I spent days building support columns for the rail between Raymont and Rancho. Sure, physically impossible, but still not magically floating.
The issue at hand is not what looks “good”, but rather the fact that most styles, regardless of how “good” they look, turn into absolute crap when you need to establish a transition between two jurisdictions. There’s nothing wrong with varying road styles other than the fact that they need to connect to each other, because that’s what roads do. Because of this inconvenient fact, changing lane widths, lane expanses, etc. is generally poorly handled, especially in a voxel game environment such as Minecraft, and on such a large server such as PCB, where some city owners may be inactive, banned, etc. Communication is key if you want a consistent style within the server. If the players on this server have failed to conduct themselves to form a consistent road style, then I suppose having the staff do it instead is worth a shot.
Heck, if we don’t agree on anything else, I beg that lane widths and which side of the road to drive on are standardized - just about everything else regarding roads is secondary (and most other aspects of road design can probably be transitioned between without much of an issue).
Ultimately, this entire discussion boils down to one question: what do you envision the Creative map looking like? Will it be somewhat uniform, connected, and one big meshy network kind of thing, or like the current map, which is rather disjointed, with random builds everywhere, and a few cities connected here and there, held together by the mercy of warps?
Neither answer is inherently correct, but the answer to this question decides whether we make the attempt to keep the sort of setup we have now (build what you want, stay outta everyone’s way) or to have a new, organized, agreed-upon style.
An extreme case of the latter situation can be seen in the Greenfield map (and server). It is strictly whitelisted and has a very specific style, and a small player base. Close, effective communication along with clearly defined standards have allowed for the players of the server to create a huge, consistent city. Whether that can be achieved here on PCB (if we wanted to) remains to be seen.
Basically, it’s a choice between neatness or variety. Having more of one will always lead to a sacrifice in the other.
I plead guilty to this offense on several accounts. Then again, city owners were like “but I want an airport RIGHT HERE and this is the only land you get to build it on”. If the terrain is so hilly that a plane would literally have to approach at a 45 degree angle to land (probably end up blowing out a tire or two IRL), it’s simply impractical to have one. That’s not a need for standardization per se, but rather a need for common sense.
Good luck agreeing on what’s “popular”. What counts as “popular” - how many people are building a certain style, or how many people like a certain style? A few months back in a pocket of NR inactivity, several rail networks popped up, with poorly designed, quickly constructed tracks. It’s certainly “popular” if you consider that many people began building in that style, and I would even say that many people would be satisfied with it (functionality first, for some people). Granted, even most of the older NR and Acra City networks are built in such a manner, and it’s clear that what’s popular changes over time. Nothing wrong with picking “popular”, it just may be harder than it initially sounds.
To be honest, I sorta started NR under the intention that nobody gave a crap about my crappy tunneling, etc. It’s clear now that I was wrong. I’m am all at once taken aback, proud, and somewhat insulted.
