"Thanks xxdita", "Inserting pictures?" and "Ergonomics of Addon Mods"

[itfitzme]

1.  Thanks xxdita, for filing my last post in an appropriate forum.  I'll do my best to figure out where stuff best goes.  Lacking any other clue, and being a NUT, I'll post here as I'm finding it all so much to absorb at once.  A half dozen addon mods, hundreds of pieces, a half dozen user sites, hundreds of forums, Props, Dats, Bats (more like in my bellfry) and a dozen or so additional tools.... "Help me Mr. Wizard.  I don't want to be a traffic engineer any more!!!" "Drizzle drazzle druzzle drone, time for this one to come home."

2.  So, after hundreds of hours of playing about with the addons, I've got one on-off ramp that I'm happy with.  My preference is for compactness, something that is difficult with the RHM.  (I'll address this later.)  I have managed to do a simple but effective exit for RHW-4.  I have found, after much practice, that this one is relatively easy to create once the build sequence has been practiced a few times.  Unfortunately, I don't know how to insert a picture in a post.  I searched about for some "forum help instructions" to no avail.  So, if someone would be so kind, please provide me with some help on

     How to insert a picture in a forum post?  I get that there is a little button there, but what do I do next?  :Thanks. 

3.  Now, on to more important things... I am finding the add on mods very unfriendly.  And I can say with certainty that, after two decades in manufacturing creating test equipment, writing procedures, training personnel, and with a degree in engineering, and an MBA with a focus in human factors engineering, that it would work better for me if the pieces were organized differently.  (credentials are everything, aren't they?  Good god, I need to get a job soon.  Thanks for giving me something to be obsessive compulsive about.  SC4 obsession may be a new diagnosis in the DMS) 

    The organization of pieces by type is not a bad idea, for sure.  There is some logical sense to it.  If I want an on ramp, I go to the onramps...etc.   But, the thing is that when I am working on a highway, I am working on a specific size.  It would work way better for me if the menu was divided by highway size with all of the useful pieces available with the press of the tab key.   This includes duplicating things like transition pieces under both highway sizes that they work for.   

     As it stands now, I pick the starter piece (3 clicks and then tabbing on through), go back to the menu and chose the layout tool (two clicks), back to the menu to find the on-ramp (two clicks and tab away), back to the menu to get a ramp (two more clicks), pick up the road tool with a key stroke "R", etc. And this doesn't include the x3 multiplier as I try to figure out if the piece is under the "transitions", "cosmetic", or "road puzzle pieces"  ... clicking, clicking, clicking.   As well, while my PC is decent enough, when I really need the highway is in the larger city after it has reached an appreciable size.  Oh, and how the CPU strains to make all those calculations and the click response slows down.

    With all of the puzzle pieces and tools that apply to say... RWH-4... under a single menu item, all I have to do is tab away.  I know it'll be there somewhere.   Sure, if I have to bulldoze something, I'm back to two clicks.  I can, though, make a minor effort to plan ahead on doing the RWH-4 stuff first, then hop over to the MIS menu, finally polishing things off with connected roads.  For sure, organized in this fashion, it won't be worse, only better. Tab, tab, tab, click, tab, tab, tab, click, tab, tab, tab, tab, click. And all of it without having to move the mouse pointer back and forth between the workspace and the menu.   For that matter, as every highway size uses MIS, MIS can be duplicated at the end of each set.   

    Oh, and it provides some information about what pieces will fit and won't.  As a user, I can be confident that pieces that are under RWH-6 and not under RWH-4 simply don't fit together, that's why the creator didn't include them.    As well, elements that are common elements between two sub-menus are a little clue.  A RWH-6S to RWH-4 transition piece under the RWH-4 sub-menu let's me know that I can go over to the RWH-6S menu and keep on building.  If there isn't one, then I can't.   

