Adara - Update 184 - March 26, 2012

[scott1964]

Good job 

[Battlecat]

Cyclone1001: Thanks very much, hope you enjoy this update!

Scott (Stray Cat): Thanks for your kind words!  Glad you like the results around the overpass.  I'm going to be doing a revision on the area around the rail overpss today, so hopefully I can obtain similar results on this second pass!

Bernhard (Nardo69): I certainly appreciate your perspective there and you are right that the slope here is steeper than it should be.  I personally don't see anything wrong with the railway going over the highway as long as the grade is appropriate.  In this case it's really far too steep as you'll see when I present the calculations in today's update. 

I'm certainly going to take your advice and apply it as best I can within the limitations and conditions of my region.  We've already discussed some of the solutions in PM so I won't get into it here since it's a part of today's update.

kimcar: Welcome to Adara!  No apologies necessary at all, glad you found the chance to stop in!  I appreciate your kind words; glad you enjoyed your first looks. 

sumwonyuno: It is a serious pain, fortunately there wasn't anything else in that area. It's a square farm with a hill in the middle effectively!  Actually the easiest solution is to grow until you get a farm building you like and then replace the fields using plopable lots. 

Ethan (ecoba): Thanks for stopping by!  Not 100% sure what you're referring to by "more dense".  I'm guessing you must be thinking the size of the farms, which are indeed slightly smaller than what we see down in the lowlands.  This farmland is only the tip of a large farming region that extends through the river valley that will be south of Winfield.  Mostly the farms size and shape are subject to my personal whims! 

I agree with your statement, but I also agree with Bernhard.  It turns out that the grade there is far steeper than it should be.  I didn't think it was quite that bad when I posted the update so I'll be fixing it today. 

Jason (Albus of Garaway): Bernhard and I have been discussing a bit and I think we've come up with a reasonable solution to the slope issue here!  Good point about the turning lanes.  They appear because of the nature of the NAM and because I had to extend road onto the two side streets to keep the two SAM textures separate.  Now that you mention it, I think I've seen a puzzle piece floating around that might provide a working solution to that as well.   I'll try to fix that in a future update, time didn't make that possible for today.

Jacob (ShultzCity): Thanks!  Yeah, I'm really enjoying the options to ignore the boundaries, particularly with the streets.  It makes a huge difference to the appearance.  As for the overpass, it's the slope of the approach that's the bigger problem; it's far steeper than a railway overpass should be.

djvandrake: Thanks very much!

Jordan (canyonjumper): Thanks, it's a shame I'm going to be taking them out today, to fix the railway slope, but such is life! 

976: Thanks for your kind words!

Tomas Neto: Thanks very much!

io_bg: Thanks!  You'll be happy to know that I partially agree with Bernhard as well, I'll be addressing that issue in today's update.

scott1964: Thanks very much!

Update 90
Ellison Flats – Railways

Inspired by Bernhard's (Nardo69's) excellent feedback about my rail network, I've chatted with him a bit and I think I've got a good solution to the slope issue that he's pointing out.  I've learned a fair bit about railway construction since I posted Monday's update thanks to Bernhard and some additional research of my own.  So let's have a look at what the problem is.

90-1: Here's the area in question.  After leaving a wide switch, the railway rapidly climbs up to an overpass over the highway.  Sadly this climb is a necessity and it's best to start it soon since there's even more elevation gain on the neighbouring tile.  The bit issue here isn't the overpass, those occur in numerous places around the world.  The real issue here is the grade of the approach to the overpass. 


90-2: Let's take a closer look at the grade here using the terrain query tools.  The start and end elevations are labeled on this picture at their locations.  I'm reasonably sure these are considered to be in meters, but that's not a major issue at the moment.  What does mater is that the railway climbs from 367.8 m to 382.7 m over the course of 144 m (9 tiles).  In railway terms that is a 103 ‰ (10.3 %) slope.  The symbol ‰ represents per mille which is 1/1000 units unlike percent which is 1/100.  Apparently that's a common measurement for slope. 


