RHW vs Maxis Highways

[letangerang58 0]

I haven't done to much with Maxis highways since I've come to Simtropolis (the whole reason I came was for improved highways and downloadable regions) while I have done some stuff with RHW. RHW can be somewhat tricky to use sometimes. I was wondering, what is everyones favorite system to use? Do you use one over the other or a combination of both? If you use both which situations do you use maxis highways over RHW and vice versa? My impression is that Maxis highways are better to use in denser areas and RHW is better to use if you have a little more room but I haven't done any experiments with this yet.

[samima 92]

I agree that maxis highways are for dense areas, but if you have the skills, RHW will fit (plus RHW looks better).

  Edited May 18, 2012 by samima  

[zakuten 8]

I use Maxis highways for a purposeful "older-not-up-to-standards" kind of feel, in dense neighborhoods. Some of the older roads in Chicago are practically MaxisHW, so I use it for that kind of feel.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Take it from a NAMite:

MHW in its current state ain't that pretty (and for the most part, 50% underscale), but, in my opinion, neglect it and you're pretty much throwing away a perfectly good transit network (two if you throw in EMHW).

Most NAMites will agree that MHWs are underscale and inflexible, but there are a few of us who want to rejuvenate it and get it to RHW standards... (Minus MHW interchanges.)

After all, MHWs are the only way to create RHW bridges wider than 6S...

I'm willing to use both MHW and RHW, but only if MHW is up to RHW standards.

[Magneto 316]

The RHW is really interesting and requires some good skills but Maxis highways have the sheer compactness the RHW crueIly lacks. Plus in my opinion the Maxis highways look better than the RHW.

[Haljackey 17,302]

Maxis highways get a bad rep from experienced players, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be deterred from using them. There are instances where they can look quite good, even given their incredibly unrealistic appearance.

I mostly use RHW, but I will use and transition to Maxis highways some of the time.

I made a post in my archives thread that shows examples how and where Maxis Highways can look quite good. The link is right here: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=4575.msg401345#msg401345

Trial and error and experience will help you decide which network to use. There is no correct answer here, we all have our own preference.

[MandelSoft 2,769]

I used to be a MHW-enthousiast, but for about two years I almost completely abandoned the Maxis Highway (I only use it for RHW bridges). Where I live, the RHW represents the freeways system way better than the MHW. Just as Ganaram DI, I would only use the MHW when it's converted to RHW-standards. The reasons why I got rid of Maxis Highways were:

1. Static and a limited selection of interchanges. I missed the Trumpet Interchange in particular.

2. Overall underscaling. The lanes for the MHW are only 3.3m wide. The RHW has 4.5m wide lanes and most of the Maxis and NWM networks have 5.0m wide lanes. The interchanges are in particular underscaled: even compared to their smallest RL counterparts, they are still scaled down 50%

3. It's always three lanes wide, no more, no less. This defeats their realism in dense urban areas or rural areas...

4. No emergency breakdown lanes or accelleration/decelleration lanes, something that's very common around here...

5. The network is hard to mod. It requires a lot of complex modeling and pathing to make new MHW content, which is why there isn't much around...

Now most people say that the Real Highway takes up much space and that therefore they use MHW instead. To my opinion, you'll have to deal with it that you can't build freeways that easily. Heck, it's hard in RL too to fit a freeway into a cityscape, which is why they often go around cities. But even within a dense city, I can still manage to cram in a RHW...

Anyway, that's my 2 cents...

Best,

Maarten

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

In my current playing style, I find I don't need highways at all, or at most an MHW or EMHW. I have found that an AVE-4 does the trick in my rural scenarios. I do use a dark texture for these however. Gray concrete is not my idea of a highway since it kind of went out after WW II and got overlaid with blacktop.

RHW is just a little too fiddly for my patience. All that civil engineering is just a bit much for me, even though I do it on shore lines.

I live in the hope of considerable improvement in the NWM.

  Edited May 19, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[dazza262 133]

I've not been much of a user of highways at all so far. I'm the same as A Nonny Moose, more of a smaller town and village builder myself, so not really had the need for them.

But the time has come for me to start connecting my city tiles with some higher volume roads.

The Maxis highways, although easy to use, aren't particularly attractive. So I've started playing around with the RHW, and tbh I'm not having a lot of joy with it.

