RHW (RealHighway) - Development and Support

[j-dub]

we'd need to make dual-lane slip TuLEPs

Thats funny, not the haha funny, but before TuLEPs, I had to use just that at certain intersections, OWR for slip lanes, in comparison basically acted like a double right turn slip lane. This works like a charm for turning onto avenues.

Also, while double height car traffic networks are not yet here, I have in fact seen similar triple level setups in this game. However, you will need more land in order to achieve this. The only working 6 lane draggable tunnel is the Maxis one, and that can be dropped -1 like El_Cozu said, but you just have to know what your doing in this situation to build it up right.

[Aldini10]

While HOV (or carpool, what they're known as in California) lanes would be wonderful in SC4, the game cannot tell how many sims are in a car.

You can make the lane forbidden to all other cars. Use it as your emergency UDI lane.
If it is possible.

[canyonjumper]

I was messing around earlier, when a thought struck me. Is that possible? So, after messing around with starter pieces, i discovered it is. Automata drive across it and its UDI compatible.

            -Jordan

[smileymk]

Sounds like a piece you'd want to have as a unidirectional setup--on-ramp but no off-ramp.

No, you'd want it for both, especially for exit ramps.
I take it you got confused by the pic - it was meant to represent an exit ramp, as I live in a country that drives on the left...

[Nego]

Hey, didn't io_bg discover that a while ago? Because I've done that a few times before in my cities. Well at least the people who didn't know about it before, know about it now. 

[io_bg]

Nego - Yes, I did, but somehow my previous comment was deleted Maybe the mods wanted to clean-up the thread?

[Haljackey]

I was messing around earlier, when a thought struck me. Is that possible? So, after messing around with starter pieces, i discovered it is. Automata drive across it and its UDI compatible.

            -Jordan

Yep, that works. I found that this is UDI-compatible as well:



If only the OWR-1 and TuLEP slip ramps lined up with the MIS...   

[Rady]

Hi all, not sure whether I should post this here or open a new thread ... I have a diagonal RHW-4 and want to build an 90°-overpass (thus the overpass will be diagonal, too) with something like an avenue or an El-RHW-4. I already found some "diagonal-over-diagonal" RHW-4 puzzle pieces, but they don't align correct. The first puzzle piece will fit in correst, but afterwards I cannot get the other puzzle pieces in place.

My latest conclusion is that I would need at least one tile gap between those two RHW-4 lanes to be able to build an overpass. Can someone confirm that assumption? Or possibly show me a way to accomplish that overpass?



Second, I noticed that when dragging a diagonal RHW-4, those side barriers are turned by 90° as you can see easily. It looks like there was a sign every 5 m or so ... has someone else noticed that behaviour? Or is there something wrong with my installation?

Thanks!

[Nego]

The same thing happens to me with the same guard rail barriers. I don't know why it happens, it just does.

The first puzzle piece will fit in correst, but afterwards I cannot get the other puzzle pieces in place.

About the ERHW over RHW diagonal pieces, there are more in the tab cycle so if the first piece lines up and the second one doesn't, hit the tap key and try rotating that piece. It should line up then.
If the problem is that the puzzle piece is just not wanting to be plopped in a certain spot, make sure the land is completely flat ware our putting it. If it is, then bulldoze the other pieces and plop that one first and the other ones after it. Good luck!



Edit: BTW, nice find, Haljackey. I just wish they lined up a little better.

[MandelSoft]

@Rady: those barriers are outdated. I noticed this before in V3.0, so I don't use them anymore. Unfortunatly, I have no new version available.

[Rady]

so I don't use them anymore.

Aha .. and how do you do so? How can I "not use" them?  I don't remember selection something like that when installing the RHW ...? 

[io_bg]

Aha .. and how do you do so? How can I "not use" them?  I don't remember selection something like that when installing the RHW ...? 

