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RHW Regional Transport Map support thread

Started by jondor, August 02, 2010, 06:01:09 AM

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jondor

With the release of this mod, this thread will now be commandeered for support requests.

You can find the mod at Simtropolis for now: http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=24992


Continuing from my first post on the subject here:
QuoteSo.................

What happens if you combine the traffic volume data view with the region transport view?

This:


Becomes this!


There are a few caveats.  In order to get the roads and streets to stay relatively the same color, they changed to cyan to counteract the pinkish overlay.  (The streets are still a little pink at the moment)  Puzzle pieces (TuLEPs, wide curves, and bridges, etc) and diagonals show up in cyan or pink because the two overlays don't quite line up.

But for some, this alternative might be better than RHW not showing up at all.  $%Grinno$%

I'll be posting updates to this mod in this thread to avoid cluttering the RHW thread.

The way it works is by overlaying a customized car volume view on top of the regional transport data view. (Thanks to Maxis for using the same routine and exemplar types for all the data views!)

After a bit of tweaking it now looks like this:

(The city tile here has had a bit of development done since the last images.)

The legend has also been updated and (although not related to the RHW issue) expanded to differentiate El-rail/GLR from Monorail/HSR:


You'll notice that puzzle pieces are slightly less noticeable than before, but not eliminated.  Diagonal roads also do not show up as well as orthogonal roads.  This is a result of the overlay workaround.  The car volume overlay does not quite line up with the transport data view in these cases.  I believe the only way to completely eliminate this problem would be to make roads and highways the same color.

At this time, the mod is not quite ready to be released into the wild, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to try them out and if anyone from the NAM team wants to help beta test it, I'll be happy to pass on the dat file.
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samerton

What you've done so far is great! I can't wait for this to be released..!

figui

great work so far  :thumbsup:

looking forward for the development! this is really promising.

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jondor

This is definitely going to require further testing.

I spent some time just playing this city.  Once I reached a population of about 10,000, with the same mod installed, the transport view started to render differently.  But only on that tile.  Other tiles render as they did before.



Now, on this tile, it's drawing the road and street color over top of the car volume view (which is preferable and makes things much easier), but if it's not going to be consistent, it won't be entirely useful.  We'll see what happens with further testing.
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travismking

that looks even better than before :) good luck with this, will be really nice if/when it is stable

MattyFo

Well this certainly is a gret new innovation, good luck with it!  :thumbsup:

- Matt

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citybuilderx

Well if this works then this entirily puts an end to "It can't be fixed. It simply isn't possible". Great job. :satisfied:

--Nick
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aim for the moon and you might not get there.

Tarkus

I'd say even with the changes after city growth, this is still a massive improvement.  jondor, my (metaphorical) hat is off to you for the very clever work you've done in finding a possible solution! :thumbsup:

-Alex

JoeST

this is just an amazing find! thanks so very much Jondor :)

Joe
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jondor

Quote from: Tarkus on August 04, 2010, 09:05:17 AM
I'd say even with the changes after city growth, this is still a massive improvement.  jondor, my (metaphorical) hat is off to you for the very clever work you've done in finding a possible solution! :thumbsup:

-Alex

If it stays consistent after that point and if people can stand the slight glitch for low populated cities, this means that I can crank up the opacity on the RHW (volume data view) and not have to do color correction on the Roads, etc.  Which will make everything look better with the possible exception of diagonals.  I can still see the overlay bleeding through (although those particular diagonals are OWR separated by a tile to avoid the diagonal congestion issue.)

When I get time, I'll test it from scratch on a fresh tile and try to include more diverse network pieces.  I also have a couple of ideas after looking through the Data View exemplar properties that I'm going to try.
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jondor

Upon further testing, it turns out the population thing was a coincidence.  The actual trigger is whether you open any of the data views before saving the city.

If you do, the transport data view draws the car volume view first (All car networks) and the regular transport view on top (all networks except RHW).  If you don't, it draws the regular transport view first and overlays the car volume view on top.

Since most people will probably open at least one of the data views each time they play a city, it seems best to develop this mod in that direction.  The caveat is that if you forget to, all road networks will be rendered in the same color.

What are your thoughts?

p.s. Sorry for double post
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k808j

@ Jondor

There is BananaPeppers RTM on STEX. Can you use that in your research?

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travismking

Quote from: jondor on August 07, 2010, 12:53:45 AM
Upon further testing, it turns out the population thing was a coincidence.  The actual trigger is whether you open any of the data views before saving the city.

If you do, the transport data view draws the car volume view first (All car networks) and the regular transport view on top (all networks except RHW).  If you don't, it draws the regular transport view first and overlays the car volume view on top.

Since most people will probably open at least one of the data views each time they play a city, it seems best to develop this mod in that direction.  The caveat is that if you forget to, all road networks will be rendered in the same color.

What are your thoughts?

p.s. Sorry for double post
yea im pretty sure this is the best way to go, I use the traffic volume dataview almost every time i open a city and am pretty sure other people do as well. Also, it looks better this way

jondor

Quote from: k808j on August 07, 2010, 09:36:59 AM
@ Jondor

There is BananaPeppers RTM on STEX. Can you use that in your research?

The region transport data view does support different colors for roads, one-ways and avenues.  That mod simply changes the colors of all the supported networks and has a customized legend.  But because all the NWM networks are road or one-way based, it makes more sense to leave them the same color.

