3x3 OW Roundabouts Turn Brown & Disappear

[zebulon_stonehenge 135]

I just noticed something interesting when trying to make a 3x3 roundabout out of OW road in one of my SC4D cities: on completing the roundabout, the final leg turns brown, and on releasing my mouse button, the entire roundabout disappears! (See images 1 & 2 below.)

However, it's actually still there! If I bulldoze the center square of the final leg, the remainder of the roundabout returns! (See images 3, 4.)

Now, I can make 2x2 OW roundabouts, and they look nicely circular with no connections, but with roads connected, they no longer even look like roundabouts.

3x4 (and larger) OW roundabouts, on the other hand, look fine. (See images 5, 6.)

So I'm curious: Is this some one-off glitch in my installation due to a corrupt file or conflicting plugin? Or do 3x3 OW roundabouts disappear for everyone?

[Ramona Brie 121]

You should reinstall your NAM. OWR roundabouts are a NAM feature and it definitely seems like something is wrong with your installation.

[rsc204 21,866]

Agreed, I suspect somehow the necessary INRUL file for that feature didn't get installed.

Regarding the 2x2 OWR, no such roundabout exists, so it's just 4 curves which together would look identical to a roundabout. Until as you've discovered you try to make connecting roads, whereupon such tiles convert to regular junctions, hence why it looks weird. If you want a 2x2 roundabout, use the Road tool. It's possible to connect up Streets, OWR, Roads and even an Avenue to such roundabouts.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Generally:

• If the game disallows you from building something or something you want to build does not show up despite the correct pattern being built, you have outdated, missing, or conflicting RUL/INRUL files.
• If you successfully build something but the textures/models are missing, the textures/models are simply missing. This is what's happening here.
• If you build something and the game lags for a few seconds afterwards, you have missing path files.
• If what you built is supposed to have props attached and they don't, you have missing or outdated T21 exemplars.

In any case, it's best to do a reinstall of the OWR roundabouts. However, I'd pay attention to whether you also have the plugin that hides the OWR arrows installed; that plugin hides all the OWR arrows by converting the entirety of the OWR network into a model-based network instead of a texture-based one. It may cause problems if part of that plugin is also missing.

[zebulon_stonehenge 135]

@Ramona Brie : Ah, yes, that did the trick! I did a reinstall of NAM-36, right on top of my existing installation. I selected my own current favored setup: nearly-complete NAM, but no MHO, no OWR arrow removal, no RRW. I went into my "Roundabout Test" city, and lo! 3x3 OWR roundabouts are now round with counter-clockwise arrows, and they don't turn brown or disappear. (See attached image.) So you hit the nail on the head: something got screwed-up in my NAM.

@Ganaram Inukshuk : In this case, I'm not sure what got screwed-up. It's weird: the 3x3 OWR roundabouts turned brown and disappeared. And yet, they were still there, invisible, because when I bulldozed part, it charged me money, chunks flew, and the non-bulldozed portion became visible again. But when in the "invisible" state, the 3x3 OWR roundabouts were non-functional. I tried driving an ice-cream truck onto them, but the truck slowed down and the tires made gravel noises as if driving on gravelly dirt. And Ctrl-X "drawpaths" showed no paths at all in the roundabout, as if it wasn't there; the paths from connecting roads just ended at the invisible, nonfunctional roundabout.

All fixed now, though, whatever the problem was. :-)

  Edited October 19, 2019 by zebulon_stonehenge  
Fixed typo (it -> it's)

[Ramona Brie 121]

2 hours ago, zebulon_stonehenge said:

It weird: the 3x3 OWR roundabouts turned brown and disappeared. And yet, they were still there, invisible, because when I bulldozed part, it charged me money, chunks flew, and the non-bulldozed portion became visible again. But when in the "invisible" state, the 3x3 OWR roundabouts were non-functional. I tried driving an ice-cream truck onto them, but the truck slowed down and the tires made gravel noises as if driving on gravelly dirt. And Ctrl-X "drawpaths" showed no paths at all in the roundabout, as if it wasn't there; the paths from connecting roads just ended at the invisible, nonfunctional roundabout.

Yup, that'll happen when you have RUL/INRUL issues or certain override interactions that are legal to build but don't have associated information (try ending an MIS at an AVE-2 to see this happen). The game will hang for a moment, give you empty and unpathed network tiles, and then you're left with stuff you have to bulldoze.

[Tarkus 6,933]

Glad to hear you have it fixed!  In any case, to give the diagnosis, for anyone else who may encounter this, if the result of drawing the pattern is those brown tiles, it means that the RUL code for the feature is installed, but either (a) the textures for the feature are not installed, and/or (b) the item is model-based, but doesn't have a preview texture associated with it in the Network INI (which is a minor issue).

What you encountered was Case A.  Somehow, you got the INRULs, but didn't have the .dat file for the OWR Roundabouts (which also would have meant the paths were missing).  This would have been an installation error of some sort, and is likely due to the currently broken and capricious nature of the NAM installer (part of the reason we're ditching it for NAM 37, which is progressing but in a very not fun stage that involves untangling a massive file architecture mess).

-Tarkus

[zebulon_stonehenge 135]

@Tarkus : I wonder if it could be due to my swapping of plugins folders? About a month ago I was doing a lot of swapping of plugins folders with different NAM configurations (w or w/o MHO; w or w/o RHW; w or w/o NWM; etc).

(Eventually I decided on a nearly-complete NAM with everything but MHO. I elected to go with Maxis highways with the new black asphalt texture & added ramps, instead of MHO's modular "symphony" ramps, which I found too complex; I love the Maxis auto-exchanges and auto-ramps for fast highway building.)

But I don't think all of NAM is in "plugins", is it? I remember seeing NAM-related folders outside of "plugins". Perhaps some files in those folders no-longer matched the files inside "plugins"? That would explain why I was able to fix the problem by doing an identical reinstall of NAM on NAM, same version (36), same feature set (all but MHO).