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[Kadzar]

Poorly-Trained Wombats
Properly-Treated Watermelons
Probably Treason; Whatever

[kaian-a-coel]

Expressing interest.

[MonkeyHead]

I think I am in love. PTW.

[Xantalos]

I'm gonna show this to some engineers I know and see how many strokes I can cause.

[JoshuaFH]

Alright, update:

I want everyone to remember the lesson we learned in Easy #1, that we can just jam slabs of concrete against eachother and call it good. This will be very relevant in Easy 4 and 5.

First though I should probably explain what's happening in this picture I teased like 3 solid days ago:



As I've clearly learned far too late, long vehicles don't have a long hitbox. Only the front and rear tires are 'touching' the ground, everything else is immaterial as fuck. That means when something like a semi goes over a steep slope like this, the middle falls straight through and the entire things gets stuck as the front and rear tires don't phase though as well. Also, this means that if a vehicle ever flips over on it's back, hit detection only works one-way so it just phases through the concrete road and goes straight into the river.

My apologies to Sirus for tormenting his trucker brethren.

But anyway, Easy 4's description is as follows: build a 100m bridge using only iron that can support a big ol' semi + tiny car.

I'm decently satisfied with the result:



Just enough stability that they can pass over, just enough slope that they catch some sick air and make it to the other side just fine.

Moving onto Easy #5: Now build a 120m bridge with the same materials to do the same thing.

Adding that extra 20m actually helps alot, cause it lets me do the stupidest thing I can think of:



Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the grand opening of the "Jesus Take the Wheel" Memorial Bridge. Built in remembrance of the already hundreds of drivers that have died attempting to go over faulty bridges, and the hundreds more that will die for the same reason.

Sx slabs of concrete + two iron beams = bridge. It's so simple it's brilliant. It doesn't matter that the slabs bounce the vehicles up and down like they're in a bouncy castle. It doesn't matter that it's moving shape is basically a sine wave. It just doesn't matter if it actually took 10+ tries to actually get the cars to hippity-hop to their destination, cause they made it eventually, now didn't they? I won't accept complaints, and if you're not happy with it, then you can cross the second bridge that'll soon be made out of the cars that careened off of this one.



I mean, just look how much fun their having. It'd be criminal to NOT let them throw their lives away.

Next time on Bridge-It+: Easy #6, the final easy level before moving onto the Medium levels.

[Fniff]

Who the hell is paying you to make these bridges?

Is it some form of bridge-based terrorism?

[Boksi]

I wish you could record this. This looks like it would be much more hilarious in motion.

[JoshuaFH]

I wish you could record this. This looks like it would be much more hilarious in motion.

I can assure you it wouldn't be. Cause even though I theoretically could just get FRAPS working, and I do have a microphone, the only footage you'd be privy to would be seeing me tryout a dozen failure bridges that can't stand up under their own weight, and then for commentary you'd have me breathing heavily into the microphone at witnessing this bridge-based erotica.

[Kadzar]

Yeah, I suppose that would make it hard for you to do the nice summarizing commentary that really makes this Let's Play.

[GentlemanRaptor]

Did...did a bridge kill your parents or something? Why do you do this to these bridges?

[Boksi]

Did...did a bridge kill your parents or something? Why do do you do this to these bridges?

Some men just want to watch bridges burn.

[JoshuaFH]

I had a dream last night where I worked at a daycare with Ms. Frizzle from the Magic Schoolbus. However, the daycare was a trick to kidnap people's children and throw them into this diabolical furnace. The way Ms. Frizzle explained it to me was pretty simple "We take the children, and throw them into the baby-powered generator, that way we can stay off the grid... forever!" and like all things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I then woke up and immediately thought of Bridge-it.

Now, as much as I'd like to gloat about being a genius at making bad bridges, there's actually a process fraught with failure and experimentation.

Take Easy #6 for example:



Seems simple enough



But one thing this game teaches you quickly is that trains are heavy.

