[RFD] Scale

[Hyronymus]

I couldn't actually find it in the FRD but I remember someone stated that each tile in TE would resemble 16 meters (wasn't it uzurpator who suggested that?). It makes sense to discuss the scaling of TE and I think it's best to start with the scales of the tiles. Building scales, vehicle scales and zoom levels are all related to this basic 'tile scale'.

I did find another description of the scale in the FRD that might be interesting though:

The game will be played on a tile based map, with dimensions as high as 2,000,000,000 or 0x80000000 in hexadecimal notation. Note that these numbers differ, but in future documents the real value will be chosen. With current computers, maps should not be larger than approximately 4,000,000 square units due to memory constraints. This would be equivalent to a 2,000x2,000 map. Tiles will have a square, hexagonic or triangular shape (to be determined).

Assuming the maximum map size is the actual 2,000 x 2,000 tiled map, that would result in a map of 32,000 x 32,000 m. That's 1/10th of The Netherlands geographical area.

[Zuu]

Scales have been a Featured Discussion, if you remember. It can be found at http://tt2.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Talk:Scale.

[Hyronymus]

OK, I'm so sorry for the stupidity . However, nothing was decided. Can Pjaytycy, zuu and Hellfire please report their summaries here?

[Zuu]

Summary of http://tt2.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Talk:Scale

One problem with realistic size of cities is that the world would need to be verry big eaven if we want the same amount of cities, indusries as in TTD. But since we want eaven more space, so that would lead to eaven bigger maps.

From the FRD, squares would be 16mx16m. If the grid is that small, then the map need to have more than the proposed 1024x1024 squares. 16 square km is a very small place. Most cities in real-life are much larger than that. You don't take a plane or even a train to travel 16 km.

Even with 2 billion squares an England scenario will be impossible.

In RT2, the geographical scales are variable per scenario.

Hellfire says that it is impossible to have both realistic tile size, realistic objects and a realistic time scale.

Hellfire suggests:
[qoute]# Houses are one tile large.
# Office buildings can range from one tile to 4x4 tiles.
# A reasonable size for a city is 40x40 tiles. (I'm not sure whether this is a good size)
# Roads are one tile wide.
# Double tram tracks are one tile wide.
# Double train tracks are one tile wide. (This differs from TTD / Locomotion, but I think it's a better scale)
# etc.[/quote]

PjayTycy lists many different scales. Different geographical, functional and time scales. I suggest that you reed them on the wiki, as it is a bullet list that takes to long time to convert to bbcode.

PJayTycy suggests:

# All buildings on the map can have whatever size is needed, let's say from 1/16th of a tile (or less) to 16 tiles (or more).
# Road-sections and train-sections have a width of 1/8th of a tile and their length is half of a tile. They can be put in any direction.
# Double track or quadruple track (rail and road) are just twice or 4 times as wide (1/4th of a tile and half of a tile respectively)
# A reasonable size for a city is a circle with a radius of 15 tiles.

PjayTycy wonders if we want that big visual difference that it is between ships and planes in speed. He elaborates with an idea that each ship should represent several IRL vehicles.


Note: After that featured discussion Hellfire made a speed prototype, that shows a plane, a truck and a ship. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that we decided that the speed difference between a ship and a plane is acceptable. I.e. we don't have to scale that.

[Zuu]

Can we have some discussion?

[jfs]

I think I might have an idea how to represent towns/cities that don't take up too much space on the map, while still not looking like country-villages built from skyscrapers. I'll attempt to make a drawing.
(This is partly a follow-up to tonight's meeting. Just finished reading my log of it...)

[jfs]

Ok, here's the promised drawing. I hope you can read my handwriting, I tried making it readable

[Hyronymus]

I could read it and it makes sense to me. But wouldn't it be better to just have 2-lane roads to start with? The tile area needed for 2 additional lanes can be reserved by a wide sidewalk, perhaps with some grass borders. It could be a feature that once a road is heavily trafficed it doubles automaticly.

[Hellfire]

It could be a feature that once a road is heavily trafficed it doubles automaticly.

So roads would be automatically from 2-lane to 4-lane in the same way as they are updated from rough-road to asphalt-road?

In that case, perhaps we should keep it a bit more generic:

Road type 0 (with properties like max speed, number of lanes, width?, etc.)
==>
Road type 1
==>
Road type 2

Etc. Details (properties) are defined in config files.

[uzurpator]

OK - a few points of reference:

Typical road is ~8 meters wide
Single track railroad needs ~4 meters

typical 1 story builidng is 3,5 meters

Typical train is 3 meters wide, 4 meters tall. Typical truck is 1,8 meters wide and circa 3,5 meters tall.
Trains vary in length from 8m to 27,6m, trucks are up to 22m (24 meters somewhere, 56 m for australian road trains)

Ships vary in width from 8 meters for river barges to 70 (50 average) meters for supertankers. In length it is 20 to 450 (330 being average) meters.

Single house with small garden would fit into 16x16m tile

Football stadium would require 10x8 tiles.

16m tile would house 4-lane highway or 4 track railroad.

[jfs]

If we don't want cities to look like country villages with skyscrapers, we will have to have an unrealistic scale between tracks (this includes railway and road), vehicles and buildings.
One four-lane road could fit on one tile. But one road vehicle takes up two lanes! Otherwise they'll simply be tiny, even if that scale would be more realistic.
One tile can fit one or two parallel railway tracks. Trains will then become approximately the same scale as RV's.
BUT, here is the main point, one tile can fit several smaller houses, a few apartment rows, or one or two middle-size office buildings. There might be just-for-looks roads between those buildings. The point here simply is that we need to make it look like the number of buildings in towns is much larger, giving an illusion of huge cities. That'll also solve the problem of unrealistic villages consisting of one house.

Remember, that one usual navigation maps in real life, roads are also oversized. If you measused the average road on one of those after the scale of the map, you'd get roads being 20-40 meters wide, if not even larger.

(That's basically what I tried to explain with my drawing.)

[uzurpator]

Frankly - I don't like it. I prefer current TTD downsized towns - but with sprawled sub-urbs and maybe industrial sectors.

[Steve]

I don't really care about the scale. I just want to make sure that we can build train routes through towns, just like in real life.

[Zuu]

One four-lane road could fit on one tile. But one road vehicle takes up two lanes! Otherwise they'll simply be tiny, even if that scale would be more realistic.

I dissagre. What is the point to have four-line roads aka highways if RV's cant overtake safely?

Ok, I know that there exist quite A LOT 4-lane roads in cities that is not highways/freeways, but still you CAN overtake using the other lane.

Also 4 railway tracks side by side will fit in one cell. (I think that was mentioned on the meeting.)

[Hellfire]

One four-lane road could fit on one tile. But one road vehicle takes up two lanes! Otherwise they'll simply be tiny, even if that scale would be more realistic.

Then the solution is simple: make the tiles larger. Try to think beyond Transport Tycoon.

[Steve]

Meeting Decisions:

- The Z scale should differ, so that it is easier to see by the user.
- Exact scales to be decided later when we have more information

Status: Discussion to continue when we know more about the tile system to be used.

Locked until the DD discussion arrives at this issue.