90-3: A steep slope for trains is one that is over 40 ‰.  Ideally we'd like a 10‰ slope, but that's pretty challenge on the best of days in SC4.  However, it's fairly apparent that my slope is absurdly steep!  With Bernhard's advice I'm going to improve this area.  In this shot I've removed the existing line and I've dug a 10 meter deep hole at the crossing point.  In this new version the freeway will dive under what was an already existing railway slope.  The depth of the highway here puts it right down to the surface of the lake. 


90-4: After several attempts, I managed to get the highway slope in place.  Based on what I know about the game, the ideal overpass is about 15 meters above the highway.  So, I've carved out a trench at the low point, and I'll use the 15 meter raising lot to elevate the terrain to the necessary height for the overpass.   


90-5: With that task out of the way, it's time to start smoothing the slope.  I've done several passes here before I finally achieved this result.  Now it's time for the overpass and the measurements of the final slope. 


90-6: It looks almost flat because it's gently transitioning from an elevated berm through to a cut before it finally hits level terrain just before the road crossing.  The distance from the low point to the flat start of the overpass is 160 meters (10 tiles) and the distance from the end of the overpass to the high point is 224 meters (14 tiles). 


90-7: Here are the resulting elevation values.  As you can see, the high point is lower than it used to be.  Turns out I'd actually forced the game to bubble higher than the maximum elevation to successfully build the overpass on the first attempt.  The railway rises 4.9 meters to the overpass and an additional 7 meters in the second phase.  At the end of the day the railway has an average slope of 30 ‰. 

I'll be the first to admit that it's still a little steep, but within the limitations of the game I think it'll do the trick.  In the real world the grade would be constant across the overpass, but the game doesn't allow for sloped overpasses.  If the game did allow for it, the slope would be 26 ‰ (448 meters total distance including the four flat tiles in game).  Now it's time to detail this area!


90-8: The new slope makes the side retaining walls slightly pointless now.  It's not nearly steep enough.  So some weeds, bushes and trees now decorate the sides of the slope.


90-9: Ironically enough, the freeway underpass is now steep enough to justify the retaining walls.  However, it's a lot newer so I've used a cleaner retaining wall style.  This area is pretty much done now, hope you enjoyed the modification. 


90-10: In preparation for the return to urban Winfield, I need to add one additional interchange to the area.  It's going to be in the middle of this straight stretch.  I spent some time thinking about how this area would develop and I realized that the highway needed to be built up, there's actually a slightly steep escarpment in there.


90-11: Here's the area now that the terrain tweaking is done.  My theory is that the main road used to slope down through a cut to the lowland area before the highway went in.  Now it will go over the highway (I wanted to use the FLUPS, but I can't find any that go under RHW).


90-12: The overpasses are getting easier to build, I'm finally starting to understand the quirks of the RHW. 


90-13: The old road down here will be reduced in priority and the road takes a sharp corner and goes down a new slope and swings around to reconnect with the old segment. 


90-14: Of course this also gives me another excuse to put in a retaining wall.  I've also polished up the last of the GLR for this tile.  It dives down into the road on the highland area, and comes out at ground level down in this new lowland area.  There will be a historical site and a mix of residential and industrial warehouses down in this area.  This neighbourhood will be in transition away from industry. 


90-15: This overview shows the entire area which will be the future industrial waterfront of Winfield.  The facilities will start to the left of the forested hill on this picture.  The waterfront is subject to change as always!


Next time I'll start getting some of the core plopped facilities in place down near the forested hill and the southern overpass.  There's going to be a variety of facilities here, and I suspect I'm going to have to produce a few custom lots for the area as well although those probably won't be ready for the next update.   

