NAM: Development

[vester_DK 477]

Date: 8/23/2005 9:56:35 PM
Author: Duke87
:
:

Well, even if they build them that way wherever you live, that interchange would be more efficeine in terms of space and distance with the trumpet going the other way. So maybe we need two versions....

quote>

Going the other way ? Please post on sketch on that.

[dedgren 830]

Ardecila-

 

You are the Interchange God!

 

Grew up in Naperville, my dad did some of the post-tension concrete work on those really loooooong 355 bridges up by Morton Arboreatum over the E-W Tollway the last few years before he retired.  I remember when 55 was US66, and Alternate US66 used to drop down through Romeoville and Joliet.  Just looking at your great work brought all that back.

 

Thanks.

 

 

D. Edgren

[Tropod 144]

GoaSkin;

- how do I replace the static base texture with the wealth-dependant ones?

Look at page 10 half-way down Models & Wealth. Page 11 at the top. Page 14 part way down Wealth-Dependant Models.

- how do I replace the signals with stop signs?

Look at the Exemplars containing the LotConfigLines. These are similar to Exemplars that normal Lots use, except they are for network tiles.

- what is the instance ID range of the T-intersection (straight street, dead-end road)?

On the Reader: goto Tools_TextureViewer_Zoom5_#NetworkName# & find it in there.

 

 

 

ardecila

That looks very impressive . Look forward to seeing that complete.

[Ryan B 35]

ardecila - That looks amazing.  It reminds me of several exits on the New York State Thruway ( IH 90 ).  Those several exits include the two closest to me:  Exit 48A ( NY 63; Pembroke / Medina ), and Exit 48 ( NY 98; Batavia / Albion ).

I wonder what else ( if anything ) you've got up your sleeve . . . .

 

Also - a question to the entire NAM team:

Has there been any development on TGC's ground / ground and elevated / elevated stacks?

[ardecila 124]

Thanks, all! I just noticed a need and filled it.

I fixed the texturing issues and I am now experimenting with grass embankments. Even if I do decide to make such embankments, I will set them up as lots to be plopped around the interchange, so you can choose whether you get it or not.

Tropod - Currently, the interchange is at 3430 polys, which gives each tile an average of 33 polys (there are 104 total tiles). Is that within acceptable limits? I'm used to using exorbitant poly counts on UDI vehicles, since there can only be one at a time, but I dunno about interchanges.

Duke87 - There was another reason why I kept the trumpet going to the left. Interchanges have a 16x16 tile-size limit. Maintaining the same scale that I am now, if I had extended the trumpet to the right, the total interchange would have exceeded the 16x16 limit.

In other words, if I had wanted to run it to the right, I would have had to decrease the turning radius, making the ramps have much tighter turns and, IMO, making the interchange less realistic.

Besides, I think the interchange is much more compact and less sprawling in this form.

[Tropod 144]

For each tile that should be fine as long as no one tile has a lot of polys (Red's interchange tute makes reference to about 800-1000 polys before it may become an issue. EDIT: I'm pretty sure that's per tile).

 

[GoaSkin 2]

I replaced now the signals with signs on my new dual-networking puzzle pieces but I still don't understand how to make them wealth-dependant.

- is this possible on interchange-related items too or only on regular network-tiles?
- is there a special resource key type what makes it possible to use one model for each zoom and wealth stage?
- or do I have to remove the base texture from the models and to add a network lot on itwith the wealth-depandant base-texture?

[Tropod 144]

GoaSkin:

- is this possible on interchange-related items too or only on regular network-tiles?

It was because of an interchange related item that I found this was possible. It may be possible for regular network tiles, but

Wealth dependant models appears to be dependant on the network, & whether or not it's a Textured-Based-Network or Modelled-Based-Network: The Network needs to be a Texture-Based Network for it to work.

 

 - is there a special resource key type what makes it possible to use one model for each zoom and wealth stage?

No, not as far as I'm aware. The exemplar that references a network tile (for a model), the resource keys handle only rotations/zooms.

 

- or do I have to remove the base texture from the models and to add a network lot on itwith the wealth-depandant base-texture?

You only need the base model & it just needs to reference the Base Texture. The InstanceIDs of the textures though need to follow the same InstanceID format as they do for normal textured tiles. As I said though, it appears this will only work for a Textured-Based-Network, so it may not work for LightRail on Street since it does contain LightRail as part of the item which is a Modelled-Based-Network.

 

[GoaSkin 2]

Here is a screenshot of an el-rail parking puzzle piece:



There is no space for carriers and it is designed to place a maximum of 3 into a row.

