Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NW_Kohaku]

Happy Birthday, Toady.

Spoiler: Streets in farmland, now (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Streets in farmland, better (?) (click to show/hide)

I removed part of roads to change road graph into tree. It can be addition to existing implementation.

Why would you voluntarily create road trees and blind alleys? The very purpose of roads is that they enable people getting from somewhere to somewhere else - in case of the farms, the roads should offer a straight and simple connection to the town. Even Toady's original roads were too twisted and nonsensical, why would you complicate them even more?

To make Jiri's point a little more directly, the problem isn't just that there are too many roads, but that they're heading in the wrong directions.

There are two things those roads should be heading towards - either they head into the middle of town, and their markets, or they head into the nearest existing more major road, which takes them either to the middle of town, and its market, or out along a major trade road.

You need to start, once again, with the rivers and major roads and the major job-creating centers of towns (right now, the castle, although hopefully, at some point, the market will be the center of town, or A center of town), and then draw other supporting roads around them, as a way of getting to the major roads. 

These roads should not look like a grid in any way.  They should look like tributaries from a river - small streams joining up to make major rivers as all the traffic consolidates into a major flow.

Spoiler: city made to have "tributary roads" (click to show/hide)

I made the most important roads yellow, orange be an intermediate road that is only important in getting across the river, and the red roads be the "tributaries" that are minor roads that are still more important than the dark brown paths.  I left the city roads alone.

I also highlighted in purple a completely pointless bridge crossing the river just to place one extra house on the riverbank.

All of these paths are just the quickest path for every house to reach the nearest minor tributary road.

These tributary roads I selected fairly arbitrarily, just to make them spaced apart a little, and reach out to a swath of farmland, and make the isolated houses have a little bit easier access to the tributary roads. 

More organically, the tributary roads would come first, and the farms would be built to take advantage of the access to the closest road.

Still, this is leaving all the roads that were generated by the current code intact, but just "hiding" the useless ones.  You can tell the sometimes bizarre angular bends in the roads probably shouldn't be there at a glance.

[Aquillion]

Though, in real life we do end up with some utterly bizarre and pointless-seeming roads all the time, due to things like property rights, shifting political boundaries, and so on.  It'd just be important to ensure that the overall structure remains reasonable -- the occasional bizarre bridge like the one circled on that map isn't necessarily a bad thing, since it can lend local character.  Maybe the bridge was built for decorative purposes; maybe the person who lived there simply liked the idea of having a bridge.  Maybe that was once a tannery or other 'smelly' / 'unclean' business that had to be placed at a distance, so they built it in this inaccessible back area that used to be used for rubbish, with only a bridge connecting it.

Anyone who's lived in a major city and really looked at its layout should know that city planning doesn't always make sense.

[Neonivek]

These roads should not look like a grid in any way

Well of the natural flow of building construction there is the Spiderweb design as well. Which makes sense as cities at this point of time are extremely centralised

While in modern times cities have become more and more decentralised.

[Untelligent]

Yeah, I like having that little bridge there.

[NW_Kohaku]

That "little bridge" is the same size as every other bridge that ferries all the traffic of the rest of the cities across the water.  You are the only ones attributing "little" to the bridge.

Likewise, that bridge is a public bridge that is built for a single common residence, of the exact same type as every other peasant house in the city, as there are no manors or distinctions in wealth or status, which means that this is the functional equivalent of building the Brooklyn Bridge to reach one single suburban home crammed up against the back of another apartment building in a way that doesn't give it access to the road.

These are not for speculative purposes, or just put into the back cover of a book, these are constructed game zones which will be populated by simulated characters with simulated tasks and traffic.  This isn't a matter of imagination, the game is going to tell you exactly who lives in that house, and he's probably going to be another farmer, or whatever gets put into the areas too far away to be in the "urban" area, so that is a "rural" house.

There's no indication that this is anything other than a bug, which Toady should correct, because if the game can't tell when it's building a Bridge to Nowhere now, it's not going to be able to tell when it's building a Bridge to Nowhere when the game actually does have manors and tanneries that it might want to isolate, either.

[Mephansteras]

I don't think anyone is arguing that it isn't a bug, just that it seems like something that should become a feature with some reasoning behind it in the future. We'd like to see such random stuff show up, but we'd also like there to be a reason behind it.

[tps12]

A bridge to nowhere? Impossible!

[monk12]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GREAT TOAD!

[Patchy]

Happy B-Day Toady,
Hope you have a great time surrounded by friends and family.

[Untelligent]

Doesn't matter, I'd still personally rather have that bridge be there than not be there.

Also happy birthday. Although I suppose that was yesterday now. Maybe not in Washington. effing time zones how do they work

[Aquillion]

There's lots of other explanations for that bridge, though.  Maybe that area used to be more connected, but it was destroyed by a fire and rebuilt oddly.  Maybe there was going to be something big built there, but it wasn't.  I've seen plenty of really oddly-placed roads and bridges like that...

The 'little bridge' issue isn't really about the bridge itself -- roads and bridges in general should be shoddier when they're serving fewer people.  Eventually the game will probably detect that, at which point it'll realize that a bridge like that only serves one person, and make it appropriately small and rickety (along with little dirt roads rather than big paved ones.)  But the same argument applies to every road everywhere on that map; that bridge is just an obvious case.  They all need to be scaled appropriately for the role they're serving.  Obviously not every bridge should be the Brooklyn Bridge, but that's a separate issue.

