jman

One thing I've wondered about highway construction is just how much of the time & cost is really neccessary. On my 4 to 6 lane widening project here in North Carolina, it seems like there are maybe 25 to 50 people working on the project. I'll drive by it every morning and afternoon, and most days, it looks like nothing has been done. Then, in the course of a week, they'll pour 3 miles of concrete or center lane barrier. Next, the whole crew will go off and work on a completly different section for 3 months and nothing will change. I really don't understand why the DOTs that oversee these projects don't push for significantly higher staffing in order to reduce the actual project duration. It would seem that in the long run, it would actually save money too. I heard once that one of the key reasons that highway construction takes so long is due to the way most construction teams are managed. The teams work 8 hour shifts that start after the morning rush hour and end before the afternoon rush hour. When you figure in the setup time, the cleanup time, and various breaks, most construction teams only construct 5 hours a day or so. If that's actually true, I could see why projects take such a long time.

My highway wish list, is probably a lot like many others - here you go though: All reasonable number of lanes: - say 1-8 lanes in each direction. This would apply to roads and highways alike. - I'd like to be able to have different numbers of lanes on each side. - I want to be able to create one way highways (without having to perform tricks!) Different roadbed heights: - Tunnels (like Boston's Big Dig). Tunnels should be able to change direction and have interchanges with other tunnels. - Roadbeds below grade (like the Cross Bronyx in New York) - Roadbeds at grade. - Above grade. You should be able to build these over other roads. - It would also be great if you could control the height of the pylons for an above grade highway. Different median styles - Ranging from rural highways with large medians to urban highways with Jersey barriers. - I'd like to be able to plant things in the medians (flowers, trees, rest areas, etc...) Overpasses, underpasses, and interchanges: - I want to be able to set up an intersection of highways/roads as an overpass or underpass. - I want to be able to select different interchange styles (cloveleaf, half cloverleaf, SPUI, etc...) - I want to be able to create access roads like they have in Texas, and the higher capacity highways like the have in Toronto. - I want to be able to have more than two roads or highways come together (say 6 way street intersections and spaghetti junction highway interchanges). Traffic Management: - HOV lanes - it would be ideal if we could select the placement of, the access to, and number of HOV lanes. - Traffic lights and stop signs. I'd like to be able to select whether I have traffic lights or stop signs at each intersection. - It might also be cool if we could create highways and roads where could have selectable number of lanes in each direction. Other stuff: - I want to be able to mix transporation types. I'd love to be able to mix my roads with my subways. - Rest areas would be cool! - Official support for on street bus stops & subways stops. - I'd like to be able to build over the highways (like the Wendy's over the highway in Chicago). - I'd like to be able to choose if I have sidewalks or not. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I'm missing. I've also got this notion of a highway architect tool that could exist in SC5. I'm sure that this isn't a new notion, but I'm not sure where I saw it before. This tool would allow you to create new roads, highways, on-ramps, interchanges, etc. This would also make it easy to create really unique highway designs. As for opinions on the highway design topic... I've driven in Toronto a few times now. I have to agree that I didn't think the 401 was all that bad. I've usually driven at non-rush hour times, and I found the Toronto highways to be fairly easy to drive on and reasonably well constructed. Of course, I'm not a local and havn't really driven in rush hour though. In general, I find that highways in the US do tend to be fairly well constructed, especially outside of the core cities. I see the biggest problem in the US is new highway construction. It just takes too long to decide to build a new highway today, and that highway costs way too much money. It seems like a decent urban/suburban highway now is in the range of 15-50 million dollars a mile. It takes 20 years to decide to build the highway and then it takes 10 years just to construct it. Just due to the cost and time required, I see our urban highways becoming a disaster in the US in the next 20 years. Except in Texas maybe where they are always building highways (wow can they build there!) Where I live, they are expanding a 4 lane highway to 6 lanes. It is taking forever... I'm sure the people that are working on it are working very hard, it just seems that there are way too few people. Other than simple cash flow, I just don't see a good reason why the highway departments set projects up that way.

I'm sure you'll all see it, but I just created a seperate thread to focus some work on the plopping networks problem that is looming out there. We're bouncing around a few different topics in here and I get easily confused...

Teirusu - from your last post it sounds like you can now plop down your new roads. Am I right? If so, I'd love to hear how you solved it!

I'm pretty confident that you can add new road pieces. Your earlier experiment pretty well proved that. In your experiment were you thinking about adding new pieces to an existing rul file, or were you thinking of adding a completly new type of road? If you were thinking new road, have you figured out how to make the new button work?

I've run back through the paths again and looked at these other letters. I'd seen them before and figured that they were special cases. After looking again, I'm even more convinced. Here's a pretty complete list. car_i,o - there are highway cloverleaf ramps to switch between highways. car_d,e,f - these are on and off ramps sim_* - these are found in intersections. With the all the different street corners, I could imagine a large number of stops. train_d,e - these are found when trains have a junction where all four tracks enter and exit from the same side of the tile. I think this is all of the new letters. I've gone through a most of the tiles and that all seem to hold to this standard. My questions of the moment: - Still how do the plop buttons select the tile to place? - Whats the unknown field in the path file? - How does the game assign automata to the paths? Any thoughts/updates?

