Airports

[zztong]

okay...this is ball park what i was trying to ask about to you two.
can you or could TFP insert code so that a town sized area could allocated to an airport instead? and limit that option to one per map?
with enough variations of tiles that could be generated and laid together so that they are not one cookie cutter each time? (which might be good for vanilla too)

If TFP is willing to code something, has the time, and has a viable algorithm, then anything is possible.

It would be pretty easy for us (or them) to design some XML that would layout a specific settlement, even with some randomization elements. TFP or a modder into modding RWG's C# could make that happen with probably a decent amount of effort.

I'm not sure TFP would agree it was needed and prioritize it, given everything else the community wants and their own roadmap. They're swimming in ideas and work.

Post automatically merged: Monday at 4:42 PM

You have complete control over which tiles a district can use, and how many of each tile can be used in a settlement via maxtiles="".

Interesting idea. I like throwing out half-baked ideas and somebody else having one of the missing pieces.

I suspect MaxTiles is a bit of a suggestion to RWG, but when you have one settlement, one district, and control the number of tiles the district wants I'd bet RWG would go along with what you set. It's those bigger, more complex, cities where RWG has to have freedom or end up in a corner with no way to resolution.

And, if you can do just 3 straight tiles, RWG probably isn't going to want to rotate them because it will want the roads to line up.

So, you'd make 2 different straight tiles... one with buildings, and one to be used as both ends of the runway? Or maybe 3 different straight tiles, each to appear once?

Oh wait. I'm not sure RWG is going to respect a MaxTiles of ZERO for the other tiles. There are reasons why you can't use those XML tags on the base Vanilla Tiles... RWG has to know it can use them.

 

[Riamus]

You have complete control over which tiles a district can use, and how many of each tile can be used in a settlement via maxtiles="".

The point was that your tile might support a terminal and then you get that terminal multiple times or none at all. You can avoid that if you want a specific tile for every specific POI (runway_01 = terminal, runway_02 = hanger, runway_03 = parking lot) and then force it to use those in the same way every time. But if you want variation and not having a separate tile for every section of the runway, then you run into issues like POI duplicating or not being seen. It comes down to the number of POI available to be placed on a given POI Marker. If all your POI are the same size, they are more likely to be evenly used, but if you have different sizes and the numbers don't equal the exact size of your "town", you may run into stuff that is missed or duplicated.

It isn't really an issue with whether or not it can be done, but a discussion of the issues you have to consider and avoid running into.

 

[EvilPolygons]

Something I just thought of would be while we are required to provide Cap, Corner, Intersection, Straight, and T Tiles, we don't really have to configure the roads on those tiles to match those configurations.

Riamus is correct about not being to control orientation for tiles, however that idea opens up other possibilities. Like the town square mentioned eariler. I mean, not every tile NEEDS a road, per se. Don't ask me how that would actually help anything because I don't know exactly. I'm just spitballing and saying zztong might be onto something there.

If we asked for a settlement with one district of three tiles, would it line them up in a row and leave their orientation as N-S | N-S | N-S?

It should. That's how Old West towns work. But we won't know until someone tries it.

 

[EvilPolygons]

The point was that your tile might support a terminal and then you get that terminal multiple times or none at all.

That would be a user error. The Townplanner will only do what your township and district blocks tell it to do. If it runs out of tiles, then it stops placing them and you get blank spots. That's just vanilla behavior and is observable in regular RWG maps on occasion.

You can avoid that if you want a specific tile for every specific POI (runway_01 = terminal, runway_02 = hanger, runway_03 = parking lot) and then force it to use those in the same way every time. But if you want variation and not having a separate tile for every section of the runway, then you run into issues like POI duplicating or not being seen.

Again, you have complete control over what tiles can spawn in a district, and how many of them can spawn. You can never ever get a duplicate if maxtiles for a particular tile is set to 1. The townplanner will simply not place a tile there and move on to its next job. The same applies to POIs -- if a POI spawn marker wants to spawn in a tile but there are no valid POIs left (determined by tags and size) then the worldgen will throw a yellow warning into the console and you'll have an empty tile in the world with no POI at all.

 

[Riamus]

That would be a user error. The Townplanner will only do what your township and district blocks tell it to do. If it runs out of tiles, then it stops placing them and you get blank spots. That's just vanilla behavior and is observable in regular RWG maps on occasion.

POI. Not tile.

And we're talking about not having to do individual tiles for every part of the "town". If you want a single straight runway tile and a single cap runway tile and you want it to place them in a row of something like 5 tiles, that straight runway will be used multiple times (that's good). But it means you have to be aware of what that means for POI Markers and what can spawn on them.

