Roads with Large Sidewalks?

[CasperVg]

Hello everyone,

First of all, sorry for shamelessly requesting something. I am aware of how busy you all are, both with your own excellent projects and/or real life. If someone wishes to develop this idea, the better, but it's not really a problem if no-one has the time or interest to do it 



Lately, I've been in a few situations where I wanted roads to have some wider sidewalks, and the most logical way to do that would be to spread the road-texture itself over two tiles, and use the remaining space as sidewalk. Since that explanation might be a tad vague, I decided to quickly whip up a small scheme of how it would probably look. Again, please excuse the shameless cut-and-paste 'photoshopping' that I did to David's road retextures, in order to get the scheme going, all credit for the actual roads goes to him.


Basically, this is what an ordinary road and sidewalk look like.


This is what I'm suggesting. As you can see, the road itself is spread over two tiles. The actual traffic capacity would probably be doubled - albeit this is not the main objective - and the sidewalk space as well. The actual objective is to create large sidewalks in order for the road to fit as a shopping street / shopping arcade.

I hope that this idea is well-received,
Casper

[dedgren]

Casper- no shame in using the textures to illustrate a nice idea, my friend.

I see no texturing issues with doing this.  If it was to be the equivalent of a functional two-tile road, you'd have to get Alex's input as to the mechanics of accomplishing that.  There'd be those pesky pathing issues if we tried to implement it as a one tile offset texture set.

I'll watch this with interest.


David

[Tarkus]

Casper, I think you've got an interesting idea here that could add a fair amount of realism to urban areas.

As David mentioned, and as we were discussing over MSN, the implementation here is going to be the tricky part, as due to the way the game handles capacity, if these pieces are Road-based, they'll have twice the capacity of a Road, and with modern traffic simulators (A, B, Z), the same capacity as an Avenue, which would kind of blur things functionality-wise.

One possible solution I see is to make this Street-based.  These types of roadways are urban in nature and would have slower speeds in RL.  The pieces would then have twice the capacity of the Street network, which would put them in a unique "functional niche".

With the various simulator options, this is how a 2-tile Street-base would compare with a 1-tile Road network:

[tabular type=4]
[row][data]Simulator[/data][data]Dual Street[/data][data]Road[/data][data]Difference[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z Low[/data][data]2000[/data][data]2400[/data][data]400 (16%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z Medium[/data][data]2400[/data][data]4000[/data][data]1600 (40%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z High[/data][data]3200[/data][data]6000[/data][data]2800 (46.7%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z Ultra[/data][data]4000[/data][data]12000[/data][data]8000 (66.7%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]A/B Hard[/data][data]2000[/data][data]2500[/data][data]500 (20%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]A/B Medium[/data][data]3000[/data][data]3750[/data][data]750 (20%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]A/B Easy[/data][data]4500[/data][data]5600[/data][data]1100 (19.6%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]C/D/E[/data][data]200[/data][data]1000[/data][data]800 (80%)[/data][/row]
[/tabular]

-Alex

Edit: Finally fixed that table.

[Shadow Assassin]

I can probably see this being expanded to include different types of T21ing, basically making it a busy commercial strip with alfresco dining, etc etc.

A good idea, and it can be done quite easily. I think the Bus Lane mod (which didn't take off sadly) actually used the same concept, so maybe this can be expanded to include bus lanes?

[joelyboy911]

As far as texturing, obviously, it would be easy as. As for placing props on the tile through t21, it would have to be intensively wealth and zone dependent (possible?), as well as using prop families and chance-to-appear examplars to avoid any repetitiveness. If only it could be made possible to place mayor mode plops on network tiles...

All in all I think its a great idea.

[CasperVg]

Casper, I think you've got an interesting idea here that could add a fair amount of realism to urban areas.

As David mentioned, and as we were discussing over MSN, the implementation here is going to be the tricky part, as due to the way the game handles capacity, if these pieces are Road-based, they'll have twice the capacity of a Road, and with modern traffic simulators (A, B, Z), the same capacity as an Avenue, which would kind of blur things functionality-wise.

One possible solution I see is to make this Street-based.  These types of roadways are urban in nature and would have slower speeds in RL.  The pieces would then have twice the capacity of the Street network, which would put them in a unique "functional niche".

With the various simulator options, this is how a 2-tile Street-base would compare with a 1-tile Road network:

[tabular type=4]
[row][data]Simulator[/data][data]Dual Street[/data][data]Road[/data][data]Difference[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z Low[/data][data]2000[/data][data]2400[/data][data]400 (16%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z Medium[/data][data]2400[/data][data]4000[/data][data]1600 (40%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z High[/data][data]3200[/data][data]6000[/data][data]2800 (46.7%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]Z Ultra[/data][data]4000[/data][data]12000[/data][data]8000 (66.7%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]A/B Hard[/data][data]2000[/data][data]2500[/data][data]500 (20%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]A/B Medium[/data][data]3000[/data][data]3750[/data][data]750 (20%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]A/B Easy[/data][data]4500[/data][data]5600[/data][data]1100 (19.6%)[/data][/row]
[row][data]C/D/E[/data][data]200[/data][data]1000[/data][data]800 (80%)[/data][/row]
[/tabular]

Indeed, having them function as actual roads might not be a good idea, since the double capacity is not realistic at all. Like you mention, having them function as streets makes a lot more sense. I think combining both the road textures and the street functionality would be the best option. However, if someone has another idea, please say!

Shadow Assassin: I can probably see this being expanded to include different types of T21ing, basically making it a busy commercial strip with alfresco dining, etc etc.

joelyboy911: As for placing props on the tile through t21, it would have to be intensively wealth and zone dependent (possible?), as well as using prop families and chance-to-appear examplars to avoid any repetitiveness. If only it could be made possible to place mayor mode plops on network tiles...

Yeah, it might be interesting to expand the whole thing to include wealth dependent T21'ing, as that would make the sidewalks look actually alive. Since these will probably be puzzlepieces, T21'ing shouldn't even be that hard to do.

A good idea, and it can be done quite easily. I think the Bus Lane mod (which didn't take off sadly) actually used the same concept, so maybe this can be expanded to include bus lanes?

You mean something like this? (whipped up quickly)



Greetings,
Casper

[Shadow Assassin]

Yup, exactly like that.

[CasperVg]

Yup, exactly like that.

Great, that shouldn't be too hard to do. If the concept actually takes off, I could probably make a few more of those.

A few other pictures:

Again, I take no credit for the actual textures - I just did some rough copy-and-paste work of other existing textures.









Hope you like them,
Casper

EDIT: Experimented with the bus lanes a bit more:

[JoeST]

well this looks awesome I guess the bus lane version should be the same size as the MAVE?

Joe

[metarvo]

The grid can't possibly last much longer, with all of these new grid-breaking additions.  This is one of those things that I've secretly wanted for a long time.  Whenever I would try to overlay a grid over a Google map, I would end up with some roads that ran between two tiles, and I would have to choose one tile or the other.  Although large sidewalks are the main objective, I consider the possibility of building a road offset between two tiles to be a nice bonus.  Good work, Casper!

[strucka]

What is going on with this project? it seems very good..

[CasperVg]

I found the files backed up somewhere and had a go at putting some of it in-game.



Don't be fooled, this is not a functional puzzlepiece. It's just a plain lot with transparent base textures and the road as overlay. Not sure what direction to take with this, as I can't make them functional myself - but I could use them on lots instead...

[io_bg]

Looks great! However, what about rounding the corners a bit more - there's a plenty of space around and this way it would look more realistic IMO.