Elevated ways at different heights

[BAC1-11]

Hello,

I've been playing Simutrans for many years now (well over a decade), but surprisingly I've only recently come across the option to turn on "Map Roughness", I've very much enjoyed this mode, even if it involves much higher civil engineering costs for ways. I have however, come to lament even more the fact that elevated ways can only be built at a height of 2 (double height map). If I want to cross a river, I much either be at that exact height, or cross at a straight. Elevated ways allow for bridges at diagonals, but as the game is, I can only do that at a specific height above the terrain, which has become quite limiting on the rougher maps.

Have I just not found a functionality? If not, has anything been considered to remedy this issue?

Many thanks.

[jamespetts]

This is a limitation in the game engine. It would be theoretically possible to  allow elevated ways to be built at other heights, but would require a very considerable amount of coding work. In addition, each and every elevated way type in each and every pakset would have to be re-drawn to have variants for each and every height, so would involve a truly enormous amount of pakset work.

This is not a priority for my own work at present. If anyone else would like to implement this into the code stably and at least one Simutrans-Extended pakset, I should happily incorporate it.

[freddyhayward]

One (expensive) workaround is to build elevated ways on top of elevated ways, then deleting the lower one. This allows you to build 2, 4, 6, 8...etc tiles above ground, but obviously not 1,3,5...etc. I have done this a few times, using cheap narrow-gauge trestle bridges as the foundation, then building the actual elevated rail on top.

[Phystam]

In OTRP, such a feature has already been implemented. I think someone can cherry-pick the feature for Extended.

[jamespetts]

In OTRP, such a feature has already been implemented. I think someone can cherry-pick the feature for Extended.

Interesting - this is worth considering if somebody is prepared to look into this, although we had probably better work on integrating the latest code from Standard first.