Node Controller 3.0 Mod Tutorial (Renewal) Cities: Skylines Tutorial

everybody welcome back my name is jumble and i'm here today to talk about node controller a recently updated mod for city skylines that gives the user a lot of control over their roads now you might be saying to yourself yumble my nodes are fine what's wrong with my nodes everything's everything's good why should i change i'm going to give you a very strong case today as to why you should implement node controller in your city and how it can help you improve things visually and how it can help improve the the flow of traffic in your cities so the name of the mod is node controller what we're looking at right now is a classic example of a node the simplest example is a place where roads intersect there's more to it than that really every every time that a road segment connects to another segment each of these circles here are actually nodes but let's look at this obvious one here an initial application for node controller might be to expand this intersection so what that actually does for you is give gives the traffic instead of making this tight left turn we can actually widen it up a little bit let me show you how that works i've got a mod called unified ui that kind of tucks node controller away you can see in the bottom left there kind of tucks it away until you need it and this is node controller it's it's open it looks like nothing except your your cursor will say select node we're going to do that click to edit so this is node controller this is the the actual interface all of these green lines and yellow dots and and colored sections here as well as this panel this node right now i'm editing node number 30 3100 three uh thirty one thousand two hundred and seventeen place value matters right um that doesn't matter but what what we can do let's let's start with the simplest change that we can make each of these columns counts for one of the angles one of the connections to this node right the all section is all of them the red one is red the blue one is blue greenish yellow there and orange so those all have their own their own parameters here including offset shift rotation stretch and marking the marking is is um we'll start from the bottom i guess the marking if we turn them all off all the crosswalks go away that's what the markings are that's just visual so visually the crosswalks will disappear what i mainly concern myself with the others here they're they're very specific and you can really get into a lot of trouble messing with them too heavily i'd recommend experimenting but in this in this example if we take the offset under the all column and use our scroll wheel you can see you scroll the wheel to change if you want to change by 10 you can hold shift or if you want to change by 0.1 units you can hold control but without even holding anything i can turn up this node to maybe 30 let's see what 30 looks like now we've got this this nice kind of large intersection with with more of a sweeping left turn right now this bus can actually make the left turn without having to to be cramped in the original in the original space if you ever want to set a node back to default you can click on the node and you can hit this button here reset to default boom it goes back to how it was you can see look at this look how far back the traffic was was pushed this turn became much much wider because the start and end point of it became further away so the radius of the turn was was increased i guess i'd say right so to put it back where it was scroll the wheel up to 30. that's somewhat arbitrary it'll it'll be whatever you want when the time comes a reason why you might want want to not expand a node completely like i did here like this node i believe i changed it a little bit if we reset it to default you'll see it's it's based on what's around the node like we've got this walgreens on the corner here we've got this condo area we've got a building there and a gas station there if i increase this by too much you'll notice that suddenly our sidewalk is kind of disappearing right until finally we've got the building floating in the air so a reason not to crank this up on every single intersection is that it does take up real real estate in the area and it increases the the the radius of these turns as well which which refines the sidewalk until it no longer exists so i've chosen to do this one to 22 though this one is a similar set of roads going all the way up to 30 for that major highway interchange look speaking of highways let me show you how you might be able to use node controller to really this gets crazy let's fix up a highway now take a gander at this i would say it's a decent looking interchange on its own right i think the angles of things are nice and and this is kind of a bread and butter partial clove relief for me this is my favorite way to do it i've already taken the liberty of using intersection marking tool on each of the connections to really make it look look marked up but if you look closely or maybe you don't even have to look that closely if you look at the angles and the curves you'll notice that it doesn't really make any sense like this this is really weird and cramped looking uh the angle that this connects at the merge here is very strange and these are also somewhat these like major connections are kind of kind of weird looking there's like an extra crosswalk overlaid over the intersection there this turn if you look at it from the driver's perspective it's real squirrely looking like it gets kind of thinner and funny looking i'd like to show you how to use node controller to iron out all these all of these uh issues visual or otherwise like i said a moment ago if we fix the angle that cars are turning at it actually changes the path that the cars go on i didn't state it explicitly but cars can go faster if the turns are less sharp so a reason that you might want to fix this and make it not so sharp and sudden is to make it so cars can move a little bit quicker now one modification that that was added if you've used node controller the previous iteration we are now on node controller three node controller two was good but it lacked this visual component and let me show you what that means um one thing that you can do this is all default right now there's no i've made no changes to this it's all it's all been reset to default one thing you can do is shift click on these sides watch this and it automatically lines it up