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Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 09 Jan 2018 16:05
by Emperor Jake
acs121 wrote:That share was possible as the trolleys and trams had the same way to get electricity : a trolley pole.
Nope, all of Innsbruck's trams use pantographs and separate wires as seen in this picture. I'm pretty sure even the voltages are different. The overhead wires would also get very messy at junctions. :P

Image

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 02:37
by supermop
Emperor Jake wrote:
acs121 wrote:That share was possible as the trolleys and trams had the same way to get electricity : a trolley pole.
Nope, all of Innsbruck's trams use pantographs and separate wires as seen in this picture. I'm pretty sure even the voltages are different. The overhead wires would also get very messy at junctions. :P

Image
As others have said, it's possible to run the two sets of wires near each other, typically the tram wires will be slightly lower so that the pantograph hits this conductor and stops before rising high enough to bridge the trolleybus wires. As trolleybuses typically use trolley poles rather than pantographs to allow them to steer with some freedom from the wires, they need not worry about contacting the tram wire as the trolley wheels will keep the poles on the correct wires (in case of the poles jumping and de-wiring, they have bigger problems).

I've found that the issue for graphical differentiation in Unspooled is that at 1x zoom, three conductors becomes nearly a solid mass of pixels, even if NRT drew both sets of wires. As it stands, the road catenary already looks like dense enough 'knitting' to imagine it as being either 2 or 3 wires , so I am ok with the current situation. I would rather see more scope for various decoration, or more control of arrangement of sprites, to allow things like poles on alternate tiles, poles in the center of the road/tramway, etc.

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 10:10
by Auge
Hello

A bit more off topic and a further image of crossing trolley and tram wires.

Berlin (GDR) Alexanderplatz 1964. From front rearwards: trolley wires, in the top area of the image from right to left: three crossing tram wires.

I never knew that there was a post office (Postamt) in the Berolinahaus (right side of the image).

Image

Link to the original image, author and license: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-C1027-0001-001 / Spremberg, Joachim / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Tschö, Auge

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 10:28
by wallyweb
Reminds me of a giant game of Cat's Cradle. :mrgreen:

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 10:58
by andythenorth
I am currently favouring independent catenary for road and tram, as it's initially simpler to just keep the two types on the tile totally separate. Vehicle compatibility etc is then all determined by label for that type, and there is no compatibility interaction between road and tram types.

However...
supermop wrote:I've found that the issue for graphical differentiation in Unspooled is that at 1x zoom, three conductors becomes nearly a solid mass of pixels, even if NRT drew both sets of wires.
Afaik, you're the only one who's actually tackled this issue, so this is useful information.

It's easy in theory to say 'artists must draw two catenaries so it always works' BUT in 8bpp there are limited pixels to achieve this with. :twisted:

I still favour independent catenary though :) The spec shouldn't try and prevent poor visual choices by newgrf authors or players :)

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 11:10
by acs121
Gwyd wrote:The same could be said for rail infra-sharing. I could allow someone on my railway but not electrify. There's no need to change that, just relly on cooperation.

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No, no. On rails, you can clearly see if there's a catenary.
With the Trolleybis, there was a catenary, but it was an electrified tram's catenary. This way, the other one seeing there's a catenary but not knowing it's a tram catenary will think his vehicles can go on your tram - but no !

Look a little at the Trolleybi roads and Electrified Trams :
Fort Flinfingford Transport, 20 Mai 1935.png
(180 KiB) Not downloaded yet

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 12:00
by wallyweb
andythenorth wrote:I still favour independent catenary though :)
I assume that the current goal is that a tile supports both types simultaneously. This would be particularly useful where tram routes and trolley routes cross.
The spec shouldn't try and prevent poor visual choices by newgrf authors or players :)
I might be sufficiently evilly twisted to qualify as the butt of this suggestion. :twisted:

Picture this if you will ...
Trolleys have parallel wires. So we have two one pixel wires separated by a one pixel space.
Trams have a single one pixel wide wire.
The tram wire should fit nicely between the two trolley wires, giving us one really fat three pixel wide wire for routes served by both tram and trolley.
Double this for bidirectional routes.
Now let us add similar routes crossing the routes described above.
Are we sufficiently evilly twisted yet?
Oh wait ... Let us have the crossing routes branch onto one another ...
Now THAT is evilly twisted. :twisted:

Did I forget the tram tracks that appear below the wires? :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 10 Jan 2018 12:23
by andythenorth
I would probably just have used colour :twisted:

Trolley wires get red, tram gets yellow. It's like PURR :twisted:

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 15:09
by acs121
Also, i wonder, will it be possible once with NRT to have custom roads / stops like on this picture ?

