Tweak your Intersections Like a PRO in Cities Skylines! (Node Controller Renewal)

hello everybody and welcome back to the next episode of city skylines with me biffer and today i am going to show you how to use four different tools that are available on the steam workshop to make your road junctions and intersections look even better we're going to be starting off with the node controller renewal mod which has only just been released and updated has some fantastic new tools and abilities built into it we're going to be using the traffic manager mod as well also the move it mod and the intersection marking tool mod as well so if you want links to any of these then be sure to check out my collection in the description below and this is what we're going to be using here we are in new zealand uh regular viewers of mine will recognize this city that we've been building together on this lovely island map um but we are going to be working on this junction down here um let's see if we can get some light on the matter there we go fantastic now we can see what we're doing so this is as you can see a fully functional working uh highway interchange no problems at all i am using uh traffic manager down here we have a de-spawning turned off um just very quickly to mention in the vanilla game on the console uh traffic will despawn if it gets too busy but i like to turn that off to make things harder so as you can see this junction is working okay um but there's a few little funny little things that are set up here that i want to look at that we're gonna adjust to make it look even better so let us start with this little section here and we are going to start with the new node controller mod now kian zarin has been working on node controller for a long time he's handed that over to mcsergi so if you click on node controller i've got the unified ui mod which puts all of these in the nice little drop down box we haven't got all these dotted around all over the place so click on there now it says select node and we're going to select this node but before i do have a look at these trucks coming down here they need to turn off their look how sharp that turn is very very sharp there we go to slow right down to come up there and also we don't have any dedicated lanes so first of all before we jump into node controller i'm going to upgrade this one here with the normal standard highway and as you can see all of these with a little blue square on are available in the mass transit dlc we're gonna be making use of those so we're gonna upgrade this one here i am also going to use the anarchy mod again that is in my collection below there we go so now we have a dedicated lane for turning off so that's one good thing so everybody else going straight on doesn't have to slow down there we go and now we're going to select node controller and select this node you notice it goes orange excellent so now we get some interesting information on here we can start fiddling around with some of these now we can grab the middle of the circle and move that backwards and forwards now that used to be let's just reset that to default um and offset so we can change that with our mouse if we want and that will adjust i'm just using my scroll wheel and you can see the options on the screen for you different amounts of scroll that will change the whole node if we want we can individually do them there we go and you can see the colors very simple red to red blue to blue green to green and everything in this column affects this green segment over here uh this offset and that for the blue and that for the red and this one is all so if you want to change all of them you can do it there so first of all what i like to do with a section like this i'm going to reset its defaults there we go is select slopes i don't think this one is going to be affected too much yeah just sort of slope that out a bit because what you'll normally find is a node will always be flat so you have a nice slope coming in from the right it will then go flat and then it will slope again i want the whole thing to be sloped all the way through so i'll click sloped then quite often i'll click this one here make ends straight and that will take each of these lines across here let's see if it adjusts them let's zoom in a little bit yeah there's a slightly adjust that one there so that's not quite as hard a turn but that's definitely line that up and already you can see they're moving a lot quicker just by adding that extra lane and straightening that out and then what i'd like to do is just to make this whole node much bigger so i am going to scroll with this here and then i'm going to move that one back like that to about there i reckon that is quite good excellent we'll go with that now also if we just have a look down here and have a look at our lanes you can see here our lanes aren't quite lining up so this one's going off to the right which is fine these two don't quite line up and they're not i mean it's not too bad on this example but we can adjust that to make it even better so if we select this node if we hold shift to align road so i'm going to hold shift select that one there and i want to align with that corner there and just watch what it does and ever slightly shiftifies it all over a little bit just enough to line these all up so anybody coming down here to go straight on can literally drive straight through that node which is fantastic so that to me looks a lot better we can compare it with this one here so that is sort of the opposite and we can see how close and how small that node is where all this traffic is trying to merge into each other and then we can compare it to this one here a lot bigger a lot more space yeah i am liking that a lot so now we need to try and make this look a bit nicer so that takes us on to our second mod which is the intersection marking tool okay so i'm going to select the intersection marking tool icon at the top here and again you need to select a node to work on and here we go we get this box that pops up not as scary as it looks we can just run through a few of the items on here so basically what i'm working on is trying to get these lines looking like they should be painted in you wouldn't come across unpainted sections like this generally speaking so there's different options so i can move that from there to there just with left clicks and then i can change that to whatever i want i've got all of these options here we are going to go for a solid line i can have that automatically be solid if i left click there now hold shift and connect it there it's automatically made that solid and i'm then going to also do a solid line there and i'm also going to do a solid line there because this section is going to be filled in along here this needs to be a dotted line so i'm just going to move that from there to there and i think in this case the uh dashed i should say the dashes are the right length apart that all looks okay but you can change the width as you can see there of the lines just by using the scroll wheel you can change the length there