 

[EvilPolygons]

POI. Not tile.

And we're talking about not having to do individual tiles for every part of the "town". If you want a single straight runway tile and a single cap runway tile and you want it to place them in a row of something like 5 tiles, that straight runway will be used multiple times (that's good). But it means you have to be aware of what that means for POI Markers and what can spawn on them.

"The same applies to POIs -- if a POI spawn marker wants to spawn in a tile but there are no valid POIs left (determined by tags and size) then the worldgen will throw a yellow warning into the console and you'll have an empty tile in the world with no POI at all."

Again, if you get errors related to POIs not being able to spawn, or duplicate POIs, it's because of user error. I spent so much time chasing after false leads during my experimentation with this because of exactly that. Every time I thought, "oh this must be a bug or a limitation" it turned out that I had miss-tagged something, or my maxtiles or class min/max or POI min/max numbers didn't match up.

But if all your numbers match -- across the board -- between your class definition, township, district, POIs, etc then you will not get duplicates, you get only and exactly the number of tiles you want, and only unique tiles and unique POIs.

 

[Riamus]

"The same applies to POIs -- if a POI spawn marker wants to spawn in a tile but there are no valid POIs left (determined by tags and size) then the worldgen will throw a yellow warning into the console and you'll have an empty tile in the world with no POI at all."

Which comes back to you needing to plan it all out. If you want every POI for the airport to spawn, you have to have enough tiles for all to spawn. If you don't want empty spaces or duplicates, you can't have too many tiles. It's a very non-random way of doing things and requires considering it all as you set it up.

Remember that I am not saying things can't be done. I'm pointing out the things you have to keep in mind when doing them (as was ZZTong). And I still would prefer RWG to improve anyhow.

 

[Riamus]

It should. That's how Old West towns work. But we won't know until someone tries it.

Not really. You quoted rotations being the same for all straight tiles. Old West towns don't care about rotation of tiles beyond that roads connect. A straight can be rotated 0, 90, 180, 270 and it doesn't matter as long as roads connect. You're not going to notice if specific POI are on one side of the road or the other like you would with an airport and runway (if you're not doing a double runway with everything between them).

 

[EvilPolygons]

Not really. You quoted rotations being the same for all straight tiles. Old West towns don't care about rotation of tiles beyond that roads connect. A straight can be rotated 0, 90, 180, 270 and it doesn't matter as long as roads connect. You're not going to notice if specific POI are on one side of the road or the other like you would with an airport and runway (if you're not doing a double runway with everything between them).

Two straight tiles can only connect end to end. Global rotations don't matter -- only local.

 

[Riamus]

Two straight tiles can only connect end to end. Global rotations don't matter -- only local.

Yes.... We talked about this before and it's why you were doing double runways. If you want a single runway, which a common configuration for a really short runway airport, you would want all POI on one side of the runway. If one of the straights rotate 180, they still connect the runway end to end, but the POI on one tile will be on one side of the runway and POI on another tile will be on the other side of the runway.

 

[EvilPolygons]

Which comes back to you needing to plan it all out. If you want every POI for the airport to spawn, you have to have enough tiles for all to spawn. If you don't want empty spaces or duplicates, you can't have too many tiles. It's a very non-random way of doing things and requires considering it all as you set it up.

Remember that I am not saying things can't be done. I'm pointing out the things you have to keep in mind when doing them (as was ZZTong). And I still would prefer RWG to improve anyhow.

Yes, I added a bit to the previous message addressing this. The post I made in Mod Discussions goes into detail, with examples. It's just a matter of making sure your i's are dotted and t's are crossed.

 

[EvilPolygons]

Yes.... We talked about this before and it's why you were doing double runways. If you want a single runway, which a common configuration for a really short runway airport, you would want all POI on one side of the runway. If one of the straights rotate 180, they still connect the runway end to end, but the POI on one tile will be on one side of the runway and POI on another tile will be on the other side of the runway.

Yup, no argument there. It's the reason I settled on the double runway being the way to do it. The one thing you have absolutely NO control over with the townplanner (afaik anyway) is rotation. And the only tile that can connect to other tiles of its type without any regard to rotation is a straight tile -- if you're okay with double runways.

 

[EvilPolygons]

I suspect MaxTiles is a bit of a suggestion to RWG, but when you have one settlement, one district, and control the number of tiles the district wants I'd bet RWG would go along with what you set. It's those bigger, more complex, cities where RWG has to have freedom or end up in a corner with no way to resolution.

Sorry I missed this earlier. The conversation got hectic and I started getting lost. Maxtiles is a hard and fast rule, according to all my tests. When you run out of maxtiles for a district, the townplanner will throw a yellow warning in the console saying that it can't place a tile. No tile will be placed, although you'll still get an ugly 150x150 smoothed square on the worldgen preview map where it should have gone.

