Just thought I'd do a little diary entry about the upcoming release. I've been helping (well, probably hindering lol) @jfarias with some graphics and stuff for the new vehicle restriction UI and also the brand new speed limit customiser... There's some sneak peeks in to the new features below, as well as some info on what is and is not included in this upcoming release.


After completing the vehicle restriction tool in the last update, it was obvious that the UI needed some work. Something more graphical - like a set of icons or images of vehicles and you just click them to toggle them on and off.

My first idea was to just take some screenshots using the isometric camera mod and do some image editing to put them on a transparent background - how hard can it be, right? EPIC FAIL[cloud.githubusercontent.com]! No matter what I tried, the result was always a blotchy pixellated mess.

While I went off to scour the internet for free vector art of similar vehicles to those found in C:S, eventually giving up and suggesting that I just buy some commercial artwork (example[graphicriver.net]), @jfarias was taking a completely different approach... Firing individual rays of virtual light at a 3D object and compiling the results in to an image. You know, just the simple run of the mill every day stuff. *brain explodes* The results were amazing[cloud.githubusercontent.com]!

After lots of tweaks and changes, as well as hair pulling at the insanity of the C:S UI system, the new UI started to emerge[cloud.githubusercontent.com] - and we think you'll like it a lot. It looks pretty swish[cloud.githubusercontent.com], almost like it's a standard feature of the game.


There were two basic choices - apply speed restrictions to entire roads, or to individual lanes. Applying speeds to lanes was far more desirable, for example you can make the inside lane of a highway faster, and the outside lane slower. With the recent T++ release, lane selection became really quick and easy - you just left click as many lanes as you want, anywhere on the map, and then you can apply changes to all of them in bulk.

The game itself actually does speeds at the road "prefab" level, so your choice of road sets the speed for all the lanes on it. But there's a limit on how many prefabs you can have, roughly 65,000. It's a good job we chose to do it at lane level (T++ keeps a separate list of lanes and their speeds), and it also means we're not changing the default road speed - should you need to run the mod in "ghost mode" for some reason, things will return to normal.

We needed icons for the UI, and we also needed to decide what speed options to provide... Our search for icons revolved mostly around wikipedia and some google image searching to double check things. It turns out that while there's a lot of subtle changes from country to country[en.wikipedia.org], they're all based on a fairly small number of common designs[en.wikipedia.org].

Initially we're going to use the Vienna Convention Sign C14 as the basis for the UI, like this one from Hungary[en.wikipedia.org], but in a later release we want to provide a way to choose the design[cloud.githubusercontent.com] that's used (particularly as US and Canada have a completely different style to everywhere else).

With the sign backgrounds done, the next thing was the numbers and text. A bit of google searching turned up a free (for hobby use) set of fonts[www.n1en.org] containing pretty much every style used around the world.

For the speeds, we factored in several things. Obviously, the default speeds of roads in the game; but we also googled to work out what the common speed limits are around the world in both kmp/h and mp/h, and we also spent some time thinking about what people would want to actually use. To keep the UI simple, we decided to provide 9 speed settings and came up with two lists[cloud.githubusercontent.com]:

* km/h: 15, 30, 40, 50, 70, 90, 100, 120, 140

* mph: 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80

Note: Initially only the km/h speeds will be shown in the UI - in a later release we'll find a way to provide an mph option.

We feel that this gives a good selection that most people will like, although we can potentially make changes if there's enough demand.

It's likely that some people will want much faster speeds - especially if they're trying to recreate German roads that have no speed limit. The problem is that the game doesn't really apply realistic speeds to vehicles, that's why you get things like busses spending 6 hours at a bus stop. There's also the issue in how the game updates the graphics... vehicles are adjusted roughly 4 times a second, and the game engine just sort of smooths things out in between. If you had crazy fast vehicles, they'd end up crashing in to buildings before the game has time to say "hey, you might want to slow down for that intersection". It would be more like "hey, *CRASH*, oh, too late...".


Obviously, we want to add lane markings (we did some research[www.fhwa.dot.gov] in to that too) so you can see at a glance where speed restrictions are applied. We should be able to get that done fairly soon, it just needs some changes to the code that adds "BUS LANE" text to bus lanes.

Having done all the graphics for different traffic signs, it would certainly be nice if we could provide a way to select what type of sign you want and also whether to use km/h or mph. But how to achieve that is still being pondered - should we do it by continent (if so, would Canadians be forced to use American signs?), or maybe by country (that's going to be a long list to scroll though)...?

Then there's the actual traffic signs on the map. This release won't change those at all, but it would be nice if we could get to a point where it does. If you extend this train of thought further, it might even be nice if all traffic signs were updated (not just the speed ones), and maybe even road styles? Who knows what the future will bring?