Under the Bridge Project

[CorinaMarie 29,857]

1 hour ago, memo said:

– the actual path coordinate points are only needed for automata.

If it's possible to keep the automata happy too, that'd be icing on the cake.

[Propfam 2,295]

20 hours ago, memo said:

I'm pretty sure the paths are not baked in. You can certainly modify SC4Paths files and the change takes effect immediately everywhere in your city, without redragging networks. The SC4Paths files also contain way more information than needed for the path finder – the actual path coordinate points are only needed for automata. The path finder should just need entry and exit coordinates.

That's why we can switch handedness even if we established the city since all paths can be changed retroactively. Also, a bit unrelated but I heard that you can remove the NAM controller in a city where RHW is already present. NAM controller has paths, right? Are Rul codes and paths different things?

[smf_16 1,838]

Hi everyone,

Small update on further research I've been doing. I decided to leave the tunnels for what they are for a moment and focus back on the bridge itself, as I felt I haven't investigated all possibilities there yet. I started playing a bit with the network index and see how it relates to the network tiles. Something interesting that I found is that you can freely delete tiles from it without the game crashing. For example, in the image below I have filtered out the network tiles at the crossover point, but it didn't seem to bother the sims at all. Still no traffic over the bridge, still traffic under the bridge. The only difference is that when using drawpaths, the paths on that tile don't show up anymore, which has the consequence that no automata can travel through it anymore.

However, when removing all road tiles from the network index, the sims suddenly aren't able anymore to drive under the bridge:

That made me wonder, how far does this go? What happens if we create a checkerboard pattern?

Note how this time only 1 house grew: the one with a tile in the network index! So it looks this is needed for the houses to have street access. Okay, then let's only keep the tiles in the index that are adjacent to a residential zone:

That's interesting! The residents are able to find their way to work, but apparently they just take the shortest route once "of the paths". Could it be that when a job is sufficiently near, they are able to find their way to it?

Well, looks like distance is not even important! Fascinating stuff. So we've learned that the network index is apparently primarily used for knowing whether a tile has road access or not. It looks like it is of lesser importance in pathfinding, which is a partial explanation for why no traffic was traveling over the bridge: there's something else going on with the pathfinding. Question is: what could it be?

[Propfam 2,295]

And speaking of bridges, @smf_16, I wonder if bridges in the pre-RH is treated differently than in RH/Deluxe and what's the effect of it on the order of pathfinding?

[smf_16 1,838]

I don't know what you mean with pre-RH. Do you mean the vanilla SC4 game? I don't have access to that, so I can't test anything there.