[CrossSide]

That's a very nice overpass! I like it and it's very realistic.

edit: Wow, Battlecat, I just scanned trough the first pages and I must say I'm impressed with youre rural aereas. For some reason I never saw this topic before, but I will bookmark it and read all the pages!

[djvandrake]

Great update!  Very well done and educational too.  Thanks for taking the effort to show us your transition efforts. 

[ShultzCity]

Great update! I loved the way you stepped us through rebuilding that overpass 

[Connor]

Great update! I loved the way you stepped us through rebuilding that overpass 

Exactly what i was going to say.

Great work as always, and looking forward to the next update. 

[Cyclone1001]

Nice, I like the overpass. May I ask how you got the contour lines?

[canyonjumper]

Great update! I loved the way you stepped us through rebuilding that overpass 

Exactly what i was going to say.

Exactly what I was going to say Excellent remodel of the crossing. Great update!

Cyclone, hit Ctrl + Shift + C to get the contours

             -Jordan

[ecoba]

An interesting update showing the wonderful peculiarities of railroads. I really liked the finished project of this update. By 'dense' I meant smaller and closer together.

Keep up the good work!

Ethan

[Stray Cat]

Battlecat...loved the update and the rework on the highway and overpass.  Very nice work.  I am an avid railroader, both as a modeler and in-game and fully appreciate the efforts you undertook to make the rail more realistic.  I measure percent gradient as a ration of rise to run.  So a rise of 1 foot over 100 feet would be expressed as 1:100 or a 1% grade.  Most railroads do not like to exceed 2.5% grade at the steepest.  Some railroads in mountainous regions will put up with 3-4% grades but only if no other options exist.

Great update and thanks for your wonderful work.   

Cheers!

Scott

[Nardo69]

Now that looks way better! Glad that our chatting turned out to be that successful for your region! And 26 o/oo is OK for a short distance even on a main line!

BTW the elevated railway is at 14,5m while all other raised networks are at 15,0m, most of the time you don't recognize the missing half meter. Don't know why though.

I like the slope of the RHW. BTW in university I learned that a straight highway isn't the best solution at all - at night the lights of the cars of the opposite direction can glare and it is tiring not to change direction at all (except for changing lanes) for quite some time that's why some curves and underpasses are rather welcome to "wake up" the drivers ...

Take care my friend!

Bernhard 

[threestooges]

Nicely done with the rail refit. The slope does indeed look better. I'd known 4% was significant for a train, though I never realized that even such a seemingly tame slope like your earlier one registered at 10%. Light rail can pull it off reasonably well, but yeah, that'd tax any train. The new version looks even better though. Very natural, and with a much better grade. Worked out nicely. Out of curiousity, how long does one of these updates take you, start to finish on average?
-Matt

[turtle]

Hi BC,
Wauw, great progress over the last month! So, I return, and you have already a couple of updates more to show. I like how the farmland in Ellison flats is coming together, and look forward to the integration with Winfield. It seems you are well prepared  The road overpass looks great too, and surely adds to making the network interesting. I think a tunnel, instead of flups would have worked fine as well (but maybe too costly?).
Great to see that you followed Nardos advice, it's definately better now, though, I'm not sure if I would have noticed it, had he not mentioned it. (Even though I've read through his excellent tutorial on realistic railways).
- Thomas

(My trip went very well - thank you for asking. I just had a VERY long trip home, leaving the West Bank saturday evening, crossing a couple of deserts by bus to reach a flight in Egypt and arriving in Denmark Tuesday afternoon. However long, it was interesting enough - both the Negev and Sinai deserts are very beautiful.)

[kwakelaar]

I just knew there would be some comment from Bernhard about the last update, and he never disappoints.  And I must join the others to say your new version is looking better for it.
And great indeed to see how you planned and rebuilt this crossing.

Gjermund/Kwakelaar

[nedalezz]

Now maybe I dont know much about the technical details, but that looks darn good to me. The entire area looks gorgeous, cant wait to see it complete.