[Teirusu 38]

ardecila

That looks nearly spot on!  Very nice!  But... your missing one key detail!  What I refer to as 'The Crosses'.  

 

Originally, I believe they wanted to make I-355 go further south, however, some time during the construction they scrapped that idea and instead ended I-355 at I-55.  Only problem is they had already made the 4 concrete pillars to hold the 4 future road decks over I-55.   Each of the pillars was designed to hold, at least, 3 or so lane deck.  Unfortunately, when they switched gears on the project, the 4 pillars weren't aligned properly to hold the two single-lane ramps, so they built new supports for the ramps and just left the 4 pillars where they stood.  So, every time you drive through the I-55 & I-355 exchange, you see 2 pillars on each side of the I-355 ramps holding up nothing but air...

 

Date: 8/24/2005 2:04:28 AM Author: dedgren

Ardecila-

You are the Interchange God!

Grew up in Naperville, my dad did some of the post-tension concrete work on those really loooooong 355 bridges up by Morton Arboreatum over the E-W Tollway the last few years before he retired.  I remember when 55 was US66, and Alternate US66 used to drop down through Romeoville and Joliet.  Just looking at your great work brought all that back.

Thanks.

D. Edgren

quote>

 

Alternate US66 is now mostly Route 30.  Route 30 comes from Joliet, cuts through the Louis Joliet Mall, intersects I-55 just outside the mall area.  Then, 30 continues on into Plainfield and merges with Route 59 for about a 1 1/2 blocks (Which makes for horrible traffic. btw.  Try to avoid going North on Rt. 59 through Plainfield during... well most of the day. ) then it splits off again, going west right through the downtown of Plainfield (Well, that IS downtown Plainfield right there... If you want to see a bunch of Mom and Pop stores, that's the place to go, through I think quite a few of those places are now insurance/lawyer offices, grrrrr....)  Anyway, it turns north towards aurora, and along this part of 30 you can spot several old, cheap motels that have been there forever...  After that, 30 merges with 34 but no longer follows the old US66 route.  The Alternate US66 continued north from this intersection/point along what is now Hill Ave and Hill Ave continues towards downtown aurora.  Along the way you'll spot one of the few drive-in-theaters that still exsist around here, sadly, it recently closed. 

 

-Teirusu

[Tropod 144]

quote>

I sincerely hope you don't wish to add this? ......I honestly can not see benifits of adding such a thing, that is purely eye-candy. If it is possible to actually make them have a Garage Capacity (like the games original Parking Garage), then I could see the benifit, otherwise personally I think this is pointless. EDIT: If you wish to add something like that, then I'd suggest using a Lot & using overhanging prop technique.


I hate to be the voice of dissent here, but it really is much more preferable that any items actually add additional functionality to the game, not things that are mostly eye-candy. If we only added eye-candy items all the time, we would be adding eye-candy items forever......This has always been my perspective on Network related items, especially when it comes to anything that is Interchange-Base Related, considering the nature of the file that handles these sorts of items.

[dedgren 830]

Teirusu:

 

I grew up in Downers Grove in the 50s and early 60s, then we moved to Naperville. I remember all that stuff.  IL65 used to be Aurora Avenue west from downtown Naperville, becoming New York Avenue into Aurora.  Alternate US30 was Roosevelt Road into downtown Chicago, after swinging north from Aurora multiplexed with IL31.  We used to live between 75th Street and Hobson Road just east of Naperville and there was nothing but farms (and beautiful old iron truss bridges over the DuPage River) south of 75th.  Plainfield was a stoplight at the five corner intersection at IL59, 126 and US 30.  I'm sure all that's homogenized into endless houses and malls now.  It started before I went off to college in '70.

 

I'm sure growing up in an area where there were so many great roads (US 6, 12, 20, 30, 41, 45, 52, 54 and 66 come immediately to mind) had a real influence on me as a child.  Driving on to my grandparents in Hammond, Indiana took my mind on to Cape Cod, where 6 began, and all the places in between.  Coming back had me thinking about Long Beach, and the California where I had been born, but had never really seen as we had moved away when I was just an infant.  I never made it to those places until years later, but when I finally got there, I felt a familiarity based on nothing more, really-- truth be told-- than looking at road maps and seeing the same old numbers that ran just a few miles from my home as a child.