Could you guys recommend some beginners tutorials, either pictorial or video, to get me started. I've seen there's lots of stuff on youtube, but they mainly seem to deal with complex interchanges. I'd like to get to grips with the basics first.

Ta

[MandelSoft 2,769]

Could you guys recommend some beginners tutorials, either pictorial or video, to get me started. I've seen there's lots of stuff on youtube, but they mainly seem to deal with complex interchanges. I'd like to get to grips with the basics first.

Then this is the place to be: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=419.0

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I have found that the RHW wants you to have your grades pretty much the same as needed for real highways. It is quite a serious exercise in realism. The terrain leveling tool in the Mayor tools helps a lot. For detail leveling you can use single road or rail tiles that are not connected to each other. The leveling tool can add terrain as well as level and take it away.

And be sure you match your pieces up. Yellow to yellow, white to white.

  Edited May 19, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[Moskva 75]

I am a MHW patriot, i love it. I am kind of experienced, i just prefer it because it has less problems of functionality compared the RHW. The MHW also looks way more urban than the RHW anyway. The RHW is better in rural areas and to make funny custom interchanges. MHW vs RHW is just senceless to me, i believe they're just different ways to make highways, with their pros and cons. The real difference stays in the style. It's like talking about capitalism and communism, they're just different, not one better than the other, at least for me .

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Generally, I believe that RHW is for the realists who are trying to duplicate some given highway from RL. I don't think it enhances game play very much if at all.

[Lucario Boricua 7,028]

While I'm supposed to like RHW better (civil engineering student wanting to specialize in transport), I prefer the Maxis highways because of convenience to build--while there's a few NAM pieces I'd like to have for the MHW, the ones currently available are enough for just about what I need and want to do with my cities. Also, there are some interchange configurations I would like to build with the RHW but they're extremely tedious to build, particularly with how the pieces are organized on the tab menus and how troublesome is it to make diagonal-orthogonal and diagonal-diagonal grade-separated crossings; otherwise I would already have several cloverstacks, stacks and medium-sized Y interchanges that would look neat on my book.

[Charlie_Zane 963]

Maxis highways are good, but it can't beat RHW. RHW has so many combinations that you can choose or create yourself.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

IMHO unless you are into that level of detail, RHW is too much information.

[Cob92 360]

My only beef with RHW is that it can be cumbersome and difficult to build, and once you start building lots of multilevel stuff, the overrides become unstable. If RHW could be made as easy to use as CXL's RHM mod I'd have no issue with it.

[WiiGoGetter 65]

I use maxis highways mostly but im trying to learn how to use the RHW well. I use it in farm land and suburbs almost all the time to learn

[Mithrik 562]

I don't like the RHW, it's far too complex too me, and I am not of the kind that uses highways anyways, I always connect my cities via roads, or if I need a larger car capacity, avenues, with a few tricks to prevent medians to go all the way to the connection if I don't want to.

And sometimes I use the NWM, but that's when I need a really specific type of rural road.

And, plus that, I don't really need to use things like highways or freeways, because I don't like making huge sprawling metropolises, I prefer to have nice small cities and towns.

[Tarkus 6,932]

Aside from testing purposes, I haven't used a Maxis Highway since 2007. That was about the time I began heavily contributing to RHW development. Once I saw the RHW in action, even in its very rough state back in those days (Version 1.2), it really magnified a lot of the things I didn't like about the MHWs with respect to scaling and flexibility.

I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the RHW is aimed with the highway enthusiast in mind. In the early days of developing the RHW's Modular Interchange System, I once made a comparison, that the RHW is to highways what the RMIP system is to airports. In the modern RHW-era SC4 transport landscape, the MHW is basically the "quick-and-dirty" system that enjoys its primary popularity amongst novices/"vanillists", those who aren't interested in investing time into tweaking their highway systems, those who use it simply out of habit ("because it's there"), and perceptions that it's somehow "more urban" (often based on the obsolete "but RHW stands for 'Rural' Highway!" fallacy). Using the MHW is basically like using the game's default airports, which any self-respecting aviation enthusiast or accuracy fiend will tell you are also drastically undersized, but people still use them anyway for more or less the same reasons.

