SOLVED How wide do you make your tracks?

[Willy Wale]

Open question to the forum.

I'm making a track based on my home town. At first I decided to make the track width 12m at all points except where buildings are too close together. This is wider than the actual road almost everywhere so I planned to effectively tarmac the pavement (sidewalk) to meet my requirements. Now I'm having second thoughts about the look and feel not being right.

Some of the real roads are only 6-7m wide, so realism would come at a price.

Working on a car being less than 2m wide. How narrow is too narrow for an AC track?

 

[luchian]

I would always vote for realism (and I did). Especially for a real location.

In the grand scheme, unless the ENTIRE track is narrow, it could be quite nice to have some narrow segments. To learn the track, know where it's not a good idea to overtake . All this applies for city-ish track (or track with side walls, like Bathurst.

If it's an open area track, on small country roads.. well there I would make a test. It might require to much precision for racing. So there I would add some width .

Hope ^this^ is not confusing

 

[Willy Wale]

I would always vote for realism (and I did). Especially for a real location.

In the grand scheme, unless the ENTIRE track is narrow, it could be quite nice to have some narrow segments. To learn the track, know where it's not a good idea to overtake . All this applies for city-ish track (or track with side walls, like Bathurst.

If it's an open area track, on small country roads.. well there I would make a test. It might require to much precision for racing. So there I would add some width .

Hope ^this^ is not confusing

It's a town location but with a newer road built along a dismantled railway so will allow some high speeds.

The narrow roads (50-60%) are similar to this (Copyright Google -Streetview)



And the new road is below (Copyright Google - Streetview)

 

[luchian]

It's a bit tight, it's true, but should be fine, IMO.
Maybe narrow the sidewalk in the city.

Once you have a basic road layout (keeeeeeep the bezier, as @LilSKi would say ), maybe throw a few blocks on the sides and prepare a small test. But I personally like the idea of tight and careful racing .

 

[Pixelchaser]

the standard is 3.75 m per lane in the uk. it can vary when it needs to. but even motorways have 3.75 spacing. now in game this can seem to thin. but its not, its the perception and viewpoints that are incapable of providing a real sense of scale.

so i use 4 metres because it suits the division of 2 required for texturing. i also add another 0.5 m per side, and for simplicity i use the same for my single track roads. which makes a nice 5 metre figure. so for a single track road, 10 m is just nice for all things considered and the extra width just helps the ac experience.

 

[Willy Wale]

OK, thanks both.

So the road with the terraced houses in is 6.7m from kerb to kerb. I notice that Kunos have claimed 10m for Highlands short but haven't checked it as Norton keeps deleting 3DSimED every time I install it :'(. Anyway screenshot below of a test run.



For time trials I think it's fine. Some of the corners are 50km/h edge of grip technical which I like. I'll set-up the start positions and do a quick race to see what it's like, but it's definitely narrow.

 

[Pixelchaser]

nice. its the perception when in the car that gets thrown off. lack of head movement laterally etc. so it ends up feeling much better at 10 m.

part of it is actually reaction time involved in spacial awareness. all roads are built with 1 m extra space which is designed around being able to react and re orientate the car at a given speed.. every curve on a road is designed around this principle too.

in game we can not possibly match the reaction times with real life. we need more space to react the same and that is why it feels better being wider because we have roughly the same space and reaction time perceptually speaking.

check out the uk road department statistical stuff online, quite interesting.