 

SC4 (and its predecessors) does that for me today.  The NAM, and its evolution over the last year and a half) reminds me of that golden period during the 60s when you'd drive a while on a new interstate, then there'd be the barriers and the big sign- Your Tax Dollars At Work.  You'd get off on the old road I55, I80, I90 or I94 was replacing for a few miles through some town, or over some river, knowing that next summer there'd just be another 10 miles of divided highway.  That would be OK, though, as it was great to watch, year to year, those disconnected stretches of parallel blue or red lines on your Standard, Mobil or Cities Service gas company road map connect up into a network.

 

Made me want to become an land use planner, and many years later I did.

 

As the SC4 community moves the game to a point Maxis never conceived of, and folks like yourself and Tropod create ever more realistic stuff in the NAM (not to slight other incredible mods out there, but the NAM and the increasing realism it allows in modeling highway (and other transport) networks stands head and shoulders above the rest), a SC4 session becomes more than idle recreating.  It truly reaches the level of allowing the creation of a virtual place in a virtual world, where one can actually be God, big government, 'the people,' the environmental movement, Robert Moses and just about any other development factor extant all at the same time.

 

Not to mention, a lot of the stuff (your interchange comes right to mind) is just so damn plain cool.  The fact that it is based on something out there in the real world- something with which I (speaking for myself) already have a connection, is just incredible.

 

Thank you again, Teirusu.  Now if someone would just come up that highway Y interchange, life would be little short of perfect.

 

 

D. Edgren

[dedgren 830]

Teirusu and ardecila:

 

In my last post, I gubbled together my comments about Teirusu's thoughts and ardecila's great 'trumpet' NAM highway interchange he posted on the previous page.  To be correct, I need to say thanks to ardecila for the interchange, but would add to Teirusu the same thanks for all the work he has done in contributing to this incredible project.  Sorry about any confusion- just want to make sure that proper credit is given where due.  Thanks to both of you!

 

 

D. Edgren

[Tropod 144]

File superseded & now obsolete.

[ardecila 124]

Date: 8/26/2005 11:08:02 PM
Author: Teirusu

ardecila

That looks nearly spot on! Very nice! But... your missing one key detail! What I refer to as 'The Crosses'.

Originally, I believe they wanted to make I-355 go further south, however, some time during the construction they scrapped that idea and instead ended I-355 at I-55. Only problem is they had already made the 4 concrete pillars to hold the 4 future road decks over I-55. Each of the pillars was designed to hold, at least, 3 or so lane deck. Unfortunately, when they switched gears on the project, the 4 pillars weren't aligned properly to hold the two single-lane ramps, so they built new supports for the ramps and just left the 4 pillars where they stood. So, every time you drive through the I-55 & I-355 exchange, you see 2 pillars on each side of the I-355 ramps holding up nothing but air...

-Teirusu

quote>
I only go through there a couple of times each year. I did have a chance to check it out on the way down to the State Fair, though. It was pretty much what I had expected from the maps I had looked at.

Crosses - Oh yeah, forgot about those things. Aren't they there for the I-355 extension, which should be starting construction... any day now? Anyways, I didn't want to take realism TOO far....

dedgren - Thanks! Unfortunately, all the fun work of creating an interchange has been done. Now comes the ridiculously-long busywork period of slicing up the interchange into 1-tile pieces, exporting them into 3ds format, then importing them into the Reader...

[Keiran Halcyon 0]

Someone should write a script to do all that automatically.

[Tropod 144]

ardecila
Now comes the ridiculously-long busywork period of slicing up the interchange into 1-tile pieces, exporting them into 3ds format, then importing them into the Reader...

quote>


You plan to just export them manually (as opposed to rendering them)?

[redlotus 16]

Date: 8/30/2005 7:00:30 PM Author: Keiran Halcyon Someone should write a script to do all that automatically.

I thought the same thing back in the day.  Sadly, when I really started looking into it, it looked like the only way to do that would be to purchase the SDK (a little on the pricy side ) for GMAX and do some serious programming.  IIRC, you can't execute saves/exports with just scripts.  You would need to develop dll's for that part and this requires the Software Developer's Kit (SDK).  On top of all that, you would need to know the S3D specs, which only a couple of people outside of Maxis know.  All in all, it might not be an insurmountable task, but hard enough that Maxis themselves refused to comit any time to it. 

 

 

Edit:  800th Post

[Duke87 1,070]

Date: 8/23/2005 10:18:03 PM Author: vester_DK 
 Going the other way ? Please post on sketch on that.

quote>

 

[ardecila 124]

Date: 8/31/2005 12:12:52 PM
Author: Tropod
You plan to just export them manually (as opposed to rendering them)?

quote>

Yes. In doing so, I avoid the monstrous time-consumption and the varied pitfalls of skinning. (The Reader's import filter preserves UV data from the 3ds files)

I'll have to export each one out of gmax seperately, but I then have a tool than can batch-convert the MD3 exports into 3ds, which will then need to be imported into Reader.

