Help with bridge height over tracks

[Felix]

Hey,

I have a problem with my track over track bridges. Sometimes the seem to work fine and at other times they require a ridiculous height. I usually want to put the lower track in a trench, so that the bridge doesn't have to be that high. The game somehow doesn't get that? First picture is a bridge about the height of a signal. The second picture you can see that the game requires the bridge to be twice the size of a signal.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2480719376

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2480719139

How can I build a crossing over a trench, that doesn't require a ridiculous height?

Thank you

[mbutton15]

I think the height is not the issue as such.
If you were to have the anchor points further away from the track it is spanning then the gradient would not be so big. Being further away allows more lead up room, which means the slopes can be much gentler.

[Thineboot]

What Felix referring to is the difference between his first and second screenshot. It's not about how near or far the track points are placed - yes, farther away leads to lesser slope - but the difference between the normal behaviour in the upper and much greater vertical distance between the crossing tracks. Check out the signals for visual confirmation.

I thought it might be that the crossing track goes straight over the signals but I checked this out and no, that's not the reason, at least not in my tests.

What else information is Felix providing? He puts the lower track in a trench.
Same setup as before, just putting the lower track in a trench.
Result is the same as Felix reported, the game somehow doesn't get that as the crossing track still wants to bridge over the lower track as if it was not lowered at all.

It's not about surface. I did the opposite test to by raising the lower track to be just on earthworks at the crossing. And the crossing received a knee at the crossing point.

Definitely worth a bug report, Felix. Since you've spotted and described it very well it's your honor to file it in.

[Empty1958]

I have run into this or similar issues with bridges. Moving the anchor points further and/or left/right has made a difference. I've also added anchor points further out and adjusted the height of the closer one. It can be a bit of a pain but I've gotten the bridge to lower and flatten.
Of course Thineboot could be right and it is a bug introduced with the latest update.

[Thineboot]

During the tests I've tried to move the crossing around, adding extra track points, ...

I thought this could be prevented by some fiddling around. Since I try to avoid bridges and especially crossings I do these crossings only on rare occasions, most likely when money isn't an issue anymore, when I've stopped checking for each tiny details. So whether it's old or new, I can't say for sure but either way it shouldn't happen.

[chaney]

I'm not convinced the difference in elevation is that much from one picture to the next. What "looks obvious" is not always "accurate" - we all are familiar with many optical illusions that show that. Your visual cortex interprets what the eye sends it as well as it can, but sometimes what it sends to the rest of the brain is not what exists outside the eye. I'm not saying there isn't a problem, just looking for more confirmation.

Track building is an opaque technology in RE. You are given some authority - manage some control points for location and coarse elevation. Then the game will use some kind of function to try to smoothly connect things. There are interactions with terrain and other tracks. There are hard limits on some things like grade. There *are* exceptions, oddities, and bugs.

I wish I could test some of this now, sorry to put it back on others.

[Thineboot]

Check out the screenshots Felix provided chaney. They are far from being an optical illusion. You can change your angle of view - in-game - which I did and there was a huge gap instead of a tiny one, depending on how deep the trench is.

[chaney]

Thanks. So that suggests it may be a terrain interaction. Do you suspect the game is requiring a minimum height above terrain for a bridge? That seems pretty strange and unfamiliar. The two pictures are quite different. The first has the track cut into the terrain on one side and possibly even built up on the other side, the second has a full cut into the terrain on both sides.

[Thineboot]

My tests were not thorough, see #2. My experience with crossing is limited, see #4. Before #2 I've expected that #3 would do the job but it didn't.

Cuts can be made natural - start-end-point - or intentional by lowering the track. As far as I can say it looks like crossing a lowered track doesn't work like it should resulting in those much big gaps and knees.


Releasing an Update along a DLC on Friday morning and calling it an early weekend - I don't know what they are thinking. It may be old, new, or a side-effect of a new one and since I'm not getting paid to do their QA I'm only investing time in things I'm curious about.

[gussmed]

I did a little fiddling with this.

Trenches do have some effect, but there's a minimum height for bridges.

Let's pretend that a normal bridge must be 20' above a track below it, or a minimum of 10' above the regular surface without a trench. No trench = 20' bridge. 5' trench = 15' bridge. Trench 10' or more deep = 10' bridge.

If your trench is 30' deep, your bridge is 40' above the lower track, which looks like more of a difference, but really you're getting 10' of benefit and need that much less ramp leading up to the bridge.

I'm completely making up the numbers, of course, since I can't exactly take a tape measure to the game.

[Maxim]

I noticed that none of the discussion above mentioned pressing the "H" key during track laying (it was shown being used only in 2nd image). This gives you terrain details in the form of green lines indicating the slopes all around your building zone.

I also noticed a much larger "arch" formation in the 2nd image which when combined with the landscape / location / grid lines (not shown in 1st image) is probably a big contributing factor.

[Thineboot]

I agree, gussmed, that's the reasonable explanation (numbers are just variables). That's what I'd expect how it should work. Now take a look at Felix' second screenshot. It defies the whole idea.

You can activate contour lines in options, Maxim. That way they're always active during track construction.

About the location: Germany is obvious, Cassel and Frankfurt should be easy to find, see minimap. So where exactly is it? Between the cities you see flat terrain on the left and higher landscape on the right (for RE it's a mountain, at least a small one). If you can spot the contour-arrowhead pointing WSW you've found the spot. It took me longer to write this than finding it, so no big deal :)

You'll notice that the crossing is nearly flat. You'd expect that when you lower the lower tracks that the crossing tracks will also be lower - they won't. It's like there is a crossing, thus there has to be a bridge and since we never forget the original map - that's why bulldozing restores the original map - the game ignores the new landscape (or trench in this case) and only takes into account that it has to bridge over at the crossing point and the original height.

If you're testing use Sandbox and Supply towers, it makes it much easier to go back and forth.

[gussmed]

Originally posted by Thineboot:

I agree, gussmed, that's the reasonable explanation (numbers are just variables). That's what I'd expect how it should work. Now take a look at Felix' second screenshot. It defies the whole idea.

His screenshots are misleading. He's not setting the anchors correctly, or using enough anchor points.

Here's an example demonstrating exactly what I discovered. I took care to make the bridges as low to the ground as possible, and to make the bridges themselves as flat as possible. Pay attention to the bridge height relative to the ground, not the height relative to the other track.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2482226933

The second bridge, the one over flat ground, is about twice as high above the ground as the one over the trench. Your height reference is the supporting layer of beams directly below the track. It's roughly 5x that in the flat-ground bridge, and 2-2.5x that in the bridge over the trench.

[Thineboot]

I agree, bridges over tranches are a bit lowered but they're still way to "high". Check out any bridge over a river or a valley, you won't see this extra earthworks lifting the tracks so that extra pillars fit, see Baltimore as an example, that's a flat crossing.

As for Felix' anchor points, they aren't the point. They exaggerate the inclines, true, but it's about the peak of the bridge that matters. There is simply no need to raise a bridge more than a signal-height+x as seen in your lower example, too.

[some moron]

I think it's to allow largo cargo ships upriver.
He hasn't yet researched the Drawbridge tech.

[Maxim]

Originally posted by Thineboot:

You can activate contour lines in options, Maxim. That way they're always active during track construction.

Always on "settings" wasnt mentioned earlier either, until I mentioned "H" temporarily "on" and is a personal choice. Both methods can be used based on choice.