My aim is to provide a mod that looks similar to the default one, but better.  Given the distinct capacities and concepts of Elevated Rail/GLR and Monorail/HSR, it makes sense to me to assign them different colors, but roads, one-ways, avenues and NWM networks all provide the same function, so it makes sense for them to be the same color. (And Avenue TuLEPs on a TLA-5 would show up as different colors and that would be visually jarring.)
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jondor

Yay, double post time again.  Here are my latest development pics:


The highways are fully opaque and darkest black, the roads are slightly brighter than the default Maxis color, roughly a 63% gray.  The streets use the default Maxis road color, 58% gray.  Originally, streets were partially transparent, but that would not work properly with the volume data view applied.

As you can see, diagonals are the only real sticking point.  It might be possible to lessen the effect by changing the highway and road colors to be more similar to each other.  I may try this if people aren't satisfied with the diagonals as is.  Otherwise, there is just a little issue with some LTEXT files to work out and it should be ready to go.

For reference, here's the same city tile if you forget to open any of the dataviews before saving:

Fortunately easy to fix if you forget.
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z

Quote from: jondor on August 07, 2010, 11:49:09 AM
But because all the NWM networks are road or one-way based, it makes more sense to leave them the same color.

I'd suggest using a different color for one-way roads.  They have higher capacities and higher speed limits than regular roads, and in the NWM they're used only in the OWRs, where they also have higher capacities and speed limits.

Personally, I would also make avenues a separate color from the other road networks, since they're much more common than NWM, but as they're functionally similar to NWM, that's a much harder call to make.  Perhaps that could be a configurable option?

travismking

wow its looking almost perfect, although i think it would be easier to leave avenues and roads the same color, it might be BETTER to make them different colors, if not one ways at least avenues.  The one I use has avenues orange and roads and one ways white, and highways bright red.

jondor

#17
Quote from: z on August 10, 2010, 12:52:41 AM
I'd suggest using a different color for one-way roads.  They have higher capacities and higher speed limits than regular roads, and in the NWM they're used only in the OWRs, where they also have higher capacities and speed limits.

Personally, I would also make avenues a separate color from the other road networks, since they're much more common than NWM, but as they're functionally similar to NWM, that's a much harder call to make.  Perhaps that could be a configurable option?
Quote from: travismking on August 10, 2010, 01:39:04 AM
wow its looking almost perfect, although i think it would be easier to leave avenues and roads the same color, it might be BETTER to make them different colors, if not one ways at least avenues.  The one I use has avenues orange and roads and one ways white, and highways bright red.

Conceivably, one-way roads could be a different color at present.  However, in the future with the development of TuLEPs for one-way roads, if the TuLEPs are created as road based puzzle pieces in order to support functional traffic signals, the same problem will occur with them as will at present with Avenue TuLEPs on a TLA-5 if roads and avenues are different colors.  The effect will be a mosaic of colors across your networks which will not look pleasant.  You can already see a little of this effect around the RHW interchanges where the false intersection tiles are rendered as whatever network is used to generate each specific override.  This is unfortunately unavoidable, but is less noticeable than the corresponding issue on roads would be because the main highway is much wider than the ramps.  The TuLEP pieces, however, cover the full width of the surface roads.

If I get some time tomorrow, I'll make a sample so you can see what the effect will be.  I realize everyone has their personal preferences, but I'm going for what will look the best for the majority of people.  Which in this case means that all the surface streets need to be the same color to avoid as many visual glitches and, therefore support complaints, as possible.

{EDIT}
I just tried assigning the different surface road networks to different colors and came across a very good reason to keep them all the same:  I could not get any of them to render on top of the volume data view.  There could be several reasons which I'll try to sort out later, but the results so far are not promising for proponents of multi-colored surface roads.
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jondor

I think a week with no new comments warrants a double post.  After a week of dealing with real life stuff, I finally got some time to run more tests.  It turns out I couldn't get different colors to show up earlier because (for reasons I can't fathom) it did not like to overlay color codes ending in '0' (#FF0000FF for 100% opaque blue did not work, but #FF0101FF did).

Here is the result:

The avenues are bright green, roads blue and one-ways red.  (for reference, see above for the locations of GLR (slightly darker blue) and rail (slightly darker red))

The two main roads you can see running through downtown are actually TLA-5s that have had Avenue TuLEPs plopped on them.  These are pretty short blocks, so the mosaic effect is minimized, but it is still noticeable on the north-south road.  It will only get worse if road-based one-way (or RHW) TuLEPs are eventually created to get around the problem of non-functional signals on these networks.

In my opinion, the basic function of roads, one-ways, avenues and the NWM networks is the same; they are all surface streets with various numbers of lanes running in various directions.  For public release, this mod is going to use the same color for all three networks.  Customizing these colors is pretty trivial for anyone who is familiar with iLive's reader, so anyone who wants to do so, can.

That being the case, the only thing I may need to finish this mod is a unique IID for an LTEXT file.  For now, I've borrowed the LTEXT file that is used for the hover query over Monorail tiles.  But if it is modified by any other mod, it will affect the legend in this mod.  If I use a unique LTEXT, I'd like to collect translations for 'Monorail' in as many languages as possible before it is released.

If anyone in the know about these last two issues (a non-conflicting LTEXT IID or the feasibility of using the hover query LTEXT) can get back to me, it will expedite the release of this mod. Thanks! :)
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RickD

Great work Jondor. Amazing that such big discoveries are still being made.
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