so that suddenly this road is is essentially going straight and if you continue down the line it gets it just gets better and better watch this you can find your your segments i don't recommend clicking in in green or orange sorry the green areas and the red areas are not to be clicked on orange sections are actually where there's where there's a node i'm using move it to illustrate that so i'm going to look for the next node and i'm actually going to refine that to where this one is and you can follow the entire road this is this is driving me crazy in the best way you can you can go down the entire road and shift click on that inner that inner angle there and line it up the whole way down and the result if we do it on both sides is amazing usually highways and skylines look kind of not sure how to say it they look kind of off off center off kilter and this should also be lined up with this one in theory yep it's the same so now we've we've made this flat you'll notice that the the margin goes in that's just the network the the um the sound barrier moves a little bit closer and that's okay but the lanes are straight right now this is you'll see the difference on the right side here it really dips in hard and and and goes at kind of a weird angle if we do that to both sides it's incredibly fast and what this is really doing is it's changing the shift i believe if i'm not mistaken i could be i could be right no i'm right that's what it is so the blue here rather than taking the shift and just and just guessing and kind of moving it around i'm just scrolling around right now you know rather than doing that we can let's reset it to default shift click and then click on the one you want to line it up with and you can do that to every node if you want to make it so your your interchange is is uh visually straight i don't think this will speed the cars up too much but this is just amazing to me the fact that you don't have to flounder around and guess how far you have to shift the lanes and things like that you can just shift click and the lanes are are shifted and everything's even so that left lane traffic is now going straight through which looks amazing i i've become used to the fact that the lanes look weird with the node system in skylines but that's a real quick and easy fix the next thing you can do is look at this these these guys are all off-center and weird you can drag these to where you want them to go to kind of straighten them out there's no benefit to having this angle be all crazy it makes the markings look weird and it makes the cars have to drive at a weird angle so let's flatten that out visually let's give this a little more space we'll give this a little more space and what this is affecting this this what i'm doing the dragging here is affecting the offset of each of these um connections to the node so i'm just increasing the offset kind of manually and because i've already done the markings here that's that's fairly clean looking i can kind of use the chevrons as a guide almost you'll know that things are funky if if it's too first of all if you get clipping like that if you're getting z fighting and clipping that's no good so you know it's something's off but but the chevron also your chevron on a merge or a split will look really clean if things are fairly even so i'm a big fan of that um one other thing to to talk about is the slope you can slope your intersection or leave it flat which is amazing this was included in the previous version of node controller but i'm a huge advocate for hitting slope by default your connections are flat and the wider you make the node the the further that flat area extends so i strongly recommend hitting slope when when possible and what that does is it it starts the slope during the node so it doesn't wait to the end and it just looks quite a bit more natural like this one is is a small node but it's flat roads don't really they don't flatten out all the sudden when another road connects that's not how things work so with this one it's been widened up a little bit i've already done intersection marking tool which is also part of unif the unified ui so they're both nested in here it's already marked up it's been extended a little bit the smoother you make it the better to a point i would say but for highway i like doing it visually and just kind of eyeballing the whole thing one other button that you can hit just to perfect what you've done is this square button here make the ends straight i'm gonna i'm gonna hit that squared off looking button it actually didn't do anything because i did a pretty good job what it would really do in my experience is if something was off and you hit make the ends straight it automatically refines it to that point right it moved it back a little bit in a way i don't like but if you're ever concerned that the that the node is angled in a way that's funny if these two aren't if these two um corners are offset too far from one another that button can help to adjust that and that's you can do that to every single one of these really you know you can you can also just hit that right off the bat i should have said that first if you hit that button make ends straight watch me so this is default other than the fact that we moved this one over earlier so let's put it back shift click and then click the node so we've shifted the lane so that it's straight through and very very refined looking this is all at a crazy angle and that's what's causing this ditch effect we can slope the node to make it sloped and we can click that uh make ends straight and that does most of it right there honestly straightening out the ends because the default setting on this is just not that great the default setting on a highway connection not so good and then just extend these by a little bit look at that does not even take that much does not does not take that much to do another practical application of the whole thing so here you can see that this angle is fairly good this side is kind of a semi-circle starting from the node back here we're going 90 degrees and then another 90 degrees and then we're connecting to the intersection that's all well and good but this road is kind of left left out and real funky looking so to do the same thing we did click the thing uh we can hit the make and straight button that'll help shift it immediately i think that shift clicking this one and then clicking this one look at that so we shifted the road to the right it