we go you can change the space length you can fiddle with that as you like you can change the color as well if you so desire and yeah that's looking good for now now a little thing that i noticed some people don't always know you can see these lines don't line up if i hold ctrl you can see in the little pop-up by my cursor hold ctrl and then select that you can then move that up and down and what i find helps is because moving it up and down unless you're really good with your hands and your mouse bit harder to get it to select i tend to sort of move it further away and then yeah it's a bit easier to sort of get the finer movements there we go and i just sort of line those up just a teeny touch so what i'm doing instead of going up and down i'm sort of moving left and right instead just to get those that micro movement i want just to get that lined up that's looking a lot better right now normally what would be in here you'd have sort of filler in here um so now if you hold alt on your keyboard they go to these little tiny red dots so i'm going to start here and click to start creating a filler so i'm going to left click while i'm still holding alt there there there and there that adds a filler and you've got these choices you've got stripes you've got grids you've got a solid again you can change the color you've got chevrons you've got pavement and you've got glass i want that to be a chevron now what you'll notice is the chevron has not lined up it's all looking a bit weird so if we press the turn button ah there we go that is now i'll invert it that is the way i want it so as you're driving down this road here the chevron starts small and then they start widening out so you know that you need to move off to go down that lane that splits off the highway excellent so let's just grab that again very good so that is looking rather nice i think i'm just going to leave that like it is i'm very pleased with that now what you can do is you can copy that so we can copy all of the markings that we put into here like this we're just gonna do a copy or we could save it as a preset so i'm gonna copy it in this example and then we are gonna come all the way over here so this is the opposite of that junction pretty much isn't it so let's select that node so i right click to deselect the last node i'm going to left click to select this node and now the paste option is available so we're going to paste that in there and of course it's back to front so we can turn it so let's turn that around and let's turn it around again and let's turn it around again yeah it's not quite lining up because we can't see the space that we've got in here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to say don't apply i'm first of all going to get my node controller and just to give us a bit of space to work with i'm just going to make that to 21 without any other changes to it now i can still go back to the intersection marking tool and it's still got that buffer of one because i've copy and pasted it i can paste that in there ah now we can see what's going on so how about we let's have a look inversely order there we go so now that is the way it should be we can say yeah we can apply that that's fine and now we can tweak it if we want um so we're gonna have to line up the things again we're gonna have to change the look of the filler in here but apart from that that has made it really really quick now what i normally do with my fillers as we can see on this one i have the points pointing towards where you're coming in and then it opens out like that obviously this is going in the opposite direction so what i tend to do with these ones if we go to our filler there we go we hover over it that tells us where our filler is i would change this one too actually we could do chevron and we could just invert it like that oh oh oh uh yeah i think that looks okay excellent now there's one little thing there you might have noticed that truck came and he drove straight across our chevron now they're going to do it as well because our lanes are not lined up correctly that is one thing that i neglected to do so let's see if we can fix this almost deliberate problem that i did because over here we have lane mathematics we've got three lanes one goes off goes down to two over here we've got two lanes plus one going into two so it's not quite lining up so there's a couple of things you could do you could just add a line onto there and say okay these two have got to merge into one and leave it like that you might sometimes get that on the highway not the best so let's upgrade this road over here and i'll show you what happens so we've got anarchy still on you can see my chirper comes and goes if it goes that means anarchy is on and i'm going to upgrade that road there to three lanes so we've got two plus one into three that would work okay but we've lost our markings because we've changed the road what we can do now is go back into intersection marking tool roads have changed you want to apply the markings manually yes and there we go it has automatically popped them in for us but it hasn't quite lined them up but if we do um is there a way yeah if we click on this little red dot here there we go we can now move these to where they should be so we're going to move that up there move that up there move that up there what's going on here oh yeah we've got an extra line okay that's fine so that's near enough that's good and then we're going to tick and apply that there we go excellent and then one of these lines i'm going to change so i want to find this one here which is i hover over there that first one we are going to delete that yep because i want that to go there there we go excellent so that has now pretty much lined it all up exactly as i want but then yeah like we said we had some people trying to cut across the lanes which you're going to see here so that is where another tool comes in so let's come out of that one we can use the traffic manager and we're going to use lane connector again i'm going to select this node here and if you just look down here you've got control s a nice quick shortcut or hugo there as regular viewers would call it and control s on there will now make people stay and don't worry this blue line goes around like that they are going to stay in their lane that's going to make everybody stay in their lane through that node there we go and then not cut through until they get further on so you know a visual thing a nice sort of fix there but that is not looking too bad and then i might just go back to my node controller i'm going to slope that i'm going to line that up square some things off i'm possibly just going to move some of these things back a little bit and then i also want to line up these corners so we're going to hold shift get that one there and that one there there we go look at that straightened it all out and we can do that all the way along we're going to do that hold shift actually we need to go the other way oh it's a corner so i'll tell you what i'm not going to do that all the way along yeah so