    [When it comes to ergonomics, your in good company.  It wasn't until Windows 98 had been released that Microsoft did an ergonomic study.  And they discovered that the ergonomic issues went back to Windows 3.1 and were unaddressed in 95.  That's why 98 came out so quickly after 95 and introduced the "Start" on the bottom menu.  It's a little clue to the new user.  "Where do I begin?  Oh, at the 'Start'."]

     Give building your favorite highway a try, count mouse clicks to build your favorite interchange or on-off ramp transition.  Now, imagine that all those pieces were a tab key away.  As a savvy user, your build speed will triple.  For the new user, it's a ten times improvement.  I've found this especially true when I made the 45 degree turn too soon and had to bulldoze it which, due to some issue with the underlying technology, means that I have to bulldoze back to the beginning as the underlying road or railroad is protruding from the end.  So I'm back to that "where the h is that darn piece at again" game.

  My one and only favorite, an RHW-4 on-off set, consists of an RWH-4 starter piece, two RWH-2 to lateral MIS ramps, four RWH-4 on-off ramps, two overpass pieces for road over eRWH-4, two street to street overpass ramps.  Now, I start off a highway with a starter piece, so it goes first in the tab sequence. I use the RWH drag tool for every size, so it would be nice as the second item of every tab sequence.  Curves, wide angle and fractional, seem a natural follow-up.  On-off ramps make sense next, followed  by transition pieces.  As I've built things, it seems the filler piece would be a nice next choice.  Maybe, with some thought, a different order is better.  Either way would be excellent.  It would be useful to have the MIS over RWH-4 at the end, depending on how long the tab sequence is getting.  On the other hand, at this point, the build is off to other sizes anyways.  (And there is another issue to be addressed with the MIS over RWH-4, which I will come to and makes it a better choice up front.)

    There is one thing to be considered.  There is a natural order to placement of pieces, like when a filler piece is placed.  Where they come up in the tab sequence would be a little clue from the programmer to the user that it's probably needed "now".   

  The build system also has a certain "picky-ness" about it where some pieces just have to be laid out before others.  It is apparent that connecting pieces often have to be placed in a particular order.  On more than one occasion, I've gotten to a point in the build, only to discover that I should have put the next piece in earlier as the program just won't take it now. 

    As an example, consider the "Diag 15mm EMIS over Orthogonal RHW-4 3" puzzle piece.  Now, perhaps it's a bug in my system, but I find that I have to place this first then build the highway to it.  If I try to place it on a built highway, it won't rotate to line up.  Rather, all I get are rotations at a 90 degree angle.  If, in the tab sequence, it came up before the starter piece, it would be a clue that it has to be placed first.  Having it before the starter piece, in the RHW-4 tab sequence is so off of the natural build sequence that it just screams "There's a reason".  And, it's a reminder.

    In general, the most obvious tab sequence is in the order of building the road from one place to the next, starting at the starter piece, curving around some existing structure, building an overpass over an existing road, ending with some transition or neighbor connector.

   The curve set for the RWH-6S follows the order of things quite well, the start curve, the diagonal extension, the filler piece... And, once I've tabbed through the RWH-4 set to get there, i'm good to go. But then, why have to tab through the RWH-4 set anyways?  I'm not building an RWH-4.

      Just as well, if I am building an RWH-10 and there simply is no wide radius or fractional angle curves in the tab sequence, as a beginner, I know immediately that it's because it doesn't exist.  I can't do that.  (Frankly, I had to go check as I wrote this.)  Sure, maybe it's in the help document.  But then again, the help document doesn't mean much yet anyways as I've got no experience to draw on when reading it.  That's the idea of "intuitive" and "user friendly" interfaces.  The more user friendly, the less reading is necessary.  After all, we all try to get away with plugging the new stereo together before being forced to read the instructions.  That's why the plugs are now all color coded and different sizes.  Sure, we "should" read first... no... we shouldn't, not if it's a user friendly experience.