knew what i was trying to do i wanted to align this corner to this corner let me reset it so you can see it again look at how kind of sudden that corner looks right if you were approaching this in your car it would be very awkward it would be poor highway design honestly and this just gives you the control necessary to to kind of combat the city skylines node system and say look that default connection is no good i want to offset that oh god oh god what have i done let's try it again shift click and then click this one oh god oh god okay i'm gonna reset it i'm going to the first time i said make ends straight so now let's make the end straight and let's see if it works yeah okay so apparently maybe that was a glitch maybe not but make ends straight and then shift clicking this one and this one alleviated that issue and now you can also widen this a little bit and then widen this one a little bit looking at the chevron markings i strongly recommend using intersection marking tool with this as well just to help the appearance because without an a marking here if this weren't marked up none of the the uh not chevron but the oh i'm drawing a blank this thing tell me in the comments what this is called i'm gonna call them slashes for now that's not what they're called stripes stripes don't tell me in the comments what they are stop typing um if the stripes weren't there and these these dotted lines and these connectors weren't there this would just be an empty black field just like all these intersections where there's just an empty black field now this one you'll notice that the sidewalk i i did the inner i did intersection marking tool on this one this one's a pretty advanced pattern i'd say i'd say that that's there's a lot going on within the intersection marking tool there's a lot of of lines that have been drawn and a lot of fillers and stuff and it looks pretty good but i'd like to go into node controller and really refine that further so this is i'm going to hit the make end straight button again which seems to be a really good first option and you'll notice what that did i'm going to reset it keep an eye on this one here which is which is diagonal and this one here which is crazy diagonal and the crosswalk is evidence of that as well that's an intersection marking tool crosswalk so let's hit make ends straight and that immediately takes care of a lot of the issues now in this situation here you'll notice there's this double crosswalk i want the crosswalk functionality to remain and i want to get rid of the vanilla crosswalk so i'm taking note of the color here i'm looking at the orange so the orange you don't have to memorize the number but the color here makes it evident to me at least and now we can go down and go to marking and turn that off and now all you're seeing is the intersection marking tool crosswalk which i've added on my own i did that as part of the the markings here and deactivated that vanilla that nasty looking vanilla weird-looking crosswalk and that's a pretty good result i still might recommend widening this a little bit just to make the turns a little a little smoother maybe bring this one back a little the key starts poking through there but that's a really good way to go you know pull this back until the texture starts to look weird you can see the texture tears don't go nearly that far but look at where the texture looks like it's okay getting a little tearing there but it's not so bad we'll drag this one back a little ways to smooth everything out um what else could be done let's see if we shift-click this external one no so that's not it's not always going to be the way to go we can just zero that out and hit enter it'll put it back to zero um so that option will work in some situations in this kind of s-bend situation that shift-clicking to to fix the shift did not work um also let's see what this a sloped version of this might look like you can see that this the grade on this hill is slightly steep i could live with it honestly that's not that that bad but i would like to see what it looks like sloped wow that might even be better so if you remember earlier i mentioned that sloping the intersection means that the slope can begin at the during the node rather than after the node and if you look at this we're going up fairly smoothly i'd say sometimes if you do this too aggressively you'll get flying cars i don't have any vehicles there's no traffic in this interchange currently but flying cars may happen so be aware of that but yeah bottom line is node controller is amazing i think that's everything that i use it for i use it on this one over here as well this this single point urban interchange which has traffic flowing through it you can see that we fixed the offset of these to make them all flat uh to make this this transition flat here another beautiful side effect of that is that this four lane highway which usually has usually everything centered and really funny looking now our merge lane if you look at this we're merging in this actually looks like a merge where it actually looks like this lane is ending and it's going to merge in normally this whole thing is centered and it looks like both outer lanes are merging in so it just really helps with the the appearance of things the realism of things if you've heard of a mod called um city skylines urban roads tool cesar i believe it's called csur this kind of gets the effects of csur without using hundreds of megabytes of ram it's a very light mod very easy on the system i'd strongly recommend upgrading from the original node controller as soon as possible this just adds so much visual so many controls that can be used visually in the user interface and it's color coded and it's beautiful and it makes things really really easy with great results everybody thank you for watching i've been yumble i appreciate you being here definitely leave a comment below like the video feel free to subscribe to the channel if you want to see more videos check out my other tutorials i also stream on twitch two days a week at least two days a week sometimes more but i really appreciate you being here and i hope to see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 219,621

Keywords: node controller, networks, city skylines, realistic, highway, transition, intersection, intersection marking tool

Id: NCD06qDeoIg

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021

Reddit Comments

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