[BuildingUp]

I particularly love 90-1 and 90-8. Very realistic setup you have going on! Looking forward to more! 

[Albus of Garaway]

Some great work here once again!

Just so you know, there is an option to remove those turning lanes when installing the NAM, and so I'm sure there's a file that can be deleted somewhere to get rid of them. Although I suppose you might want to keep them for those more urban areas such as Winfield. As you said, I'm quite sure that the RuralRoads by David has an intersection that would get rid of those turning lanes.

The railway looks much better now. I'm glad that Bernhard could help you out there!

Jason

[Battlecat]

CrossSide: Welcome to Adara!  Glad you enjoyed your first visit.  I'm also very glad you enjoyed the early stuff; thanks for planning to go through it all.  There are a lot of updates now, I'm actually probably due to go through and have a look over all my old work as well at some point! 

djvandrake: Thanks very much!  I just hope I managed to put enough details in to help with replicating that effort in the future!  It actually came together rather easily all things considered!

Jacob (ShultzCity): Thank you!  Glad you found it interesting!

Connor: Good to hear you also found it interesting!  Thanks for stopping in!

Cyclone1001: Thanks for your kind words!  Those yellow contours are an in game feature, you can activate them by hitting CTRL-SHIFT-C.  There's no way to modify what elevation they show up at though.  The detailed terrain information came from the terrain query cheat.  Hit CTRL-X and then type terrainquery in the box that comes up.  It will add the coordinate information to your query tooltip. 

Jordan (canyonjumper): Thanks very much, glad you enjoyed it!  Thanks also for taking a moment to answer Cyclone1001's question!

Ethan (ecoba): There are a lot of peculiarities when it comes to railroads!  That's what I thought you meant about the farms.  They have tended to be a bit smaller up in here.  I'd like to try to vary the farm sizes more in the future; some farms in my area are quite tiny.  Glad you enjoyed the update. 

Scott (Stray Cat): Thanks, glad to get a vote of confidence in the changes.  I tend to think of grades in percent as well.  Permille (‰) is an alternative notation that's apparently used as well.  Effectively where percent represents a 1:100 ratio, Permille represents a 1:1000 ratio.  In this system a 2.5% grade is equivalent to a 25‰ grade.  I suspect that since the fine characteristics of grade matter so much in railway design there is some logic to using a notation that removed decimal places that would constantly get in the way.   Glad you enjoyed this update!

Bernhard (Nardo69): Thanks very much for your help and advice getting the railway here into shape!  I figured 26 ‰ was about appropriate, particularly since the wide raidus curve approach would allow the trains to keep a fair amount of momentum through the area.  That's an odd point about the raised networks; I wonder why it was done that way.

Very cool thought about the highways as well, that does make a lot of sense.  There's a very long straight section of highway that I drive quite regularly, and it does get quite tiring.  At least the two halves of the highway are separated by about 50 feet!

Matt (threestooges): I know, it really doesn't look that steep does it?  I was quite shocked when I did the measurements after Bernhard made his comments!  Glad you like the improved slope.  The slope for my urban GLR is quite steep in some places, but the shorter trains to help a lot with overcoming that.

Lately, updates have been taking me about one to two hours to put together, not including the actual play time.  It depends a lot on how much extra work the update needs.  In the case of update 90, it took a bit longer because of the calculations and photo editing.  I usually try to have a one to two update buffer so I just have to write the replies when it's time for the post to go up, but that dwindled away over the last couple weeks, so I'm pretty much posting them as I finish them up lately!  It helps a lot that I spread the writing over several days, I often have most of the replies written the day before posting. 

I should be able to get my buffer rebuilt this weekend assuming life doesn't get too busy again.  Thanks for stopping in!