[Sunday]

There's lots of other explanations for that bridge, though.  Maybe that area used to be more connected, but it was destroyed by a fire and rebuilt oddly.  Maybe there was going to be something big built there, but it wasn't.  I've seen plenty of really oddly-placed roads and bridges like that...

The 'little bridge' issue isn't really about the bridge itself -- roads and bridges in general should be shoddier when they're serving fewer people.  Eventually the game will probably detect that, at which point it'll realize that a bridge like that only serves one person, and make it appropriately small and rickety (along with little dirt roads rather than big paved ones.)  But the same argument applies to every road everywhere on that map; that bridge is just an obvious case.  They all need to be scaled appropriately for the role they're serving.  Obviously not every bridge should be the Brooklyn Bridge, but that's a separate issue.

Putting your point in slightly different language: it's kind of silly to complain about that bridge being the same size as all other bridges when there's currently only a single size for roads and bridges. Eventually, there may very well be different sizes, which will be nice. But right now there aren't, and so having a less used bridge the same size as a more used bridge is to be expected.

Also, while it probably won't happen—because it probably isn't of interest to enough people to justify the work that goes into it—it would be neat to see a system of property ownership arise, particularly one that takes advantage of how the land gets used depending on the owner's personality. If a certain disliked landowner is surrounded by other landowners with a grudge against her, she may very well not be able to get an easement to build a road across any particular chunk of land. Thus, building the bridge might be the only option left for her. However, if that landowner is a child of the local warlord, the warlord might be able to seize the neighboring land and either turn it over to the disliked landowner, or just seize enough land to build a road.

This, in turn, could lead to interesting politics, as landowners band together to combat the warlord and the warlord's disliked daughter in either legitimate (try to gain the warlord's favor by giving him gifts), or illegitimate (sponsor a coup, or try to make it appear as if the warlord's own daughter is sponsoring a coup, or even just hire bandits to distract the warlord from internal politics) means.

[NW_Kohaku]

There's lots of other explanations for that bridge, though.  Maybe that area used to be more connected, but it was destroyed by a fire and rebuilt oddly.  Maybe there was going to be something big built there, but it wasn't.  I've seen plenty of really oddly-placed roads and bridges like that...

The 'little bridge' issue isn't really about the bridge itself -- roads and bridges in general should be shoddier when they're serving fewer people.  Eventually the game will probably detect that, at which point it'll realize that a bridge like that only serves one person, and make it appropriately small and rickety (along with little dirt roads rather than big paved ones.)  But the same argument applies to every road everywhere on that map; that bridge is just an obvious case.  They all need to be scaled appropriately for the role they're serving.  Obviously not every bridge should be the Brooklyn Bridge, but that's a separate issue.

Putting your point in slightly different language: it's kind of silly to complain about that bridge being the same size as all other bridges when there's currently only a single size for roads and bridges. Eventually, there may very well be different sizes, which will be nice. But right now there aren't, and so having a less used bridge the same size as a more used bridge is to be expected.

Also, while it probably won't happen—because it probably isn't of interest to enough people to justify the work that goes into it—it would be neat to see a system of property ownership arise, particularly one that takes advantage of how the land gets used depending on the owner's personality. If a certain disliked landowner is surrounded by other landowners with a grudge against her, she may very well not be able to get an easement to build a road across any particular chunk of land. Thus, building the bridge might be the only option left for her. However, if that landowner is a child of the local warlord, the warlord might be able to seize the neighboring land and either turn it over to the disliked landowner, or just seize enough land to build a road.

This, in turn, could lead to interesting politics, as landowners band together to combat the warlord and the warlord's disliked daughter in either legitimate (try to gain the warlord's favor by giving him gifts), or illegitimate (sponsor a coup, or try to make it appear as if the warlord's own daughter is sponsoring a coup, or even just hire bandits to distract the warlord from internal politics) means.

No, it's silly to defend the bridge as possibly having some other purpose when there can be no other purpose right now.

Sure, you can make a bridge out of some sort of purposeful modeling of government waste or a personally wealthy merchant who just wants a personal bridge for show... but to do that, you have to actually model in government waste, and make the game recognize the difference between being waste and just being stupid AI. 

If you don't do that, it's just AI that doesn't recognize what it's doing, and you're just making up stories to try to rationalize a bug.

It is a bug.  It needs to be identified as a bug so that Toady can fix it. 

Making wasteful decisions on purpose may be something that can be expanded upon later, but for now, Toady needs to know when he's getting the AI to make wasteful decisions because it can't make rational decisions at all.

[Neonivek]

One problem Kohaku is that all rivers are basically streams or creeks rather then anything one would call a river. So people arn't really going to brand it an outright bug since by all means a small bridge to get into a single nondescript house happens in reality.

Also because of how the game handles resources... the roof of the shack they call a house costs more then the bridge.

[LoSboccacc]

One problem Kohaku is that all rivers are basically streams or creeks rather then anything one would call a river. So people arn't really going to brand it an outright bug since by all means a small bridge to get into a single nondescript house happens in reality.

Also because of how the game handles resources... the roof of the shack they call a house costs more then the bridge.

well, bridge uses the architecture job while the floor(roofs, ops) does not. that could be part of the equation (or not, of course)

yeah, I know that you can floor your way across the river but that would not be stylish, would it?