Right-Of-Way

[delta9]

If you are anything like me, the lack of being able to reserve right-of-way for future expansion of roadways is a frustrating thing indeed, especially when there is plenty of yard and parking space to be eaten up by your new avenue or highway lanes .  It really makes me frown to be forced to take down an entire side of main street in a young city (I hope I'm not alone in being so affectionate ) just to upgrade it to an avenue.  Hello, eminent domain.  It really throws a wrench into realistic city design, IMO, especially when you are conscientiously trying to plan ahead and avoid displacing your precious Sims.  For example, take the US Interstate Highway System.  Here in Austin, most of I-35 has visible right of way between the feeder road and the main lanes, and on the outside of the feeder road.  Even on state and local main routes, you can see a grassy (or graveled) ditch and set-back curbs that are just asking for more lanes to be added to them  For a perfect example of this in my home town, click here and zoom in a bit.

To get to the point, I think I've thought of a way to allow us to do this, at least conceptually.  Now I just need to figure out how to mod and make decent graphics... anyway, here is an image of my concept:



The green lines are the paths.  The roadway is a northbound (upbound?) RHW-4, and the green squares running alongside are the reserved ROW.  The blue squares are a 2x2 commercial building for the sake of example, and the other light gray squares represent unzoned land.  The image and concept should be fairly self-explanatory.

Now here are the problems I see with it... If I understand the way network paths function, and I suppose that I do, it would require a genuine crapload of repathing for pretty much every outer lane on every straight roadway, and that already makes it seem not worth the effort.  Unless there is a way to do it without that, I think my idea is dead in the water, but I've already typed this much and made a pretty [ugly] graphic so ... Then the other, more minor problem is having a decent graphical representation, because obviously you can't make the game dynamically draw parking lot entry extensions.  A gravel texture would be my best idea, considering it looks better than dirt, and clean, pretty grass without tire marks wouldn't make less sense.  Or, no texture at all, just the basic ground texture, or some kind of wealth-dependent thing.

So I guess what this culminates to is this: Is there any way to "trick" the game into allowing access to lots set back from the roadway without massive repathing of the outer lanes of all existing networks?  I suspect the answer is a resounding "no", but here's to hope.

[Ryan B.]

The best setup for this would be a set of MIS / OWR-2 & OWR-3 ramp interfaces (on / off ramps).  I believe OWRs are best suited for frontage road duty in SC4.

Ideas are already spinning in my head regarding ways to do this.

[delta9]

I should correct myself.  The road in my graphic should certainly not be considered an RHW-4 because they are restricted access.  I kind of flubbed on that one.  Blame the beers and the late hour .  I'll make a few more pictures to elaborate on my intentions.

Since we don't have the wider avenues and OWR's yet, let's consider the case of a standard road.  Here we've got some commercial buildings right up against a road that needs to be upgraded.



And you know what happens here.  You choose which side of the road to annihilate and end up with this (two lines are easier to draw than a median ):



And that's what I want to avoid.  So the issue is trying to find some way to do this:



At this point, the only options I can see are 1. massive repathing as mentioned, which does not sound very appealing or worth the trouble, or 2. finding some kind of way to trick the pathfinding engine with a "pseudo-zone" of sorts.

Just brainstorming here... That would probably entail some "black hole" pathing magic going on across the ROW tiles (labeled "access?") which, if it could be done, isn't an issue because the travel time across the ROW is negligible and constant.  The "black hole" thing would be beneficial in the end, because it would erase any chance of the engine preferring the tiles to the left non-ROW side, because it wouldn't have to travel one extra tile to get to a potential work site.  I don't know specifically how such a thing would/could be pathed, but I've seen what could be a precedent in some old FAR bugs.  The difference is that those FAR bugs caused commuters to jump out to infinity and back upon the same point, but it had no effect on commute time, so maybe there is potential there.  I really need to learn up on pathing (and everything else) before I can even take a step towards a conclusion on that, but logically it seems like there could be a way to manipulate that.  The issue is making the commuters "jump" between two different "black hole" points.

Pursuing a purely network-based method of accomplishing this seems like a very unattractive option, considering all of the path madness that would be required.

Back to the preferred option (if I dare even call it that; it is purely ignorant speculation).  I don't really know how much slack, if any, we end-users have over zone-related modding, insofar as what would facilitate creating some sort of "pseudo-zone" as I mentioned.  That would be ideal, because as we all know, you don't have actually path the cars driving into the buildings/lots (at least on the network side), they do that on their own.  What exactly is the mechanism that tells the pathfinding engine to do this?  IE, on regular street/road/avenue networks, the paths where Sims enter/exit their destinations isn't pathed onto the road itself, but the routes show these entries and exits when you query them.  They key here would be finding some way to manipulate that to our advantage.  Where does the actual coded network pathing end, and this jump to the building entry points begin?  And is it manipulable?  Can we make it skip an entire tile with some sort of override/trickery?

I'm really just brainstorming at this point, and with limited information and no experience.  Can someone out there with pertinent experience lend their input on this?  If this could be done, it would change the game for a lot of people, pushing it even further towards realism, IMO.

[MandelSoft]

As I currently know, you can make a workaround for this. Place a parking lot somewhere and then place a pedestrian mall in front of the building. The workers place their cars in the parking lot and walk the rest of the way to their work, or they will walk all the way to work.

[joelyboy911]

That workaround is only good for COM and IND zones, however. RES won't like having ped-malls as its access road.

[z]

There's a setting in the traffic simulator that theoretically determines how close to a network a zone has to be for it to have access.  Normally, it's set to 1.  Setting it to 2 or 3 should allow you to set your lots back that many squares from the road.  But I tried it a while ago, and it doesn't work.  The game doesn't appear to pay attention to the setting.

I don't think that even massive pathing changes would help you, as the requirement to be adjacent to a network seems to be hardwired deep inside the game.  Instead, I would propose that you use an access road (or even a street) that runs along the right side of your access area, and connects with your smaller avenue at intersections.  Such arrangements do exist in RL.  When you want to widen your avenue, you just tear down your access road and replace it with the wider avenue.  I think that that's the best you can do.

[asd195]

i put a post like this on simtrop and got some weird comments but i was thinking about a road that has a large median so that it can be 2 tiles wide and still give road alowence

[Andreas]

We cannot see a picture that is on your harddrive. You have to upload it somewhere, i. e. ImageShack or Photobucket.