Curtis Lemay
Posts: 12969
Joined: 9/17/2004 From: Houston, TX Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ColinWright Mein Gott. First off, I've provided three cases: one being the Thames, which certainly doesn't flow through a mountain canyon. You're provided none -- except your TOAW screenshot, which as pointed out, doesn't demonstrate what you appear to think it does. Secondly, the 'artificially contrived counterexamples' were simply the actual cases of roads running along rivers that I'm intimately familiar with. The Sacramento, for example, is the closest river of any size to my house. Roads routinely cross back and forth over rivers, or don't, but in any case, what's on a TOAW map won't tell you if they do or where they do. The Thames isn't an example of this at all. Yes, it's got lots of bridges - but for the normal reasons - its at a major road network with roads crossing it all over the place. It isn't a single road running along a river snakeing back and forth due to canyon walls. I expect that's much the same for the Sacramento river near your house. In that case, the TOAW map will have those crossroads, just like the real world - and there will be no problem. (See my France 1944 map). I-40 travels adjacent to the Arkansas River for about 200 miles (I was on it just last week). It crosses it once - when the river finally turns north. There are lots of bridges over the Arkansas, but due to crossroads, not I-40 snakeing around. You'll see the same thing around the Mississippi River as well. Bridges over militarily significant rivers are expensive. They're only built when necessary. And, as I've repeatedly pointed out, even for that one artificially contrived example, the map designer would have been compelled to make the roads cross the river at the appropriate places for appearance purposes! (That's assuming the river was even militarily significant enough to include - most canyon rivers can be waded over most of the year). There is only a problem if the map designer was oblivious to what his map looked like. That's not going to be the case. But, even if it is in some rare case, the matrix can be made optional. Now for the good news: Yesterday, I took a stab at creating the map for the matrix. Editing it in XML allowed me to complete it in about an hour. (Doing it in the map editor would have taken forever). It's attached if anyone wants to see it. The river permutations run vertically, while the road permutations run horizontally. A bonus is that I'm now familiar with the XML map format (although I don't think I would ever edit a real map this way) Next, I have to pick the permutations that have bridges in them. That may take a few hours more. Then, I'll translate the picks to text and the Matrix will be ready.
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