Advanced Road Building for City-Building Games (Concept)

[Googlefluff 55]

I was bored, so I decided to finally get this idea out of my head. It's partially inspired by Transport Fever, specifically the way it handles train trancks. In that game, tracks are laid one at a time, with new tracks snapping to adjacent ones. I thought, why not do the same with lanes of a road? So here's what I ended up with. Note that I have no experience with game design or programming whatsoever so I have no idea if any of this is even technically feasable, it's just something that would exist in my perfect city-builder. I'd love to hear any comments or questions, and let me know if there's anything I'm missing!

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[CorinaMarie 29,923]

Hiya, @Googlefluff.

This certainly looks detailed and interesting. I can imagine the NAM team and @kotcity being interested in it. While I don't know who all is on the NAM team I'll @ mention (alphabetically) the ones I know so they will get beeped and maybe take a look here: @Eggman121, @rsc204, and @Tarkus.

 

[kotcity 110]

9 hours ago, Googlefluff said:

I was bored, so I decided to finally get this idea out of my head. It's partially inspired by Transport Fever, specifically the way it handles train trancks. In that game, tracks are laid one at a time, with new tracks snapping to adjacent ones. I thought, why not do the same with lanes of a road? So here's what I ended up with. Note that I have no experience with game design or programming whatsoever so I have no idea if any of this is even technically feasable, it's just something that would exist in my perfect city-builder. I'd love to hear any comments or questions, and let me know if there's anything I'm missing!

You may have to right click --> view image if the text is too small.

We are pretty far away from being able to do this but I'll need something like this when we start thinking about 2.0.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

This is pretty similar to the Custom Road Builder (CuRB) concept I had in mind that I explained here (well, up to the intersections and ramp interfaces part, which I have yet to think about):

On 3/12/2018 at 6:01 PM, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Imagine a blank road that's, say, 16 meters wide. Assuming a sidewalk width of 2 meters and a lane width of 3 meters, you can construct a 4 lane road out of modular pieces.

Now imagine a blank road that's 20 meters wide. If we assume a median that's 4 meters wide and use the same components from the 16 meter example, we can create a basic avenue.

Wait, you want a turn lane median? No problem; switch out the original median with a turn lane median. No, wait, you wanted a 2+3 road that you can pass off for a turn lane setup but you don't like how that 4m lane is being too wide? No problem; partition that 4 meter space into a 3m lane and a 1m separator between the two directions of traffic.

Apologies if I'm saying this unscripted because I don't have the notebook I wrote this in on hand, but you basically have blank roads that are a width of a multiple of 4 meters (4, 8, 12, 16, 20, etc) and you build an entire road out of that blank space. Of course, there'd be presets for popular road types (and between SC4 and C:S, there's plenty to go by), but this is if you want really fine lane control. You can define a preset before you lay down the road or, if you want a new design right now, you can modify an existing road.

In my notes, however, I designated the entire road to be blank and you have to build the road from the ground up, even the sidewalks, and when you're done, there may be some wasted space. A slightly easier implementation from that would be to have the 2m sidewalks pre-installed on the sides of the road and picture the rest of the road as a blank canvas for you to carve up into lanes. Side note: I don't know if you've ever been where I'm at, but where I live, we've had road configurations become repurposed; for example, we had a 6 lane road with turn lane median and shoulders (a TLA-7 by NAM standards) and it got demoted back down to a TLA-5, but the decomissioned lanes and shoulder were converted into a bike lane and parking zone. (This was a really wide road, by the way, and I have a link to the road in question before it was converted; I can also show how the road looks now if need be: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1349409,-116.3152464,235m/data=!3m1!1e3 )

 

This fits into its own grid-based system because I'm specifically forbidding the use of measurements less than 1 meter (so nothing that's 1.1 meters wide, for example). A 4m road would be more suitable as a tiny alley (not sure how your game would react to that), so I'm saying the minimum working width is 8 meters and declaring that as an SC4-grade street; the 12, 16, and 20 meter examples are used as the 2L road, 4L road, and 4L avenue, respectively (SC4+NAM standards); widen all three by 4 meters to add a parallel parking strip on all three (C:S standards; the convention here is 2.1m parking buffer, but I'm rounding it down to 2 meters; not sure if that's a good idea.)

 

[Eggman121 1,053]

Thanks for the notification @CorinaMarie

You could do something in that space with Flex Technology @Googlefluff The up and coming REW will have that fuctionality for most of the mod.

A transport fever style thing would work. I really should play with my copy to see if any concepts can be ported over

-eggman121 (NAM Team Member)

[Googlefluff 55]

Thanks for the feedback! @Eggman121 I haven't played SC4 in ages (I just dug through my computer and found NAM 32 installed if that gives you any idea) so it's interesting to hear that similar ideas are being worked on.