Agreed; I typically avoid Type A-C entrances (especially when I'm building highway x highway interchanges) and opt for its non-merging counterparts, Types D-F. From a highway safety perspective, it's easier to have a Type A, B, or C exit because slower traffic is on the right anyway and traffic is LEAVING the highway. But in an entrance, it's better to have the acceleration lane for traffic to merge onto the freeway in the quickest, but safest way possible.

This is a very common criticism of the Type A2/B2/C2 onramps, and I've actually done something to that effect, where I merged the two lanes into one before merging it with the actual highway. You may have seen this before.

However, the countercritism to that is this: as unsafe as it may be, these kinds of things do, in fact, exist in real life, and as such, they have to be represented. This was something that Maarten himself sent me in response to my alternate implementation: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.603678,4.731145,3a,19.6y,24.63h,89.41t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1saPMauB1yKCW895ZAOKPq-Q!2e0

[henrys1996 127]

 

The roadgeek in me cringes whenever I see two branches of an RHW-4 merging together to become an RHW-6S. (this is a pet peeve of mine) So, where possible, every 2-lane onramp should result in 2 lanes being added onto the RHW, even if those lanes end soon after the onramp. Entering traffic should always be given plenty of space to merge with freeway traffic. This is how it is with all two-lane onramps that I've seen on freeways in my area; anything deviating from that strikes me as unrealistic and, more importantly, unsafe.

Agreed; I typically avoid Type A-C entrances (especially when I'm building highway x highway interchanges) and opt for its non-merging counterparts, Types D-F. From a highway safety perspective, it's easier to have a Type A, B, or C exit because slower traffic is on the right anyway and traffic is LEAVING the highway. But in an entrance, it's better to have the acceleration lane for traffic to merge onto the freeway in the quickest, but safest way possible.

This is a very common criticism of the Type A2/B2/C2 onramps, and I've actually done something to that effect, where I merged the two lanes into one before merging it with the actual highway. You may have seen this before.

However, the countercritism to that is this: as unsafe as it may be, these kinds of things do, in fact, exist in real life, and as such, they have to be represented. This was something that Maarten himself sent me in response to my alternate implementation: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.603678,4.731145,3a,19.6y,24.63h,89.41t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1saPMauB1yKCW895ZAOKPq-Q!2e0

 

Beautiful work, Ganaram! And yeah, this is after all, the REAL Highway Mod; so it's definitely a plus that users can recreate exits/entrances to their liking and replicate more REAL ramp setups. This is mostly just a matter of preference and design. Plus, I think that maybe in areas with space constraints or highways without too much traffic, the A2/B2/C2 entrance can possibly prove to be effective.

[Compdude787 916]

However, the countercritism to that is this: as unsafe as it may be, these kinds of things do, in fact, exist in real life, and as such, they have to be represented. This was something that Maarten himself sent me in response to my alternate implementation: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.603678,4.731145,3a,19.6y,24.63h,89.41t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1saPMauB1yKCW895ZAOKPq-Q!2e0

 

I know that such onramps exist somewhere in the world, but I've never seen them myself. In response to that RL example, I'd say that that onramp is meeting the freeway at a much shallower angle than anything you can do with the RHW. There's also a sign showing that the left lane of the onramp merges directly into the right lane of the freeway, something that doesn't exist in the US. (Regardless, NORO is supposed to be an American-style region) Using Google Earth and a protractor, I found that a lot of ramps branch off freeways at an angle of around 10 degrees relative to the freeway. There are some RHW ramps that you can make this shallow, but not all of them.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

To that, I'd say that that onramp is meeting the freeway at a much shallower angle than anything you can do with the RHW. Using Google Earth and a protractor, I found that a lot of ramps branch off of the freeway at an angle of around 10 degrees relative to the freeway. Considering that FA-3 is an 18.4 degree angle, even that is pretty sharp for RL.

And to that, I say: there's a limit as to how realistic we can go. FA6 ramp interfaces, which would have an even smaller angle of 9 degrees, would have to exceed the 5×5 size limit that INRULs can natively handle, and because of how even FA3 ramps behave with other networks, such as the RHW-8S and RHW-6C, the biggest an FA6 ramp would have to be to handle all of the possible networks would probably be 7 tiles or even 8 tiles long, possibly even 9 tiles long. That's pretty excessive already, considering that some of the NAM's biggest puzzle pieces are 9 tiles long, by both width and height.

There's another realism issue that's lesser known: All of the networks in-game, including RHW, are still overscaled, and that's because all of the cars in-game are overscaled. To get them to be properly scaled with real life, you would, 1, need to rescale all of the automata in-game, and 2, get all of the third-party automata to be rescaled before you would even get to thinking about rescaling the RHW, and rescaling the RHW is already a daunting task: you'd have to not only make new textures for everything, but trash the tens of thousands of RHW models in existence and replace them all. We already have a hard enough time trying to handle all of the legacy pieces.

Achieving true realism is just one can of worms after another, and it gets uglier the deeper you go. Even with part of RHW's dev philosophy is to be as realistic as possible, that's just it, we can only be as realistically as we can allow ourselves to do so. Any more's just gonna require more time and code than we can allow, to the point we run out of space allocated within the NAM's own project range of 0x5#######.

_{(And with that, I've given away several answers to the NAM test I've made.)}

[Compdude787 916]

There's another realism issue that's lesser known: All of the networks in-game, including RHW, are still overscaled, and that's because all of the cars in-game are overscaled. To get them to be properly scaled with real life, you would, 1, need to rescale all of the automata in-game, and 2, get all of the third-party automata to be rescaled before you would even get to thinking about rescaling the RHW, and rescaling the RHW is already a daunting task: you'd have to not only make new textures for everything, but trash the tens of thousands of RHW models in existence and replace them all. We already have a hard enough time trying to handle all of the legacy pieces.

Wow, I didn't know that cars are overscaled! To that I say, wow, Maxis, wow...