i think that looks okay there we go so we've got that one done we've got that one done so the difference now between that and something like this is huge isn't it it's huge and it makes all the difference now with a junction that's as busy as this which let's be honest isn't too busy you don't necessarily need to have the this extra lane for coming off as we've got here you can use another tool in traffic manager this one here it says clear traffic but that's not what it does there we go lane arrows and you can as you can see below control left click and it will change this to a dedicated lane so you can do that so they'll change at this node here if they want to come off and they'll go down there that also helps as well if you want to leave it like it was before just select on the segment there we go they can go straight on and come off right as we said it's not too busy but as traffic got worse you might want to change that but definitely where it comes on i would recommend doing something like this so you've got extra lanes now we've got this little join here from three lanes to two lanes the same as we've got over here from two lanes to three lanes um let's fix these up so first of all we're going to use the move it mod i press m there we go look we can select our nodes this node here is a little bit too close to there so i'm going to hold that i'm going to hold alt which should turn on toggling although it doesn't seem to do it sometimes i should do that myself i'm going to just move that along along just so this little lane for coming off is slightly bigger there we go so we've got a bit more space there which is what we need nice now we want this to look a bit better so we're going to grab our node controller and i want to make that a bit bigger it's got it as a middle i want to stretch that no that's not what i want to do and then once we've selected that node we want to change this to i think it's custom there we go so we get a little bit more space again i'm going to yeah it was already selected to slope i'm going to do this one here make ends straight yeah there we go and then i'm gonna do the offset of the whole thing just to give us a little bit more space to work with there we go then i'll right click out of that and that can stay there fantastic so now we want to do our intersection marking tool and as you know we can click that hold shift go there to get a straight line i'll do that there and then how would this normally work on a highway well you'd have say this lane would go on and that lane would go on and then that would be an extra lane that they could go through like that so that's working okay we can line these up a little bit let's do that but it's still looking a bit small still looking a bit cramped so let's go back into our node controller and we're just going to give these guys a little bit more space like that and i might even just tweak that a tiny bit there we go so that's starting to look a lot better we've still got this odd thing where these lanes going down aren't straight so i'm going to select that i'm going to hold shift select that one and select that one there we go so it's just going to budge it down a little bit and how does that look i mean you can tweak these things to your heart's content but i think that is much better than it looked before fantastic so now we have our transition from two roads to three roads sorted with the intersection marking tool we can copy that and move it somewhere else but instead of copying which just holds whatever the last thing was you copied in the memory we're going to make a preset so we're going to tick this button here we're going to save a little picture of that preset and we're going to call that preset two to three it's going to work for three to two as well but i'll remember that so there we go you can call that of course whatever you want then we'll come all the way down here to this area we're working on before and we've got the opposite we've got three going into two so let's give ourselves some room to work with we'll use the node controller first we're going to change this one from a middle to a custom there we go and then in the all column by offset i'm going to scroll and i'm going to take that up to say 20 slope is already selected i'm going to click make end straight didn't need to make any changes that's fine so right click we'll save that intersection marking tool select on here go to our presets we've got two to three i'm going to tick it and it's the opposite way round so inverse order and there we go that is pretty much it you can either tick apply or you can right click and it will automatically save it so now the two lanes going down the highway carry straight on the one lane coming over here that merges has to merge into those two lanes which is good you are going to get some crossing over like that if that bothers you do you remember what to do yep go to traffic manager lane collector control s and that has done it a little bit odd here yeah let's change that i'm going to change that so we're going to go from that one to that one not that one there we go so that one carries on those two merging i mean you can do it either way it's totally up to you you don't even have to do that bit just watch when you do these lane connectors some people do these everywhere i know doing it here and here isn't going to be a problem because we've got plenty of nodes afterwards where they can change lanes but if you've got junctions too close together you could be causing yourself problems so just keep that in mind but i've lined that up so it looks correct with the lines that we've got and there we go when i get to the end they'll merge in nicely and i think that looks okay i don't think we need to do much more adjustment there i'm really pleased with that so with all of that information at hand we can now dive in and change all the other nodes that are on this intersection and see what a difference it makes so i think that's time for a time lapse [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so there we go i think that's really increased the realistic look of this highway i'm very pleased with the way it's turned out let me know what you think in the comments below and be sure to subscribe if you're new be back here for some more episodes building and expanding in our city here of new zealand have a fantastic day take care everybody [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Biffa Plays Indie Games

Views: 203,061

Rating: 4.9144073 out of 5

Keywords: cities skylines how to start, how to start a new city, Cities Skylines best mods, cities skylines top mods, Cities Skylines, how to fix traffic cities skylines, urban planning, cities skylines how to fix traffic, biffa plays, cities: skylines, cities:skylines, cities skylines how to fix your city, biffa2001, city builder, cities skylines what mods, cities skylines mods, how to, node controller renewal, intersection marking tool, traffic manager, move it mod, node controller 3

Id: 6aK3YyQGCD0

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021