BIG Roads – Large Suburban Roads

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Author: hockenheim95

Last revision: 5 Sep, 2020 at 01:39 UTC (1)

File size: 92.86 MB

On Steam Workshop

Description:

BIG Roads is an ongoing road project with designated turning lanes, a constant flowing median, american road signs and markings. It uses techniques with multiple layers of asphalt on top of each other and many direct connected nodes to recreate real road hierarchy. Some of these roads have up to 25 different meshes sharing all the exact same texture for optimal RAM usage. It is optimized to be used with Intersection Marking Tool but most road markings are rendered automatically.

This package contains 12 different roads in 3 different road sizes. They’re not zoneable because that would destroy every grid. Please read the description. I won’t answer any questions that are clearly written here. But if you have any further questions please feel free to ask and I will add the answers to the desciption.

All medians at intersections are pure cosmectic. Cars and pedestrians will cross the median! If you want to use these streets proper you need Traffic Manager: President Edition. Traffic can be very hard to handle on these roads. Please don’t blame me on this. These roads don’t change any behaviour of traffic. You have to tackle that yourself.

12 roads with custom LODs. Roads are categorized by the number of lanes they’re based on. For example a 4+4(10l) road is based on 10 lanes because the median is 2 lanes wide and therefore the whole road has a width of 10 lanes although only 8 lanes are actually there.

10 lane based roads

• 4+4 (grass median)
• 5+4 (grass median)
• 5+4 (paved median)
• 6+4 (paved median)

8 lane based roads

• 3+3 (grass median)
• 4+3 (grass median)
• 4+3 (paved median)
• 5+3 (paved median)

6 lane based roads

• 2+2 (grass median)
• 3+2 (grass median)
• 3+2 (paved median)
• 4+2 (paved median)

Thes roads use a special technique to get rid of the dirt/ruined transition between pavement and therefore have an overlapping grass texture. But roads can only show a pure grass texture so that the surrounding area should show the pure grass texture too. For the best results you should:

• Choose a Map Theme with a good looking grass texture. There are many beautiful ones on the workshop. I usually use SCT-Homecoming by Raffa
• Get rid of the grass sprites with Remove Decoration Sprites, Theme Mixer 2 or Hide It!
• Extra Landscaping Tools to remove resources (ore, oil and forest) or use No Radioactive Desert And More! to remove the resource textures on your whole map. You can also use Hide It!.
• Remove the forest are ground color with either No Radioactive Desert And More!, Lock Forestry or Hide It!

Symmetrical Roads (4+4/3+3/2+2)
These are the main roads. They have custom tunnels, bridges, bus stops and railway crossings. I would start every layout with these roads and add the turning lane roads afterward.

Roads with 1 Turning Lane (5+4/4+3/3+2)
At junction with small roads these roads create a normal traffic lights. But if you switch the traffic lights off with TM:PE a designated turning lane will be generated. This turning lane will look different if the road continous with a oppositional 1-turning-lane-road (3-way junction) or a symmetrical road (4-way junction). You can also use these roads at big intersections. The designated turning lane is separated by a solid lane. These roads only have ground meshes and!

Roads with 2 Turning Lanes (6+4/5+3/4+2)
These roads with solid lines are intented to be used right in front of large intersections. These roads only have ground meshes!

Although these roads can handle slopes some glitches can appear because of the heave use of direct connects which require straight junctions. There can be problems when you place nodes in too small intervals. The roads auto-generate many trainsitions between different medians and road withs. Many common transitions will work and look good this way but not all. For example a direct transition between a 6+4 and the oppositional 4+6 direction is not possible because it would need 4 more meshes. I would recommend a small piece of a 4+4 road in between.

Conno gladly did custom wire-hung traffic lights especially for this project. They’re fully functional but have their limitations in combination with TM:PE because of the american setting on the „wrong“ side of the road and will eventually show wrong colors. Then there’s a problem with T-junctions because the traffic light will appear on the side oft the road where your road is. It looks best when you got a 4-way junction and the opposite of the junction being the same type of road. But I think you’ll figure that out. But please don’t complain – I am really not able to improve this. Custom traffic lights for assymetrical roads are only available if they’re facing towards the intersection. A 6+4 road where only 4 lanes are facing towards the intersection doesn’t make sense for me. But if you want to build it you’ll have to live with vanilla traffic lights 🙂

Sorry, I really can’t improve on this. It took hundreds of hours of work to make the RHD version and a LHD version would be overkill because I would do that on any other future projets too. These are american roads and they drive on the right side of the road.

Railway crossings are available for all kind of roads but they look best with the symmetrical ones because they’re more detailed and got road markings right up to the rail. If you want the rairoad crossing markings more up to the rails just insert a node before the junction.

I made custom arrows and markings for this project. But just like in many parts of the States I only added left and right turn arrows. Arrows facing forward are not available.

If you like this please rate my work!!!

If you appreciate my work you can support me on Patreon[www.patreon.com]and help me to find and improve ideas for my next BIG Projects including early testing versions or simply donate via Paypal.[paypal.me] Even the smallest donation will help me to continue.

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