Those barriers are a separate mod. They should be somewhere in your NAM install folder

[Tarkus]

Those barriers are a separate mod. They should be somewhere in your NAM install folder

Precisely.  They're part of mrtnrln's RHW Addon Mod, which was released 2 years ago as an attachment in this thread.

The files it contained it were named as follows:
AmericanExitSign.dat
DutchExitSign.dat
FrenchExitSign.dat
GermanExitSign.dat
z_RHWmod_Type21_ExitSigns&GuardRails.dat
z_RHWmod_Type21_Lights&ExitSigns&GuardRails.dat

I've removed it from the T21 mod list as well for the time being.  I'll probably take a look at it at some point and try to figure out why things are incompatible.

-Alex

[itfitzme]

So, after careful examination, what I get for the highway capacities given the traffic simulator is set to one of the low thru ultra settings is that the MIS/EMIS, RHW/ERHW-4 and RHW-6S are functionally equivalent.  Based on that table of tile widths, they all come in at two tiles for two directions.  As well, the standard Maxis highways, the RHW-6C, RHW-6C8C and the RHW-8C are also functionally equivalent at three tiles for two directions.  Lastly, the RHW-8S and RHW-10 are funtionally equivalent at three tiles.

One could, for purely traffic capacity purposes, eliminate the RHW-6S, 6C, 6C8C, 8C, and RHW-10.  Or, if one prefers all RHWs rather than the Maxis highway, the RHW-6C might be used instead. 

This kinda narrows down the list the list of functionally different highway networks to the RHW-2, E/RHW-4, RHW-6C, and RHW-8S along with the E/MIS.  One could drop the 6C if willing to accept the look of the Maxis freeway while taking advantage of it's smaller interchange footprint.

It seems that, from a purely traffic capacity standpoint, the RHW adds two capacities between the avenue and the Maxis standard along with one capacity that is higher than the Maxis standard. 

One would generally expect that the look of the highway would be a good indicator of it's capacity.  This tends to be so in real life.  More lanes means more capacities.  A wider shoulder means more capacity as people are naturally slow down when the shoulder or other objects are wizzing by close to the side of their car.

Perhaps I've missed the meaning of the tile widths.  If I have them correct, I have to wonder why the RHW-10 and 8S should be designed with the same capacity except that the 10 could be designed that narrow and the 8 couldn't be designed any narrower so they just ended up the same.  I just don't see the highway department going through the expense of adding additional lanes only to end up with the same traffic capacity.

It just seems to me that the whole set would present a better "feel" if the capacities increased with the lane count, shoulder width, etc.  Maybe I'm missing something but if the tile count for the 6C and 8C are both three, then they both have identical capacities.

With the RHW-2 at one tile for two lanes and the MIS at two tiles for two lanes, then one lane of a two lane highway has less capacity than an offramp. For that matter, it appears as if two MIS lanes are functionally equivalent to a four and a six lane highway.

I can rationalize the 6S having less capacity than the 6C if I imagine that, perhaps, it's a better designed highway. Same with the 8S and 8C pair.  Though I'm not exactly sure, I'd have to spend some time finding a real life example of a split and combined highway.  Seems to me that its actually the other way around as the split pair looks more like what I see in more rural areas, like coming up I-5 or I-99 while the combined one is more like through Walnut Creek or Livermore. (California)  That's not necessarily a good comparison though as they aren't equivalent sizes.  What I really need are real life examples with the same number of lanes. I just can't think of anywhere that I've seen six or eight lanes in rural areas.  They tend to be the result of high commute traffic volume.

I must be understanding the tile width thing incorrectly or do you see what I mean?  It just seems like the Traffic Configuration guys went through a lot of trouble to straighten out the capacities to more realistic levels given the network type and look. 

Just wondering. 

[woodb3kmaster]

Here's my understanding of the situation based on reading this and other threads. If anyone on the NAM Team knows better than I, I'm open to being corrected.

