Flann

I'd like to give my sincerest thanks to the Simtrop team for getting the site back online and keeping our community alive! Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

It's going to be a case by case thing. Some of the bridges have S3D geometry favorable to reskinning by adding a new textured plane to the model. Others will not have satisfactory results. Try looking at the bridge models in wireframe mode.

This is Szeged. The name of this next one has two words.

No, not really. This has been somewhat of a pain point for doing this sort of work until very recently. Previously we got by with either storing an unhealthy amount of hexadecimal IDs in our brains, or we'd run override texture sets that had "burned in" IIDs in our plugins, or we'd reference the network code, or peek into the texture dats to find what we needed. Nowadays, however, we just use this excellent query DLL which is able to tell you what the ID of a network tile is.

You can't switch directly between different height levels of RHW. It is necessary to use a special transition piece, called FLEX Height. See this documentation for more details - https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/realhighway-mod/#transitioning-to-other-networks

Well, I can confirm that it works with @rsc204's suggestions, assuming the RUL code is properly incorporated into the appropriate files. We use a special compiler program to do this rather than edit the files directly. However, it also breaks the OWR-1 starter, so, an alternate RUL1 definition would need to be found.

Because this is identical to the OWR-1 starter definition except for the IID, the possibilities are: Your changes were not properly added to the RUL1 file Your changes were properly added to the RUL1 file but the because it's the same as the existing one, the game is preferring the one which comes first or last in the file (I'm not sure what the load order preference is).

Indeed, there is quite a lot to it and unfortunately a dearth of easily digestible how-to guides. Fortunately, the most important topics are covered in great detail on the old SC4D wiki. These articles will teach you how the game works but you'll probably need some help to put it all together. As you have discovered, you must learn quite a few things to accomplish adding a new override network. You are also correct that such a mod would not be possible to release as a standalone package. The code that makes the networks work ultimately must be compiled down to a handful of files, and only one copy can be active in a given installation. Stewardship of the network related features thus must be centralized. This is the responsibility of the NAM team. Ultimately, to make your idea a reality that could be shared, you'd have to coordinate (join) the NAM team and then there'd probably be a discussion on the merits of the feature and how to implement it if folks agree it should be added.

The key to understanding RUL0 is that the checktype lines tagged with 'optional' cause the game to place the network component that correspond to the specified flags. If the underlying flags involve two networks, this combination must be defined somewhere in RUL1. When this concept is used to create starters and other flex pieces, the RUL1 definitions are known as false intersections (or falsies). In order for your RUL0 item to work, you must define a new falsie in RUL1 which calls up a new network texture. From there, you can define RUL2 rules to cause the network to propagate along the OWR network. The SAM 11 starter falsie is defined here https://github.com/NAMTeam/Network-Addon-Mod/blob/9ac972aa2fa57f5059e28d916ada681402f6cfb1/Controller/RUL1/04_Street/08_Street_OneWayRoad.txt#L252

To me, this is not a good compromise unless categories of the competing sets actually have the same meaning. If the solution is "call it whatever you like", then we actually haven't defined anything, we have not settled on a system, and there would be no shared understanding of how the tilesets are supposed to work. Without that consensus, how could it ever be possible to actually implement the community styles broadly? Remember, work will need to be done to actually get content assigned to new styles. If that work is not done using a common system, we'll end up with two or more similar classification schemes masquerading as one, and the tilesets won't behaver as expected. For that reason, I still insist we work to find just one common styles system. For several reasons, I believe the logical system proposed in Option A is better. Here's why I like it: It groups similar architectural styles together eliminates the need to have a deep understanding of architecture. The use of a representative city and era as shorthand for a grouping of styles is a continuation of the the system Maxis used in the original game. It is transparent about its relationship to time, recognizing the importance of the historical era in organizing architectural styles. For me, the ideal solution is to adopt the logic of Option A while ensuring that there aren't any regions or styles overlooked in the final set. If that means that the list has to be expanded a bit, or that some styles are sparsely populated, to me these are acceptable compromises to make to ensure that good representation is achieved. I would rather we have a lengthier list of styles under a common system than two competing systems.

I don't think a style must have a lot of existing content to be useful. I imagine it will be common to have multiple styles active when playing. I also imagine it will be quite common to have a plugins folder with some or even most of the styles empty. The major benefit achieved with having a broader selection of styles is better control over what grows at any time. I'm trying to judge the options here like so: 1: How obvious is it what will grow when I have that style on? 2: How easy is it to classify any given building into one of the styles? Is it obvious or is there some ambiguity.

I think the gist of it is that we had 20 years of only having 4 tilesets, so if we don't replace them completely, they'll continue to be a hodge-podge of different styles. See the below posts for a better explanation:

Maybe more descriptive, but keep in mind that it is the name that we will see, and for me the names in A are decidedly more obvious. City plus era is immediately evocative, whereas the styles presented in Option B are less clear and an odd mix of regions and architecture styles. For example, I find the four different European styles (west, east, north, central) to be excessive and unclear, but I think that Paris 1895, Berlin 1915, Rotterdam 1975, etc. more readily provide a sense of place that I can imagine in my head.