Road Sign Kit

Revision as of 20:08, 24 September 2017 by imported>NelsonJenkins
Road Sign Kit

Road Sign Kit vendor image.
Creator Nelson Jenkins
Launch year 2009
Company Gentek Technologies
Availability Marketplace & In-World
User Manual

The Road Sign Kit is a set of 281 road signs based directly on the MUTCD 2003 specifications.

Instructions

Setup

  1. Rez road signs. It's easiest to do this with Use Grid enabled (go into the Edit menu, on the upper right there should be a checkbox labeled "Use Grid" or "Snap", check this). Then drag the sign using the Position tool and lock it to a grid position. This makes stacking signs easier (see below).
  2. If you want more than one sign on a pole ("stacked" signs) or you want to have a sign without the pole, start with the HIGHEST sign. For the sign below it, rez it and go into the Edit menu, choose the Select Face tool, and click the pole. Then, on the Texture tab (if there is no tab, click the expand arrow at the bottom of the window) change Transparency % to 100. This should make the pole disappear. If it makes the whole sign disappear, you messed it up. Position the lower sign on the highest sign's pole (use Snap To Grid to make it perfectly aligned).

Do NOT stretch or re-texture the road signs. They have been textured specifically from the Federal Highway Administration's MUTCD specifications. If the sign is too high, lower it into the ground.

FAQ

Why are my signs blurry?
We set up the signs so that they're all on just 2 textures, and just 2 mesh objects. This prevents hundreds of textures from loading sequentially and, ultimately, just never loading at all. We think it's better to have always-loaded, always-visible signs than extra-detailed prim and memory hogs.
Why do some start with RSK3A and some with RSK3B?
The A and B correspond to which mesh object is used for that sign. Typically, sign categories (route, speed limit, warning, etc.) all use the same mesh object, but there are some exceptions (the Yield and Stop signs, for example). This is mainly because we're lazy and named them that way when we were making the signs, and don't feel like renaming all 281 signs just because.

Updates & Release Notes

You can update your Road Sign Kit by rezzing the Updater Box.

  • v3.0
    • Made all signs mesh.
    • Removed white arrows & cardinals and pedestal crossing signs because of texture space constraints.
  • v2.0
    • Added hundreds of more road signs & route markers.
    • Made all signs modifiable so they can be stacked.
  • v1.0
    • Primary public release.


Original Design

The first Road Sign Kit included only a few basic signs and was aimed mostly at roleplay sim owners. As there were no other comprehensive kits on the market, sim owners would either have to buy individual signs (usually 2+ prims each) or create their own, usually failing to conform to MUTCD specifications. Because of this, the RSK attained massive commercial success, and has been adopted by many, if not most, roleplay regions since.

For versions 1 & 2, each sign was a simple prim with a single texture. On the back, the texture was simply flipped horizontally and colored black. While this was somewhat unrealistic, sim owners greatly enjoyed each sign being only a single prim, freeing up prims to be used elsewhere.


Mesh Update

Version 3 replaced all signs with single-prim mesh versions. Additionally, to make loading quicker, two optimizations were made:

  • Only 2 mesh objects are used for all signs. One object contains sign faces for rectangular signs, the other contains faces for all other shapes. Faces that aren't used are simply hidden.
  • All signs are mapped onto only 2 1024x1024 textures. The original textures had issues with unloading from cache once each specific sign was out of view, so now the textures are almost always loaded as long as at least one sign is within view.

Stop bord

A copybotted Do Not Enter sign sparked the Stop bord meme.