Thomas (turtle): Thanks very much!  It's been quite an interesting run since you last stopped in!  I hadn't actually thought of trying tunnels, the game seems pretty reluctant to make them sometimes despite the characteristics of the slope mod I'm using.
One thing I have noticed is that grades can be quite deceiving in this game.  I didn't think my slope was that steep either!  I don't even want to think about how dangerous the run though Vavenby is!  I'm not going to worry about reworking that area now though; I'll just try to do better in the future! 

Glad to hear your trip went well, that is a crazy long travel time! 

Gjermund (Kwakelaar): Indeed he doesn't disappoint!  And his comments were quite valuable as well.  Glad you like the way version 2 turned out!  Thanks for stopping in!

nedalezz: Thanks very much, glad to hear you like how this update turned out! 

BuildingUp: Thanks very much for stopping by!

Jason (Albus of Garaway): Thanks!  As you've deduced, I'm keeping the turning lanes in specifically for the more urban areas, they really add a missing detail to the cities.  I expect the TuLEP project will add even more possibilities in the future.  Those rural roads are exactly what I'm looking for, thanks for reminding me!  There are actually two places I should check on this tile to make sure there aren't any turning lanes.  Glad you like how the railway turned out as well.

Update 91
Ellison Flats – Industrial Plans

Today it's time to start returning to work on urban Winfield.  I'm not entirely done with farming here, but I'd like to get going on a bunch of railway related facilities here first.  Sadly, this update is a lot smaller than I planned but not because of real life for once!  I'll explain during the update. 

91-1: Here's the area I'm starting with.  This will be the primary industrial core here.  To get things started I've added a fairly nice station facility (Rayden's Transfer I think) which will be connected up later.  I have no idea what level of function it has but it looks nice!  It's going to get moved a bit and rotated 180 degrees before this update is over though. 


91-2: Moving along, it's not the industrial area of a major city without a railyard.  Things are really getting shifted and twisted around, this has been a hugely complicated build with a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes.  These railyards have to be placed on perfectly flat land!  I envision the corridor marked by the center of this railyard as the primary access point, everything else branches off here.  The STR line is a secondary siding which provides service to the station and to a set of siding and industrial facilities in this area. 


91-3: These railyard have excellent textures, but the one thing the pack is lacking is a way to repurpose this leftover siding.  I've seen these ignored in some games very effectively.  I'd like to try something different.   


91-4: As you can see, the railyard has evolved to a slightly different design, I think it's much larger now.  I'm finally satisfied with this design.  Also I've managed to place a large batch of other sidings connected up to the STR service line.  I'll be interested to hear what you think about this.  The large blocks of industrial don't necessarily reflect what I'm actually planning; mostly I'm just assigning land to its probable future use.  In the future I'll un-pause the game and see what develops, then weed stuff out as necessary. 


91-5: Here's one of the culprits that resulted in such a small update.  This is the first filler lot I've built in a while.  This eye candy lot will provide a visual connection to a couple custom industrial lots I'm working on.  I spent a lot of time in the lot editor, and just ran out of time! 


91-6: What you saw in 91-5 was an early draft, I wound up moving some railcars around once I actually saw it in game.  I'm trying to emulate the same mix as the modular railyards. 


91-7: This is it for today, I know it's a disappointingly small update by recent standards.  This area is going to have a couple of custom lots put together.  They're still in the works so I'm going to keep them under wraps for now because I'm really not sure where I'm going with them yet.  Oh, by the way, the grid is on intentionally in this shot.  It's handy to know how many tiles I've got to play with for this custom lot.  The first one is about 6x9 in size. 


Sorry, but that's all I've got today.  The lot editing is taking a lot more time than I anticipated, I'm going to redirect away from this area to do some work on zoning and laying out more of the street network in some areas while I chip away at the lot editor!  See you all next time!   

[Tomas Neto]

Fantastic update again!!! Nice work!!!

[Cyclone1001]

Cool, I like railroads, but I hate the textures that appear under them. Your lotting looks pretty good, mabey you can make more cool stuff!