Road Think It's A Bridge

I wonder why did the guys at Focus put a height limit to the bridge. It adds nothing (challenge is not the point) and it makes placing bridges super frustrating sometimes.

 

What was the tag you had to add?

 

what bridge mod did you download lately that can cause that? all I can think is MrX bridge mods? apart from that I have no idea what your on about lol

 

I'm seeing the same thing, but only with RHM2 highways. I've been trying to debug it. That's why I was curious about the tag. Nicko's bridges (the elevated sectional-looking ones) work fine, so do the built in ones. I've attached the progress of my refactor (and excluded the sgbins, since I'm not editing those) but I broke something and the game crashes now on load.

I did notice that the built-in highway tool automatically creates a bridge, but it is so broken and horrible for long spans. Unfortunately, at this point its the only think I know I can rely on. Anyone want to shed some light on the following things:

Tags: I'm trying to just work on the 2-lane (40x16) highway from the RHM right now. I've been looking at tags from the core game and from Nicko's mod, but the highway stuff seems to be treated differently.
<Tag>MS18;T3;TransportLine;RoadLine;RoadLine;Highway;40x15;BridgePlacement;GemCity;MS16;Curve;FastWay;LocaleChoice_Default;Custom;MSCUSTOM</Tag>

Not sure if order matters with tags.
Also, not sure what most of them do, but for all of this type of road, they seem to be Highway, FastWay, 40x15. The BridgePlacement one is mysterious to me. Makes me think it should be FastWayBridgePlacement since there is a FastWayBridge tag.

I wish there was more debugging information or a more in-depth documentation about these class files than whats on wikia

AltGroup: I've noticed that the 'AltGroup' tag for each different kind of road seem to follow a pattern. In this 40x16 RHM road, it starts City44 for the main flat road part. Then, for the bridge class, it defines City44Bridge.

I wonder if we, as a community, should decide on a better naming convention for AltGroups so there arent conflicts between mods maybe. I think RHM_40x16 would make more sense than City44.

Layout Files: Are the plugs used to determine what piece should follow when drawing a bridge or road or just how the pieces would connect? Layouts are next to impossible to debug by hand. Too many crazy numbers to look at, and it seems without order. Anybody have a tool that doesn't require 3dsmax to visualize/edit these?

 

@MrX sorry wasn't trying to put blame on you. I just thought yours was last one created. Now I realise @barrakoda is trying to mod something. So really his issue not yours or mine

Bridges work well for specific sizes only, prb same as roads unless you create all new models. From memory Naming conventions of files all play a role. Yes tags also play a role and usually new custom ones are needed, by both your files and latest UIM/Community Mod

Bridges/roads etc. are mostly a pain in the butt to create.

 

There are issues with the official release for XXL. I'm remodding it, and taking the time to reorganize the files and folders in the pak so it is easier to maintain. I didn't like the option of drawing regular bridges and then converting them into RHM bridges, and luckily, I seem to have figured out how to make it work normally again (like it did in XL Platinum). I'm also taking the time to correct some drawing issues for the bridges that were driving me nuts (mostly the piers).

Thanks for the info on the tags. I did notice in some of the lua code that the game looks for sequences of tags in some cases. Like, TransportLine;RoadLine;Highway, but yeah it doesn't seem that the order matters. The style, size, and potentially file name (not verified) seem to pick the proper layouts. The other piece I wonder about is if tags match by 'string-begins-with' rather than a full string match.

Other things I've gleaned;
MS16 and MS18 are version tags, and are not needed for XXL
FastWay and/or Highway is used for categorization in the UI
Foundation;FoundationBridge and Foundation;FoundationTunnel are used to specify the class file is the foundation for the road with matching tags.
Custom terraforming is painful, and better to leave to the game default
SubrogatedPrototype (what the in game highways use, removes the distinction between bridge/road) is broken
AltGroup definitely controls the upgrade variants, but the other tags need to match, and I think GemCity is required for this to work. (potentially another tag too, I think TransportLine)

Anyway, I'm going to continue this over here and stop derailing the OP heh heh >> http://xlnation.city/threads/xxl-realistic-highway-mod-2.2538/page-5#post-18199