I've been thinking that the button to exemplar link is in the LUA files. I know we've looked at these before, but a couple of things I've seen in the last 24 hours have changed my mind. There is an LUA script that has some comments that states that #text# is a macro that is replaced by actual values at run time. This doesnt match exactly, but since its already been seen the name is relevant, I find it interesting. If anyones interested I'll dig it out when I get home. (edit: it's LUA 3760) I'm also influenced by the ploppable buttons from the plugins. There are LUA scripts in there that deal with setting up variables used by game.tool_polp_building. There is very similar code in LUA #5649. My hunch is that this isn't a coincidence. Also, I think we may be getting some false results from editing some of these records in the dat files using the Reader. When I was experimenting last night, I discovered that after editing some of the text files in the Reader, the file sizes didn't properly sync up in the dat file. This was causing the reader I developed to give me problems. When I went back and corrected the file sizes I stopped getting the error. I had to fix the file sizes by hand. Unless it was pure operator error, I'm guessing that the exe may have had problems decompressing it as well (perhaps even just ignoring them). I've posted the problem over on the Reader thread with more details.

Oh yea, I forgot to mention the 255 entries. In all the instances I saw, the entries with a 255 appeared to correspond to tiles where movement stopped within the tiles (such as a dead end). I didn't think about the neighbor tiles though - interesting idea...

I went back and looked at the SC4Path entries again and think I've filled in a couple of holes. From the section for moving transportation types the format should read: # : Transportation type (1=road,2=sims,3=train,4=subway) # : Path number (per type and direction) # : Tile Entry side # : Tile Exit side ## : Number of repeating coordinates for this block #.#,#.#,#.# : repeating z,x,y coordinate The description for the new fields: Path number - For a given flow of traffic through the tile, this identifies each descrete path. For example, there are three lanes of traffic in each direction on the highway. So for each highway tile there are three of these in each direction. On a typical road tile there is only one lane of traffic. So for each road tile there in only one of these. Tile Entry & Exit sides - These match the images in the FSH entries and follow the same format as the RUL files.

Thanks for the welcome. I've sat on the side lines and learned for a while and am glad to be able to give back a little. Much of what I wrote down definitly had been discovered by other. I definitly wouldn't want to try to steal anyones credit or thunder. I like to think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants!

By the way, if I didn't say it, I'm guessing that these rules are used when the reference tile is plopped or created. Basically the plop engine goes to put down the tile and runs the rule. This dictates what tiles actually get placed as a function of the surrounding tiles. It also decides if any existing adjacent tiles need to be changed as a result of this newly plopped tile. I havn't written any new rules yet, but I have been successful in changing these FSH pointers to put down different tiles. It seems pretty straight forward now to try creating some new tiles to try out.

I think I've got a pretty good idea what the RUL files are doing. So we've seen that they are composed of entries that look like: 1,2,0,2,4 3,0,0x2001500,0,0 or... 1,0,0,1,3 2,5,1,0,2,4 3,0,0x2001800,0,0 or even... 1,13,2,0,2 2,1,0,1,13,0 2,6,13,0,0,1 2,7,0,2,13,2 3,0,0x3900,2,0 3,1,0xa00,3,0 3,6,0xa00,1,0 3,7,0x3900,0,0 We'll use this final example to describe the rules for RUL files. We already know that 1,a,b,c,d (ie. 1,13,2,0,2) are lines that describe the basic boundries of a given tile. a,b,c,d are unique values that must match the value of the tile next to it (ie a 2 touches a 2). This is described well in earlier posts. So far I've seen values of: 0 (no connection) 1 (sloped connection) 2 (straight connection) 3 (sloped connection) 4 (shared median) 11 (sloped connection from an intersection) 13 (sloped from an intersection) Side A is the west side, side B is the north side, side C is the east side, and side D is the south side of the tile. If I draw a little text art for my tile I get: +-----+ | 2 | |13 0| | 2 | +-----+ The second line 2,x,A,B,C,D describes the squares that must be adjacant to it. The X value describes the relationship of this "limiting tile" in relationship to the reference tile. X uses the following convention: 1 == west 2 == north west 3 == north 4 == north east 5 == east 6 == south east 7 == south 8 == south west A,B,C,D follows the same convention as before. So in our example we have three tiles that must be adjacent to our reference tile for this "rule" to be valid. From our example our limiting tiles are: 2,1,0,1,13,0 2,6,13,0,0,1 2,7,0,2,13,2 A little text art picture looks like: +-----+-----+ | 1 | 2 | |0 13|13 0| | 0 | 2 | +-----+-----+-----+ | 2 | 0 | |0 13|13 0| | 2 | 1 | +-----+-----+ Notice how the sides line up nicely... The final step in our puzzle is the line 3,Y,FSH,ROTATE,FLIP This line states what FSH images to load into which tiles and if any manipulation is needs to be done to the image before it is place (rotated or flipped). So basically this is responsible for making sure curves work (as well as highways that often take up 2 tiles). The fields have actually been described well above. I'll just add the Y values which I've figured out. Y works just line X from the previous step with the exception that 0 is now a valid field. A 0 denotes the image to load into the reference tile. Values 1-8 denote west through south west just like above. FSH, ROTATE, and FLIP are already described in earlier posts and work like they've been descibred. NOTE: I havn't decided yet if FSH actually points to the FSH value or an exmplar with the same instance ID. I tend to think exemplar, but I'm not sure... Does this match up with what others are seeing?