Road Feedback Thread

[Christian_Akacro]

With the new changes to road as detailed in the latest patch notes we want to hear what you think of them. Please let us know your thoughts below, your constructive criticism is very valuable to us.

[I_am_a_great_magician]

I went through all of my saved solutions to each level. Over half of them no longer work. I'm not sure if it is possible to do some of them while staying under budget now. Levels with particularly long spans like 5-6 and 6-15 are especially problematic. In 5-6, I actually had road panels suspended by cables that were not carrying any vertical loads break at the beginning of the simulation, even though the rest of the structure had no problem staying up. This stems from the fact that while you are constructing bridges, you do so in a zero-gravity environment. When the simulation begins, suddenly the force of gravity is exerted on the bridge, causing an excessive amount of deflection and placing a overly large amount of stress on the road tiles, especially those near the ends of the bridge. Essentially, this would be akin to suddenly kicking the temporary supports of a real bridge out from under it after the bridge was completed. In actual construction, the temporary supports would be gradually removed so as to ensure that the bridge's weight would not become a live load.
I do think the new roads are more realistic, but at the same time, fundamental problems with how the simulation runs cause huge problems with the new roads that would not be an issue with a real bridge, not to mention the fact that many of the scenarios, especially those involving jumps, are unrealistic scenarios to begin with. Considering how weak the road panels can be, I really don't see how it will be possible to complete some of the levels under budget and I especially don't see how how we can complete some of the levels without anything breaking. (This was already an issue in the levels with jumps before, but now it is an even bigger problem.) At this point, I prefer the old roads, but that could change if the other issues I mentioned here are addressed.

[I_am_a_great_magician]

I have been playing a bit more. I have noticed that levels involving hydraulics have a lot of issues because the hydraulics often break the road sections. The fact that you can't overlay two different members of the same length over each other has forced me to resort to wonky solutions like this one in 3-6.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=704818948
We need the ability to either lay steel/wood/cables over road panels of the same length, or the road panels need to be strenthened to the approximate strength of steel. This would reflect the fact that in real bridges, roads almost never are used as structural members to support the weight of the bridge itself. Instead, roads are only used to support the live loads (cars, trucks, trains, people) that are placed upon it, and the roads transfer this load to rest of the bridge structure.

[Iijil]

Hi I_am_a_great_magician!

In that situation there are other options to prevent the road from breaking. The break in this case is caused by the left half of the bridge bouncing up and down a bit, compressing the road. So building additional structure that prevents the bouncing is the best way to go about it. For example some additional wood triangles do the trick: http://imgur.com/Da9J1mO

You can also place the hydraulic somewhere else, for example lifting the left tip of the bridge. There it doesn't cause all the stress to go on a single road piece.

Personally I like that the new roads encourage you to look into the cause of any breaking instead of just throwing steel on the area until it holds.

[I_am_a_great_magician]

I understand how to get around some of the problems posed by the new road panels. However, this is a bridge building simulator, and I don't think putting extra members like that onto bridges reflects how real bridges are built. On a real truss bridge, metal members run parallel to the road itself. The road does not carry any dead loads and merely transfers the force of the live load to the truss. With the way the game acts right now, the roads are responsible for carrying both the dead loads and the live loads of the bridge. The best way to compensate for this is to either make the roads much stronger or allow other materials to be placed alongside the road panels.

P.S. Did you hack this game to get all of the achievements? I see you have gotten all of the new achievements, and yet the leaderboard shows that you never played 3-5. Not to mention the fact that your budget on some other levels like 6-11 seems impossibly low.

[Iijil]

Okay, point about real bridges. Maybe I view this too much as a game ;)

I got the levelcompletion for the achievements before the leaderboard score collection began. All my scores are legit, just not necesseraly with obvious solutions. If most of my scores seem low that is because I specifically played the levels where I had a very low cost solution to get on the leaderboard.

[I_am_a_great_magician]

I'll take your word for it, but I really don't see how you were able to do 6-11 using just $6,000. With unlimited materials, the lowest possible cost is $3,800.

[Dry Cactus]

I_am_a_great_magician, thanks for the detailed feedback.

I agree with the majority of points you're making, the only thing to keep in mind is that with Poly Bridge we are aiming for a slightly more 'playful' approach to bridge-building (hence the jumps and unrealistic scenarios), however that's definitely no excuse to overlook some of the core building principles.

We're currently looking at two ways to improve the current issue with roads being too weak, primarily because as you say they're left to hold lots of the dead-load, something that doesn't happen in the real world.
Option A) Give players a reinforced road material, which would be more expensive but have a strength similar to steel
Option B) Allow a secondary strut to be placed over an existing road piece (wood/steel/cable/rope) to reinforce it

Increasing the base strength of the normal road is not really an option as it would open up the possibility of building shorts low-hanging arcs of road only that need virtually no support and can hold the load of lighter vehicles, which is something I'd like to avoid.

I will be experimenting with the two options above in the coming days, if you would like to be more closely involved in the process please email me at [e-mail] as we do run a private internal beta for this stuff.

In regards to the initial gravity causing too much stress (similar to suddenly removing all the temporary structures suddenly) I'm not too sure how to mitigate that, one idea that was tossed around is to avoid breaking the structure for the first, lets say, 0.5 seconds so it has time to settle, but we haven't had time to test this yet.

As a side-note, we have an internal way of verifying leaderboard submissions and banning specific players, and I can vouch for Jaso (one of our internal testers) that his solutions, while pretty unorthodox and not very 'realistic', are indeed genuine.

If you have more feedback or suggestions please let me know, it is highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Patrick

[Iijil]

http://gallery.drycactus.com/image/view/133660 ;)

[I_am_a_great_magician]

Okay, yeah. Very nice solution. I forgot that the water is frictionless in this game.

[I_am_a_great_magician]

Thanks for your response. Both options sound promising. Option B could cause some issues in being able to see what is there, but would be extremely helpful with not only strengthening roads, but also overlaying hydraulics over top of bridge truss members. Perhaps both options could be implemented?

In regards to "bridges" involving jumps, I am completely okay with them not being realistic, but we need to be able to solve them without the road breaking, which is something that I am not sure is possible right now in some levels. I want to get 100% of the achievements in this game!

[Dry Cactus]

Doing some tests, I think the reinforcing road 'manually' by adding another struts makes more sense.
Here's a quick example:
http://i.imgur.com/rOV7TYj.gif

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "but also overlaying hydraulics over top of bridge truss members" ?
If we have a hydraulic and another truss type connecting two joints, the secondary truss would always break as the hydraulics move, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding ?

Thanks!

[I_am_a_great_magician]

This screenshot explains it best:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=705027664
If you look on the left, I had to create some unnecessary members because I was not permitted to lay the hydraulics over top of the bridge truss. Let me know if this makes sense.

[Dry Cactus]

I see what you mean, I hadn't correctly considered the split-joint scenario.
I'm aiming to push out a new build later today with this reinforcement mechanism for everyone to try out, thanks again for the useful feedback.

[Dry Cactus]

A quick follow-up, public build has been updated with the 'reinforcing' mechanism discussed above.
You can find more details in the announcement http://steamcommunity.com/games/367450/announcements/detail/591476480763775068
Thanks!

[I_am_a_great_magician]

The change has been very helpful. I was able to complete 6-15 under budget without the road panels breaking this time. My only additional suggestion right now is that some of the levels will need to have their budgets increased in order to account for the extra cost of the struts along some of the the road panels.

Edit: I also noticed that we still can't place hydraulics over other truss members. Will this be changed in another update?