Hi everyone,

the hard coded tile limit of max. 255 tile protoypes poses a big problem for mods like this. As the Factorio devs stated, this limit wont be raised. If you are a fan of Alien Biomes as i am, then this is bad news.

This leads to the following question: Is asphalt roads too bloated with its 65 different tiles? In this thread, i'd like to discuss the next steps in developement of this mod with you. Here are some ideas:

• Should i add an option to disable some of the line tiles?
• Should i remove some of the line tiles?
• Should i switch from tile based line marking to entity based line marking?

I'd be glad to hear your opinions!

It's sad to hear that the devs won't raise the limit, but I can only assume it would involve rewriting major parts of the engine? As for your three options I believe the final would be the best one. You could also potentially remove the 3 extra hazard asphalt colors to save a couple tiles. Currently though Alien Biomes is the real hog and I don't think much can be done about it. In a perfect world I'd have Dectorio, Alien Biomes, Asphalt Roads and More Floors but as it stands I only use Dectorio and your mod. I love having beautiful highways for Pavement Drive Assist and just can't give that up no matter how many pretty trees there are.

i have to agree with oniksu: just use fewer mods that add lots of tiles, and i say this while loving nice roads through pretty landscapes, but having no problems since i removed alien biomes which accounts for half of all tiles on my old map :-(
btw: the problem of increasing the number of IDs is not only a rewrite of parts of the engine, but the increased memory usage (including bottlenecks on computer bus and caches etc) of 1 byte per tile, or 1GB for a map with 1000² chunks.
i think that the problem sooner or later will appear again until some standard for vanilla and all mods is found how to add more tiles without conflicts.

the problem with lines is that each country has its own standards, and everybody would need to enable and disable other subsets of tiles to fit his own set. and thus i would like to have even more lines in this mod (as long as it doesn't add more conflicts with too many IDs). where i live, we don't have yellow center lines, but instead we have lots of different white lines: single continuous line for "no overtaking", stripes for normal road, and combination of continuous lines with stripes off-center to indicate "overtaking in one direction only" (from the side with the stripes). the current single and double lines can't be used for this purpose since they all are centered and thus don't connect properly. i would need continuous and striped lines that are centered and connect, with additional striped lines offset to the centered continuous line, and several other wider lines (between main road and on/off-ramps), etc ...

thus i think the only solution would be to have very few different tiles for influencing drive assist (one tile to absolutely prefer, one to absolutely avoid, and maybe very few others for different degrees of prefer/avoid). all the other lines should be only optical effects that can be put on top of those few different tiles, eg striped white lines on top of "slightly avoid", continuous white line (or for the US a double yellow line) on top of "absolutely avoid", and blank and other markings and signs on top of "preferred road").

it will be a giant task to do all those changes, but how else would you reduce the number of tiles/IDs significantly and at the same time still keep roads buildable according to many different legal regulations around the world ?

with such a system, maybe even new mods would be possible, eg street markings like the AAI zone markers (arrows etc), that are ignored by simple drive assist systems, but could be used to redirect automatic transport vehcles, similar to what i was shown as an add just before the latest factorio video that i watched: http://www.leo-locative.com/de-de/entdecke-leo/

Honestly, since I saw this mod for the first time, I wondered why you didn't make the road markings as decals. Not only they could reduce the number of tiles in the tileset, but also could work on any road width and be quite handy for nice smooth turns. The ideal would be to make something like this mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/mydecals but with the interface of this mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/textplates

I think a simple country theme selection would be perfect allowing the user to have the perfectly minimal amount of tiles for there country/style.

Also, a diagonal option is a good idea some people don't build diagonal roads so that means they're not using half the tileset almost I for example only use the yellow lines to recreate double yellows those roads are almost always in a built-up area which is never diagonal.

The decal route as suggested would be the best solution even if it worked exactly like now with 8 rotations and locked to tile means you only need 1 decal for each line as all 8 rotations would exist. Meaning only 1 ingame tile asphalt and if you really wanted to go out there could add other styles of asphalt a couple colours max 10 tiles as an optional thing.

For now, I would just like a quick fix so I can update my game cause im currently stuck at 0.16.25 just allow me to disable the yellow or white lines while you work on a more long term solution :D

Wouldn't using decals destroy ability of 'Pavement Drive Assist' to follow lines? I use Asphalt mostly for that.

@ouk_ouk probably it would be possible to change Drive Assist to recognize marking decals too?

Wouldn't using decals destroy ability of 'Pavement Drive Assist' to follow lines?
probably it would be possible to change Drive Assist to recognize marking decals too?

yes, and that applies also to other mods that remove decorations. on an old map from 0.14 or 0.15 i used such a mod to reduce memory and savefile size by more than 50%, also improving save/load times to maybe 25% of the old save/load times (which on a huge map can add up considerably for many autosaves on large maps). if the "asphalt decorations" would have a simple naming scheme, it should be easy to exclude those decorations from removal in such another mod (if at all necessary: that mod only removed decorations once for the entire map when it was added to an old save later, and afterwards only on newly generated chunks which of course have no roads yet)

Kinda late to the party, but I did always disable most of the line markings in my games anyways since I feel like they bloat the menus way too much with little effect. They may be pleasing to look at but some are really similar or could be put together in one tile prototype that has asphalt edges. Decorations/Decals may work too, but that would most likely have some side effects.