Even if you aren't an RHW user, however, RHW development has influenced other facets of NAM development, most namely, the NWM. The NWM probably wouldn't exist had it not been for the RHW, as at the coding level, it's practically a clone. That said, surface street systems are actually easier to replicate in SC4, which is a large part of the reason why the NWM's learning curve seems much lower than that of the RHW. The modularity of the RHW has also allowed us to better serve the "highway enthusiast" segment of the SC4 community, who, beforehand, were requesting extremely labor-intensive MHW pre-fab interchanges with some frequency. Now they're requesting smaller ramp interface pieces that take at most, a few days to make, as opposed to several months (for just one MHW interchange), and we very rarely (thankfully) get MHW interchange requests these days.

-Tarkus

[Moskva 75]

So what, i am experienced so i have to use the RHW? Come on, let's get over this. There's no RHW vs MHW debate, again. It is senceless as it is just a matter of taste. RHW is not more complicated than MHW, it just takes time to project and build your own interchanges, that's all. RHW looks more rural than the MHW, because perhaps of darker texture, space it takes maybe, and the fact you've to let at least one unoccupied tile on sides. Again, i've seen many american cities from the satellite, the urban freeways are just not that dark, they've no green areas around them and try to take less space as possible. Perhaps experienced people prefers the RHW, but i see it just as a preference. The planing of a MHW is no way easier than the RHW, somehow it could result even harder since you don't have possibility to make those interchanges you want with RHW.

[Tarkus 6,932]

So what, i am experienced so i have to use the RHW?

No, no one's said that, though my last post might not have phrased that bit in the clearest manner. The main point I was trying to make was that the MHW was, as a generalization, typically seen by most users as the "quick-and-dirty" system, which tends to make it more attractive to the less experienced users. It is, however, as you rightly pointed out, ultimately a matter of preference.

fact you've to let at least one unoccupied tile on sides

You still have to do that to a lesser extent with MHWs, particularly around interchanges. The footprint widens out to 4 tiles wide for both, in order for their to be room for the ramps. The difference is that the smallest full MHW/Road diamond interchange one can build is 4 Wide x 7 Long, whereas the smallest RHW/Road diamond interchange is about twice that on the length dimension (but still 4 tiles wide).

-Tarkus

  Edited May 20, 2012 by Tarkus  

[Cob92 360]

I'm hoping that the next RHW release will make it quicker and easier to build ramps and interchanges. Right now I have to spend way too much time trying to get the pieces for one interchange to fit exactly where I want them. When you have to build 50+ ramps/interchanges for a region, it really bogs you down. It would also be nice if there were pieces that allowed the construction of Texas-style frontage roads.

[Moskva 75]

Thanks for explanation, Tarkus. I forgot the RHW was wider, hehe. However, you now got me curious to build some of it, however, not now, perhaps in the next region. I hope you'll keep working on RHW but also come back to do something on the MHW, if you want. Especially need those one-way smoother curves, please man! I am going to gift you CAKE!

  Edited May 20, 2012 by Moskva  

[poshbakerloo 186]

I always use the Maxis Highways. The junctions have better curves, they take up less space and are generally easier to edit etc

[Wiecher 192]

When I play, I completely disregard the game mechanics and just build eye-candy cities. So RHW is the only highway I use and it's even satisfactory sometimes to work on an interchange for days and finally get it finished.

The RHW has almost infinite possibilities and is easy to use when you get the hang of it.

[Linoa06 1,374]

With the right mods (textures mods, etc), Maxis highways do the trick. The RHW are tricky to use and I often crash using them, so I'm better off with a MHW. Besides, I don't use highways that much, since I'm quite more fond of AVE-6's and rural-semi-urban settings. (Now I know there are highways in Trabia and Eshtar... @.@)

[Piteri 17]

I use both.

Here's an example

RHW = Nice wide transitions and Exit/Entrances

MHW = High efficiency and urban.

Whenever I think MHW I think

[monomass 36]

What are the benefits to the Real Highway Mod? I know that you can't build tunnels with the RHW and that seems like a deal breaker to me, yet I've noticed a lot of the better SC4 journals use it. Thoughts?

[Adjiebrotot 94]

RHW is more realistic than the original Maxis Highway... the lanes on maxis highway are so narrow (unrealistic) also with RHW you can build a lot of interchanges design whatever you want, with RHW you can be more creative and your city will be more beautiful

I don't know what my city will be if there's no RHW...

but you can change an unrealistic maxis highway into RHW-equivalent mods called Project Symphony, available on NAM31