MnM's (Mightygoose's new Monorail skin) 31/03/09

[mightygoose]

Trials and tribulations with the reader....






after some discussion with tarkus it seems it is possible.... (anyone who has seen the movie "The Island" will know what im on about)

it is very early days here but i wanted to see what the public feeling on this was....

i have the straight piece just about ready to go....

195 polygons....



dont expect this any time before 3-4 quarter this year.... I don't even know how to start pathing this yet....
meantime.... thoughts?

[jplumbley]

Pathing wont be your issue...  Making it a puzzle piece will be.

The problem with dual networks is they only use one capacity...  So, it will either have the Capacity of the avenue or the monorail, it cannot combine both.  This will give you a reduction of capacity since both traffic types will be added together to determine the congestion of the tile.  Since both Monorail and Cars are effected by Congestion they will both be effected when the network starts to become congested.  This works properly with GLR because GLR uses Subway paths which are not effected by Congestion, therefore not being calculated as part of the Congestion calculation.

[Jonathan]

I dont mean any offence, but I cant see in your picture where the monorail tracks are.

I had planned to make a draggable monorail on avenue after the HSRP, which would just be a normal monorail pylon and track down the median of the avenue. However if you would like to continue with this I dont mind, but it would make sense to make it draggable from the begging instead of puzzle pieces then draggable.

[kassarc16]

This works properly with GLR because GLR uses Subway paths which are not effected by Congestion, therefore not being calculated as part of the Congestion calculation.

Does this apply to El-over-Ave too? Or will that fall to the same problem?

[Jonathan]

Maxis El-rail doesn't have that problem because GLR is el-rail without the el.

[mightygoose]

the monorail are of the hanging variety... the two silver constructions are the rails from which the cars will "hang"

[memo]

The problem with dual networks is they only use one capacity...  So, it will either have the Capacity of the avenue or the monorail, it cannot combine both.  This will give you a reduction of capacity since both traffic types will be added together to determine the congestion of the tile.  Since both Monorail and Cars are effected by Congestion they will both be effected when the network starts to become congested.  This works properly with GLR because GLR uses Subway paths which are not effected by Congestion, therefore not being calculated as part of the Congestion calculation.

Actually, GLR uses EL-Rail paths, not Subway paths, which are two different things. And to my knowledge, Subway paths can be affected by Congestion as Subways can also be overcongested, for instance.
Some time ago, I made some tests in which I set the capacity of avenues to 0. Then cars weren't able to use avenues, but the Sims could use GLR, also on the Avenue-GLR puzzle pieces. When in another case the capacity of lightrail was 0, GLR didn't work on the dual puzzle pieces, but cars did. This lead to the conclusion for me that the capacity of avenues and GLR on the same tile is calculated individually, at least on these avenue-GLR puzzle pieces!? Honestly, this makes sense to me because usually there are no crosses between EL-Rail and Avenues which would lower the capacity. Therefore, Monorail will probably work as well.

[Andreas]

I tend to agree with memo, there shouldn't be a problem with the capacity of the avenue if it also carries monorail. Actually, I thought that monorail was the only network that isn't affected by congestion - at least I read that many times over the last few years. But of course the modders back then could have be wrong. The only thing that will have capacity problems are transit enabled lots (stations), though. There are no individual capacities for the different transit types, so even a large amount of pedestrians that only cross the lot would add up to the capacity of the station.

[Jonathan]

mightygoose: While that looks pretty awesome, it would not be compatible with the MAXIS monorail, meaning you could not visually join the 2 together.

[mightygoose]

i am fully aware of this, although the set will be limited at first.... i do plan to release plain new standard monorail models as well. this is more of a personal project i thought the community might find some use for.

it will be slow progress and although i will produce as much as possible it will be take it or leave it (as ith all custom content)

although with tarkus' advice and all your input im sure this will turn out to be somethig quite unique.

[dragonshardz]

Looks great MG.

[Jonathan]

Sounds great, if you would like when you have them puzzle pieces and after I am finished HSRP, I could have a crack at making it draggable, but it's entirely up to you.

[A200]

They have this sort of thing here in Brisbane, except it is the AirTrain (passenger rail service to the airport, part of existing rail network) and not a monorail. The railline is fully raised off the ground and at the end goes up the median strip of the main airport road. At the international + domestic terminals, it has stations in that median strip (with I think ped overpasses to the terminals).

It would be interesting to see this sort of thing done, as the problem with monorails and other rail is that they take up a lot of space.