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 15:29
by Gwyd
I think it's already been decided that special stops are out of this things scope.

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Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 15:30
by andythenorth
acs121 wrote:Also, i wonder, will it be possible once with NRT to have custom roads / stops
Stops no. Not in scope for NRT ;)

Fake graphics for fake stops - I'm guessing that's what some of the things in the screenshot are. They might be possible. But they'd be eye-candy sprites, no function.

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 16:10
by kamnet
andythenorth wrote:
acs121 wrote:Also, i wonder, will it be possible once with NRT to have custom roads / stops
Stops no. Not in scope for NRT ;)

Fake graphics for fake stops - I'm guessing that's what some of the things in the screenshot are. They might be possible. But they'd be eye-candy sprites, no function.
I am highly in favor of this.

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 16:54
by Gwyd
That or you can replace all stops directly

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Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 17:09
by acs121
andythenorth wrote:
acs121 wrote:Also, i wonder, will it be possible once with NRT to have custom roads / stops
Stops no. Not in scope for NRT ;)

Fake graphics for fake stops - I'm guessing that's what some of the things in the screenshot are. They might be possible. But they'd be eye-candy sprites, no function.
Not specially custom stops, but custom roads, like the ones you see in the right-down corner of the picture.

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 17:14
by andythenorth
acs121 wrote:Not specially custom stops, but custom roads, like the ones you see in the right-down corner of the picture.
You'd need to annotate to be sure we're talking about the same thing, there are all kinds of road-things in bottom-right of the screenshot :)

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 11 Jan 2018 17:22
by acs121
I'm mainly talking about custom roads. I was talking about stops, as those are actually fake stops.
For example, we could take the bus lanes that you can see at the fake stops.

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 12 Jan 2018 02:43
by supermop
acs121 wrote:
Gwyd wrote:The same could be said for rail infra-sharing. I could allow someone on my railway but not electrify. There's no need to change that, just relly on cooperation.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
No, no. On rails, you can clearly see if there's a catenary.
With the Trolleybis, there was a catenary, but it was an electrified tram's catenary. This way, the other one seeing there's a catenary but not knowing it's a tram catenary will think his vehicles can go on your tram - but no !

Look a little at the Trolleybi roads and Electrified Trams :
Fort Flinfingford Transport, 20 Mai 1935.png
Trolleybi provides no roads nor catenary. If no Roadtype NewGRF is loaded, it will use the 'default' ELRD sprites as per NRT, which just uses the default tram wires from the current baseset. This would be true for any NRT vehicle GRF that provides ELRD vehicles without providing ELRD sprites.

I was motivated to make Unspooled for exactly this reason - to make more realistic (in my opinion) looking trolleywire. This is why I called it 'Unspooled' rather than 'Various types of road'...

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 12 Jan 2018 08:21
by Leanden
acs121 wrote:Also, i wonder, will it be possible once with NRT to have custom roads / stops like on this picture ?
Where is this picture from?

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 12 Jan 2018 10:37
by kamnet
Leanden wrote:
acs121 wrote:Also, i wonder, will it be possible once with NRT to have custom roads / stops like on this picture ?
Where is this picture from?
It's a photoshopped image for the Screenshot of the Month competition. AFAIK those do not exist at all. But, again, out of scope.

Re: NotRoadTypes

Posted: 12 Jan 2018 21:46
by acs121
Actually, one-lane / diagonal roads is a close collaboration between NRT and NMF - i'd say it's more in the scope of NMF.