   Also, I believe, and it would be a great ergonomic study, that users tend to favor a particular size highway.  Some just really like the widest possible highway and then figure out how to make it work.  Others don't want to go through the effort to fit all those pieces so they stick with the highway that allows them to draw the curves.  Still, others find some compromise between "easy enough to build" and "big enough to handle my traffic".  It nice to have all the tools I need for a job, all in one tool box rather than have to bring four tool boxes with me.

        I hope I've been verbose enough to explain myself.   Thanks for all your hard work.

[cubby420]

Hmmm...not quite sure what to make of this post. Not to be dismissive, but you seem to be spraying to all fields here, and a wall of text on various subjects may not be the best way to confront your issues. Plus, I'm fairly certain this post (most of it anyways) belongs in the NAM subsection of the forums; specifically RHW development and support found here:

http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=990.0

Regarding your inability to post pictures, there are directions posted somewhere, but you'll need to first upload your pics in the jpeg format to a third party image host, then simply insert the url of said pics after clicking on that "little button". Hope that helps a little bit.

Slow down though and take things easy. Instead of downloading hundreds of amazing plugins right away (I know its super tempting), it might make more sense to ease into it and only download things you fully understand after reading the relevant support and creation threads. Everyone here will be very helpful I promise you.

[Tarkus]

I'll respond to the RHW bit here, being one of the main developers of that project.

The RHW is, generally speaking, a Plugin intended for advanced users and is designed for the creation of highway systems that roughly correspond with real-world scale (which can include some very large interchanges).  The learning curve is a bit steep at times, but that's in large part due to the sheer amount of stuff and the amount of possibilities it offers.  Additionally, we kind of figure that folks have already played around with the content in the base NAM package and gotten used to how things work there--that usually lowers the curve a bit, and it gets quite a bit easier with time. 

That being said, we are always looking for ways to improve things, though there are at times some limitations that we have to work around that, to some extent or another, dictate how we implement things.  When we were first looking at things in terms of how to organize the various pieces when we expanded the system out to include the various networks (it was largely just RHW-4 until the 3.0 release in January 2009), we sought some input on how to structure things.  There was just about an equal division between the "by network" and "by type" options--we ended up going with "by type" because it was a bit easier to define where things went, particularly with transitions/ramp interfaces/splitters that involved multiple networks. 

I do see how "by network" could have its advantages, though, and perhaps as the mod becomes even more expansive, which is a virtual inevitability with the very high degree interest in the RHW right now, it may become a more desirable option.  I don't really concur with duplicating pieces across multiple TAB Loops, however.  From an implementation standpoint, that would be rather impractical resource-wise, as we can't stick the exact same Hex ID reference in multiple TAB Loops/RotationRings (which causes the game to freak out when reading the RUL entries and immediately CTD).

Additionally, there may still be a lot of folks who still prefer the existing "by type" setup--the fact is, due to how the RUL files are set up, we can't really satisfy both and it has to be one or the other. 

There has been some preliminary discussions about using daeley's Advanced Menu Navigation system (DAMN, as it is often abbreviated) as an option to get around some of the aforementioned RUL limitations.  However, that would require a rather exhaustive and tedious task of making icons for every single piece in the mod and cataloging it all, which is the main reason it's never gone beyond mere proposal.

Hope that gives you a little bit more insight--and thank you for the interesting feedback/suggestions.

Oh, and additionally, on the intuition end, you may be interested in the "Draggable Ramp Interfaces" (DRIs) that were introduced in the Version 4.0 release last month--this may flatten out the learning curve a bit for you:

http://www.youtube.com/v/SirdKOFtwzg

-Alex

[xxdita]

ifitzme, The reason your posts have been moved is that the NUTs around here are named not to question their mental stability, but because they are a team of custom content creators, all of whom are over the age of 30. Nobody Under Thirty Squad. Their board is for the continued development of their creations and requests for support for items that have already been released. So unless you are invited to join up, I'll have to ask that you at least make some effort to posting your specific questions in an appropriate board. Perhaps take a look around the main forums page and read the descriptions of the boards to learn your way around a little better.