[ma360]

It's going to be very cool!

[Starmanw402007]

That's going to be one awesome Monorail. Looking forward to adding it to all my cities.

[redraider147]

i've recently been testing some ideas involving express tracks on el rail lines, and some makeshift subway tests. as far as i've found, subways do get congested. i've had this problem over and over which prompted the start of the tests...while the express lines were separate tunnels, the sims utilized them as such, taking trains that branched off from a main line. thus leaving the local line much less congested. as for the capacities of avenue/monorail, it shouldn't in theory affect the congestion or capacities since the 2 don't even share the same surface...much like el-rail over road. the one downfall is that if one becomes congested, since the 2 have been combined into 1, the other is automatically affected negatively as well, even if there is no usage. if there was a way to get the game engine to read them both as separate networks, as a subway placed under the location of a road would be, then it's much more helpful from a transit standpoint...currently the only way dual networking helps is in the eye candy and moving somethign that would take up valuable real estate on top of something else thereby saving space in a cheaper way than using subway.

[Jonathan]

Subway tests are very interesting, are there any pictures of the work you have done.

[mightygoose]

after further talks with Tarkus, it makes little sense to do an over avenue network first.. so i remodelled the piece in 3dsmax exported as a 3ds and would like to know how to import this into the reader.... and where to go from there...

here is a WIP shot of the diagonal pieces.



as a side note by ensuring the pieces are no more than 22m wide you have zero width compression when switching to diagonal...

32xsqrt2 ~ 22.6



-EDIT-

TECHSPEAK WARNING!

Ok according to the tutorial on this site [linkie] the correct procedure is to:

"Export the model as a .3ds mesh file, which can be directly imported into the Reader, skipping the rendering process altogether."
However after buzzing Tarkus with the apparent impossibility of this we managed to figure it out. According to a post by Ardecila on the private NAM boards, the process is abit more involved.

Firstly, to import into the reader, you must first open an existing S3D file. Then by clicking on the "3ds functions" button and selecting "import .3ds". Find your 3ds file and select it. There it is in the reader isn't it?



Note the "3ds functions" button can be seen in this image. Well here is my model. Two things immediately struck me.

1)   It's at 90o to what it is supposed to be.
2)   It has the material properties of the original S3D file.

According to a post by Ardecila on the private NAM boards, the process is a bit more involved.

You have to go back to your model. There are three key points.

1)   All objects that are to be the same material should be converted to editable Poly's and attached so you are left with one object per material.
2)   Apply UVW maps to each object so again there is one map for each material.



3)   Rotate the model 90o in the X-axis, this is because in 3ds max z axis is up and down whereas in the reader it is forward and backward.



NOW in reader you need to ensure that the number of objects/materials in the 3ds file is the same as the number of anim groups in the chosen S3D file.

S3D anim groups = 3DS objects for the import to work.

I unfortunately didn't do this.



Again there are two things that strike me.

1)   The model is non coherent.
2)   Only some parts of the model have rotated.

Now, this seems odd, does that mean that only the objects with anim groups get rotated and the surplus don't? Well surely that would mean a similar affect would have been seen the first time considering I used the same S3D file for the import.






-SECOND EDIT-

The problem with the second import was upon reopening the 3dsmax file, to try grouping the object before export, I discovered that the rotation in max had been activated on ungrouped pieces so import 2 was a correct representation of what I told it to import. Having sorted out that minor render problem I went to try import 3.



Here you can see I have used the right click functions to ensure the number of anim groups matches the number of objects in the 3ds file.



It seems Ardecila should have been more specific when he said rotate the object 90o in the x axis. To clear this up I will talk about real world position.



By right clicking on the rotate icon this window appears. Type -90 in the box shown to achieve the correct result. (Note this is -90 from the vertical orientation, it is -180 for those who saved after rotating +90.)



Import 4 seems dandy, orientation; scale and cohesion all seem to be accurate. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get the position correct in 3ds max to make the piece appear in the correct position in the reader. Looking at the last picture you can see it is partially submerged in the ground plane and off centre.


My questions are as follows...

How do I now get the textures into the reader?
Is there anything else I am doing obviously wrong?

thanks
MG

[Collgab]

Looks very nice mightygoose ^.^ hope it works out, I'd get it

[redraider147]

Subway tests are very interesting, are there any pictures of the work you have done.

not at the moment i don't, but i can get some. again it uses 2 separate lines laid side by side, but one line only occasionally touches the station.