Mod for schematic transit maps

[vitusweb]

Hi everybody,

i was thinking that it would be great to have a mod for generating schematic transit maps (I mean, maps of stations just connected by straight line segments, without geographical accuracy, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_map).

Maybe it would be overkill for bus lines, but it would be useful for metro, rail and maybe tram.

I couldn't find anything like that on the Steam workshop.
Is there any modder interested in the development of this feature?

 

[metacritical]

cimtographer is about the closest thing that i know of

 

[muttonnoir]

One of the transport mods does have this function although it's pretty basic

 

[vitusweb]

Thanks to both for the reply!

After posting, I noticed that Transport Lines Manager has this as an alpha feature.
I have given it a try, but the output is actually quite disappointing at the moment :-(

I also knew Cimtographer, but it is not what I'm looking for.

Meanwhile I have searched some resources on automatic transit map generation and I am trying to implement myself an algorithm.
The first results are not bad (see attached example), but:
1) it is implemented in Matlab and therefore quite slow (the example with 62 nodes and 7 lines took about 45 seconds [EDIT])
2) there are still a couple of major issues (e.g. missing optimized label placement)
3) I have no modding expertise, so if anyone is interested in porting and benchmarking my code, let me know...

 

[muttonnoir]

Looks promising, certainly would welcome this function with possibly a number of layout styles to choose from. Hope to this implemented soon- either as a community mod or by CO themselves.

 

[vitusweb]

I have some improvements!

I used Cimtographer to export the city I am playing with and read the coordinates manually, which is not particularly comfortable ;-).

This is the original layout of my metro and ship lines (the city has about 80k inhabitants):

Those sharp bends and those crossings in the lower right corner are not very smart, I know... That's the reason why it is a good test case for my algorithm.

I experimented several parameters, at the end I converged on two main "modes":
1) a "faithful" representation, which enhances the keeping of geographical relationships among neighoring nodes
2) an "unrolled" representation, which enhances readability and tries to get rid of crossings, at the cost of geographical inaccuracy

Those are the best results I got for the two cases (most labels are now placed automatically, I just moved a couple of them manually):

I also tried to include some tram and train lines, but it becomes too messy. I would rather plot them on separate diagrams.

At the moment, results are strongly impacted by the initial choice of a "reference node", which is marked by a star in the diagrams. As you can see, I got the best results in the two cases with different reference nodes. I should investigate how to automate this choice.

There are also some known issues if parallel lines are present, which is not the case in this example, and many improvements could still be done.

Nevertheless, I post these preliminary results in the hope to motivate some modders to collaborate.
As I wrote, I have no idea how to implement it alone. I could even port some parts of the core algorithm by myself, but I need someone taking over the interface with the game.

 

[muttonnoir]

Interesting development- have you looked at CSLMapView as a tool for this task? Would it be possible/compatible? Cimtographer doesn't work for me but Map View is simple and creates really nice maps

 

[vitusweb]

Thanks, that was a great suggestion!
The output of CSLMapView is a XML file and would be usable (with some pre-processing).
I hope to find some time for further development.

 

[vitusweb]

Do you have any ready CSLMap files which I could use for testing?
Could you upload them somewhere?

 

[Kreatifchk]

How is the development of mod?