Arthur's Highway Engineers - (Alpha)

Highway Engineers - (Alpha)

Road (and bridges) planning and construction for planets, straight from an LCD

Pick the "Highway Engineer" script on any LCD panel, look at it and click: place nodes on the planet map, shape the curves, check the price, and let the contractors do the digging

Requires Procedural Cubemap Api (the roads are baked into the planet itself, so no grids, no lag, and they survive anything a voxel can survive)

This mod is a many-months long project i have, and is definitely not ready... but judging by other mods released recently, it's a feature that a lot of people want, so I published it as my take on "road building" mods, it has pretty much 0 runtime cost, since the road is baked into the planet, this mod does NOT apply any voxel modification on the planet, and the Bridges are actually "Planetary Boulders" shaped as bridge prefab parts

Check out my other mods

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Features:

Road Planner

- Interactive planet map on any LCD (Satellite, Terrain, Materials and Biomes layers) - Click to place nodes, drag to move them, drag the tangent handles to shape the curves - Auto Road: finds a path between two points, weighting distance, inclination and earthwork to your taste - Road settings: material, width, depth, max slope, embankment angle, smoothing distance, follow terrain or keep a steady grade - Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y to undo and redo while looking at the panel

Bridges

- Valleys and canyons are detected automatically and bridged - Two designs: Beam (straight pillars) or Arch (one rib springing from the canyon walls), by default whichever needs less concrete - Approach ramps on both ends, meeting the road - Automatic mode did not see your gap? Hold a node and scroll the mouse wheel to lift it (and force a bridge), or use + / - on the selected node

Contracts

- The server quotes every road before you commit: earthwork in Space Credits, and materials as items (Gravel, Steel Rebar, and Concrete Mix when the Concrete Tool is loaded) - Itemized invoice, with the faction that takes the job (nearest trade station) - Deliver the materials to the Road Logistic Depot and the road gets built - Built roads and bridges are kept in a shared road library, synced to every player

Maintenance

- Bulldoze: remove roads and bridges (partial refund within the first hour, a fee after that) - Repair: repave with a new material, fill holes dug into the road, rebuild its bridges, and re-paint the guide lines

Guide Lines

- Double yellow centre line and white edge lines painted along the road (decals only, the terrain is untouched) - Off by default: turn "Guide Lines" on in the road settings, or "Re-Paint Guide Lines" in the repair dialog

Other Mods

- Water Mod: water shown on the map - Concrete Tool: bridges are made of its Concrete, paid in Concrete Mix

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Server Admins

Prices are in HighwayEngineerCosts.xml and limits (quotes, open contracts per player, segments per road) in HighwayEngineerServer.xml, both in the world storage folder of the mod

Chat commands: /road free : roads without cost, on or off (admin) /road forcecomplete : completes every contract still waiting for delivery or payment (admin) /road debugDropoff : shows the delivery boxes of your contracts

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Known Issues

- The approach ramp always leaves the bridge straight, so a road that turns right after a bridge can meet the ramp off-center - Roads and ramps can't be shaped to the exact same width - The planet map is drawn with LCD sprites, so on small screens it is a bit pixelated

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WARNING, this is in ALPHA, so bugs are expected, please report it below in the comments

Roads are planet modifications, removing the mod (or the Cubemap Api) won't remove the roads already built, but the road library, contracts and bridge bulldozing go with it

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Thanks for:

@Digi - Because if at some point you made a mod for this game, you need to thank this guy (and for the Concrete Tool)

@Malware - Mdk² is still amazing