Road Types and Road Shaders

[Amahula]

So I just started playing around with the map editor. Not necessarily to make a map, but just to learn the basics of how to make them.

What I noticed is that there are like close to 1000 different road types and well over a hundred road shaders.

I do have promods and rusmap installed, so maybe those add a couple.

How do you (map makers) choose between thousands of options? Other than UK/not UK of course. I have no idea where to start.

[MandelSoft]

For a beginner, the number of road types can be daunting. However, upon further investigation, you see that we only use a limited number of road variants per region or purpose.

1. First of all, each road type has a certain number of lanes. Now, the old definitions and the ones from SCS are not really systematic in particular. The more modern definitions we mostly use are much more systematic. For instance, hw3b would signify that this highway had 3 lanes (and b signifies the presence of a hard shoulder). The ew and city series follow the same pattern. The only exception is the rl-series, where the number signifies its width.
2. Second, there are different layout types of the roadways. You can either have one two-way roadway (see the full rl series), one way roads or two roadways with a median in between. Now, you see names like "hw2b 2m", which means that the roadways are 2 meters apart from either side of the median. This can also filter out the choice greatly.
3. We are getting more and more country-specific road templates. This means that some road templates should be used in one or more countries. The country's ISO code is usually used as a prefix, such as "DE hw2b - 2 meter median", which is a 2-lane motorway to use in Germany.Do note that some countries have quite similar road markings. For instance, the road templates for Germany can also be used in Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Austria (though, with different block markings at the exits). And this also narrows down your choice set.

As for the road shaders: there may be a lot, but even then we have a selection of favourites we tend to use. For instance "asphalt" is the default texture, "asphalt10", "asphalt11", "hw_def_dk" are quite popular to use, while "hw_def_de2", "asphalt_nl1" and "asphalt_snow" are region bound and "asphalt4" is rarely being used.

I hope this answers your questions.

[Amahula]

Dude I love you