 

[zztong]

Attempt One:

Settlement: airporttown
1 per map, 3 tiles per settlement

District: airport
Belongs to airporttown

rwg_tile_airport_cap
rwg_tile_airport_corner
rwg_tile_airport_intersection
rwg_tile_airport_straight
rwg_tile_airport_t

But all of those tiles were really rwg_tile_airport_straight (copied).

Results:
Cap
Corner
Straight



But there's good news. It looks pretty good for a 2 Tile settlement...



Unless you work at Captain Digby's Arizona adventure, in which case there will be lots of low flying aircraft disturbing the animals.

Actually, it doesn't look good. I think with two Tiles I get a Straight and a Corner. The road connection is at the bottom of the map I shared.

 

[EvilPolygons]

Attempt One:

Settlement: airporttown
1 per map, 3 tiles per settlement

District: airport
Belongs to airporttown

rwg_tile_airport_cap
rwg_tile_airport_corner
rwg_tile_airport_intersection
rwg_tile_airport_straight
rwg_tile_airport_t

But all of those tiles were really rwg_tile_airport_straight (copied).

Results:
Cap
Corner
Straight

View attachment 35855

But there's good news. It looks pretty good for a 2 Tile settlement...

View attachment 35856

Unless you work at Captain Digby's Arizona adventure, in which case there will be lots of low flying aircraft disturbing the animals.

First problem I see there is that the townplanner is going to rotate tiles based on the filename. What's in the file doesn't matter in the least to it. Try this:

rwg_tile_airport_straight
rwg_tile_airport_straight_01
rwg_tile_airport_straight_02

EDIT:
Wait, is that even necessary?
Setting maxtiles to 3 for just rwg_tile_airport_straight should get you the same result.

 

[zztong]

I removed all the tiles except for the rwg_tile_airport_straight tile.

I got warnings for the others not being available. A warning necessarily bad. RWG only placed ONE tile, even though the district was for three.

I can make more than one straight tile, sure, but I don't think I can overcome RWG wanting to have one of each type available and trying to use them.

 

[EvilPolygons]

I removed all the tiles except for the rwg_tile_airport_straight tile.

I got warnings for the others not being available. A warning necessarily bad. RWG only placed ONE tile, even though the district was for three.

I can make more than one straight tile, sure, but I don't think I can overcome RWG wanting to have one of each type available and trying to use them.

Hmmm... I wonder if a straight gateway + straight + cap would work?

 

[EvilPolygons]

Argh. Fine. Okay, so here's my first attempt at an airport settlement using only straight tiles. I used my modified method from the Modding section. I just copied the vanilla rural_straight and renamed it rwg_tile_airporttest_straight. I'm not going to bother making a custom tile with a tidy runway strip because that's not necessary for a basic demonstration.

I did get a yellow warning that no cap file was found, which makes sense because I didn't bother with a cap tile. Results:



A 2-tile settlement, correctly stacked end to end. I should probably make a cap tile for it and see how that turns out, but it doesn't appear to be super necessary. Once I do the cap tile then I'll see how it spawns as a 3-tile airport settlement.

Oh, I just realized it didn't spawn with any local rotation at all. Very interesting... probably just a coincidence, though.

 

[Riamus]

Attempt One:

Settlement: airporttown
1 per map, 3 tiles per settlement

District: airport
Belongs to airporttown

rwg_tile_airport_cap
rwg_tile_airport_corner
rwg_tile_airport_intersection
rwg_tile_airport_straight
rwg_tile_airport_t

But all of those tiles were really rwg_tile_airport_straight (copied).

Results:
Cap
Corner
Straight

View attachment 35855

But there's good news. It looks pretty good for a 2 Tile settlement...

View attachment 35856

Unless you work at Captain Digby's Arizona adventure, in which case there will be lots of low flying aircraft disturbing the animals.

Actually, it doesn't look good. I think with two Tiles I get a Straight and a Corner. The road connection is at the bottom of the map I shared.

I like how you're drawing with a piece of wood...

 

[EvilPolygons]

Okay. Test #2. Very interesting results. Notice the total lack of non-uniform rotation in any tiles spawned using my method. The tiles maintain the same orientation. Which means, if this continues to happen with further testing, that you CAN have your airport buildings on one side and runways on the other, without having to do the double runway workaround!



Btw, if someone wants to make me a decent straight runway tile and matching cap tile, then I'll gladly run my tests with them. But I didn't want to mess with this in the first place so I will not be taking the time to do that when I can just use vanilla placeholders