Fractal Road Tool Stops Working in City Designer 3

sotik

I have a hand drawn map I am trying to convert into a CD3 map. I made a road tool that is fractal to give it my roads more shape and character then the default roads. As I follow my drawing clicking, I will get to a point where the tool just stops adding new nodes and I am unable to finish my roads. I am not sure if that makes sense or not, but I was wondering if this was a limit on the fractal tool that only lets you add so many nodes. Or if it is some kind of bug?

Monsen

Limit is about 40,000 nodes. For performance and stability reasons, I recommend not even going near that number though.
If you are getting to those kind of numbers, you should probably seriously rethink the amount of fractalization you are using.

sotik

Okay, that is what I felt the problem might have been. Fractal if I understands it adds more nodes on its own right? So I will need to change how often it adds nodes and I should be able to add roads in I am guessing. The main problem is the road I am currently trying to add in, is long and windy. So it's longer than if I just made a road straight across the map.

Monsen

Yes, fractals add a bunch of nodes, depending on the current depth. If the depth is 1, one node is added between each node you place, doubling the amount. For every additional increment of depth, the same happens, doubling the number of nodes again. So if you use a depth of 5, 32 nodes will be placed for every one you place, and for the max value of 10, each node places 1024 nodes.

LordEntrails

If you already have part of the road done, you can use the Reduce Node (REDN) command to get rid of some of the nodes in existing fractals.

JimP

I click no more than 3 times in fractalizing something. All of my computers tend to crash, or something else goes ka-thud !, if I keep clicking.

Windows just doesn't like fractals I suppose.

jslayton

Note that SIMPLIFY may give you better results than REDN. It's certainly more controllable because you can specify the minimum feature size, where REDN has a constant minimum angle metric that it uses, which can result in much less effective results.

LordEntrails

Posted By: jslaytonNote that SIMPLIFY may give you better results than REDN. It's certainly more controllable because you can specify the minimum feature size, where REDN has a constant minimum angle metric that it uses, which can result in much less effective results.

Thanks, didn't know that.

jslayton

SIMPLIFY is a new command with the last update, so it's not common knowledge (yet).