The SC4 traffic simulator is set up to only calculate network capacities based on how many cells (the game's own term for what you're calling "tiles") wide a network is. This fact explains what you've observed - that all two-cell-wide versions of the RHW have the same capacity and both three-cell-wide (and, likewise, four-cell-wide) versions also share a common capacity. The traffic simulator is basically blind to how many lanes are on a network's textures; it only considers the network's width in cells. This results in a less-than-realistic progression of RHW capacities, as you noticed, but because the game is fundamentally based on the grid of cells, there's no way to improve the situation. You could say that the difference between, say, a RHW-4 and a RHW-6S is purely cosmetic, and that's pretty much why the different widths exist. Lots of players enjoy building things that are just eyecandy; these different RHW widths are yet another way to cater to those players' desires.

[itfitzme]

This results in a less-than-realistic progression of RHW capacities... the difference between, say, a RHW-4 and a RHW-6S is purely cosmetic... eyecandy

Thanks for validating this.  It does go to the heart of my recent consideration that there is "eyecandy" and there is "eyecandy".  We could, with some thought, come up with a series of "eyecandy" definitions that get increasingly closer to being realistic in both performance and look.  The conflict between, what I understood to be a strict adherence to being as functionally realistic as possible and the purely cosmetic difference between the 4 and 6S left me feeling like one of Harry Mudd's androids trying to make sense out of "everything I say is a lie".

It seems that the 10, for instance, could capture an additional tile while still looking like it's physically smaller.  It's not much different than the RHWs that have a disabled shoulder that extends into the bordering cell.  In this case, the bordering cell would be enabled with the RHW skin just extending into half of it.

I can rationalize it as there being two subsets of highways in the RHW, one set giving precedence to the look and the other to the simulation realism.  Perhaps it isn't possible to have both at the same time?  And I still have yet to follow the works of the original TSCT guys and understand what the actual traffic capacity is for a real highway on a per lane basis.  They have made the the TSCT with enough user adjustable parameters that the odds are in the users favor of being able to tweek things appropriately.  And I'm curious to find out if it's not possible to have both model scale realism along with traffic capacity realism.  Folding the physical width of a cell into the table of RHW cell widths and comparing this to real world highways widths and traffic capacities seems like the next thing to do.

[ophiuchus14]

It's been a while, but I am happy to see the release of some new stuff, especially the RHW.

Unfortunately, I haven't checked yet to see if this was resolved earliers (slow connection) but my Elevated RHW-4 curves are missing .
http://yfrog.com/9hellesmere1jan0012773686p

In addition since I'm an LHD user, I can't build the transition pieces between ground and elevated RHW/MIS either. I was able to do those things with Version 3.

Is there something I need to do to get it fixed. I download RHW 4.0.4 on 23rd June

[MandelSoft]

@itfitzme: Making the RHW networks wider makes the network much more difficult to handle. If for instance you would increase the capacity of the RHW-10 without increasing the capacities of other RHW networks, then the RHW-10 would take up one tile in width more room. This makes it a lot harder to use, a lot harder to path (you would have about 8m/27ft wide lanes, since all tiles need to be pathed in order to work). Making a seperate functional mod would not only mean we need a seperate RHW mod, but also a seperate NAM, because we also need a new controller. Therefore it's quite unpractical.

The problem that capacity is calculated per tile bugged us from the beginning, but unfortunatly there's nothing we can do about it. We just work with the things that we have.

Best,
Maarten

[Blue Lightning]

ophiuchus14: It seems you have my incompatible ERHW-4 cosmetic mod. Remove the T21.dat file from it and you should be fine, however no new ERHW cosmetic pieces will appear on new RHW's, they will be drawn like the default.

[ophiuchus14]

ophiuchus14: It seems you have my incompatible ERHW-4 cosmetic mod. Remove the T21.dat file from it and you should be fine, however no new ERHW cosmetic pieces will appear on new RHW's, they will be drawn like the default.

Thank you very much for that  . That was the problem. As for the second issue. I've found that was a non-issue anyway as I can still drive over it in the opposite direction.