I go for my pyramid of dreams idea again:




and I find that even a hundred large iron beams can fit neatly at the bottom of a river.

So I go a bold, new direction:



But while functional, is much too boring. Gotta scrap it and go for a new one.



"Good job Josh You've made the same thing but much less efficiently"

But one thing you can take home from this game is that trial and error can eventually culminate in things you're genuinely proud of:



This is the first asymmetrical bridge to date, and it's made up completely of acute triangles, as opposed to the equilateral triangles that the pyramid of dreams is made of. That alone is enough to have me just repeating the simulation over and over just so I can watch those sexy triangles in action. Ticking off the pros here:

• Surprisingly robust
• performs it's job
• would make an actual engineer have a heart attack

Good job, A+. Moving on... to the MEDIUM LEVELS!


Medium #1

The goal: Build another train track, with only iron, over a bigass ravine.



Here's another vital part of the process that artistic bridge makers like myself go through. Sometimes when the answer just doesn't hit you, just close your eyes and start placing the iron beams whereever the hell they may fall. Sorry jimmy, gotta take that one back to the drawing board.



Medium levels actually require something approaching sanity, so I can't immediately assume I can make trains go through Sonic the Hedgehog looptyloops. And in my experimention to find the perfect bridge, I've discovered I can use the roads themselves as building materials! And besides vanity, they have practical applications too, because while they may be enormously heavy and have no tensile strength at all, they have truly staggering compressive strength, enough to put iron beams to shame at the very least.

But this is still too big, what can I do to miniaturize this pretty little bridge?



Exxxxceellllent. I will dub it... the DOUBLE DECKER.

Next time on Bridge-it+: Cables make their appearance!

[flabort]

Exxxxceellllent. I will dub it... the DOUBLE DECKER.

Eheheheh.

You should make a ramped bridge with a gap in it somewhere, so that cars/trains/trucks HAVE to jump over it.
With the knowledge that cars would not behave that way IRL.

[Arcvasti]

PTW, this is hilarious.

[JoshuaFH]

I feel I gotta stop using IMGUR for my image hosting. Not because there's anything wrong with them, just that every time I go there I get atleast an hour sucked away looking at random shit.

Anyway, tiime to do... Medium #2!

It's our first 'official' mission to involve cables. Just gotta make a train track across a small river. No biggie.



This is a pretty simple design, and it's the simple meat and potatoes build for building just wanting to complete the stage and never think about it agian.

Of course we need to step up our game a little bit. After alot of experimentation though, I've conclusively found that Trains are assholes and are very finicky when it comes to cables. I jerryrigged something interesting though:



Sometimes the game is nice enough to give you anchor points that are outside of the 'bridge space', or rather that they're further down the road than where the actual river is. You can use these to create makeshift anchor towers. I used these to create this groovy number where the weight of the train ever so slightly mushes the entire bridge down depending on which side it's on. Look at those two pictures, see how cool that is? Wouldn't you just feel so safe riding in that train? Me too.

Moving onto Medium #3, which is another first in that it's our premier drawbridge level!

Of course, my first reaction is to try to make an entire bridge out of hydraulics:



Unfortunately, hydraulics come with a very critical design flaw built right in: They don't have crossbeams, so a whole bridge made out of them just collapses naturally. There's actually a glitch where you can GIVE them crossbeam by trying to make an iron beam and hydraulic arm in the same place, but the hydraulics just destroy them when they start moving.

Oh, and nevermind the fact that with this many Hydros going at once, they accordion up, completely destroying the road they're trying to support.

So the second idea: Just life the entire bridge out of the water!



Looking good so far!



Damnit!

Ok, new plan:



This one actually looks really good, the idea here is to have the bridge retract upward rather than simply get levered out of the way, but I want to do one better still.



I call it the Praying Mantis Bridge! Has a superfluous ramp + shrinks in on itself making it look like it's gonna grab the boat with it's little arms. Giving it the masterpiece seal of approval, and moving on, to Medium #4!