[Tropod 144]

ardecila
Well if you run into any problems at all at any point, please don't hesitate to post/PM & let us know. Many of us I'm sure would be eager to help out, as we'd love to see that included .


Redlotus: I've sent you a PM . Nice to see you around .

[Tropod 144]

(NOTE: due to the number of images, please refrain my quoting my post in whole, thanks).

TESTERS ONLY Please (I can not stress this enough):

Overview:
File url below contains a zip file which contains substantial/significant modifications to the Avenue Network (see images below). It adds some 30+ new intersections, junctions, &/or set-up possibilities for the Avenue Network using the normal avenue tool. The zip file contains several *.dat files some of which are unique to the games' engine, & as such this is currently not compatible with anything else network related (especially items released in other developement threads in this forum). There is a README file included which explains matters in more detail. So if you would like to test this out, then you need to read the ReadMe as it contains important information.

File is approximately 340KB (file size has been reduced due to removing the images).
Z_NAM_AvenueJunctions_Alpha_090205.zip

Changes in this version; please see the included ReadMe for this.

I would like to extend my thanks to frimi2, who has helped considerably & provided the many textures.

If folk wanted to, or could, come up with some (preferably short) names for each of the different junction types, that'd be great, as I'll most likely be adding the list of possibly junctions to the documentation.

I've decided to post pictures of these, save putting them in a file to download (hopefully these all come out right):

Images do not constitute final works.

[frimi2 0]

Here are some names to discuss. Have fun

 

 

[andreharv 1,197]

Wow...I don't know what was more tedious...making those textures, or coming up with the names.  It is fairly amusing.  My question is, how could you link more than 4 avenues together in an intersection and not expect to run into some serious traffic issues.  It wouldn't be suitable to lay avenue unless there is a net traffic volume of at least 1000.  Therefore, if you link 5 avenues together, you are almost certainly asking for trouble.  It kinda reminds me of those crazy intersections in a dr seus book.  I simply love the 4 way and 3 way intersections, however.  Those can solve a lot of problems in anyone's map.  As for the Pinned skin and Diaper...we could probably let those stay to our amusement.

 

 

[theLXMB 4]

uhm, like andreharv said, sometimes you can have huge traffik jams even if you just let a road cross an avenue... but 8 avenues into one intersection?? (target) wouldn't make it more sence to let those big intersektions become roundabouts when placed?

anyway, i just love the idea!! some of them would be really nice to see in my cities.

today i have to build big intersections with the nam puzzlepieces (if more than 4 avenues meet at one point) for don't have 2 or more intersections next to each other. but with these solutions intersektions of more than 4 avenues won't be that huge anymore^^

[Duke87 1,070]

Nice stuff, though a few of those intersections are just rediculous. Where in real life do you see an 8-way intersection? You don't, and with good reason. It's way too much uncontrolled pavement, and the traffic light would require at least 4 phases. Too dangerous and would back up traffic too much.

[Tropod 144]

frimi2:
hehe, there's some interesting names there indeed . Thanks. EDIT: I was kinda hoping for actual names that might reflect a given junction, like the 8-sided junction I thought of perhaps Diamond junction. I probably should have pointed this out in my post .


andreharv/Pichu0/Duke87 & anyone else wondering about these new avenue junctions;
Many of these are just a factor of the base code, which has undergone a big transformation. Some of them may not be real-world like, but that's not my intension with these. The Avenue tool as Maxis originally designed it, is just way to restrictive: doesn't give us users much flexibility to create the kinds of junctions that some of us would like to make. And that's why I sought to do this.

[Shadow Assassin 336]

As someone said, I hope that the Target comes with a roundabout...

[Keiran Halcyon 0]

What do you mean by unique to the game's engine?

[Tropod 144]

Date: 9/3/2005 11:44:06 AM
Author: Keiran Halcyon
What do you mean by 'unique to the game's engine'?

quote>


Basically means that a particular file (or set of files) is unique to the game, in such a way that only one file will actually be used by the game when it loads. So if you have multiple versions of the same (internal) file (that have the same TGI ID address) the game is only going to load & use one of them, typically the one that is loaded last. For a lot of aspects for the game this isn't an issue, but for many aspects related to the networks it is. hope that makes sense .