[WIP] ATS Company/Facility Directory — C/FD

[nautofon]

The Company/Facility Directory (C/FD) is a PDF document meant to assist driving in ATS without GPS navigation.

It features location descriptions for company depots and trucking facilities ("city location descriptions").


Download:

The C/FD is a work in progress. At this time, only a preview edition is available. The preview edition is currently limited to the following states, which taken together cover 78% of ATS cities: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wyoming

https://github.com/nautofon/cfd/releases/download/preview-404/cfd-preview-404.pdf (0,5 MB)

Some incomplete additional content for other states is available in a preview supplement:

https://github.com/nautofon/cfd/releases/download/preview-404/cfd-preview-404supp.pdf (0,1 MB)

Updates to the preview edition may be expected several times a year. Every update is announced in this thread. For additional download options, such as per-state PDF files automatically generated immediately after every change, please see the C/FD repository on GitHub.


Distribution:

This work is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. See reply #18 on the next page for a short summary of what this means.

If you reupload or modify this work, I'd love to know about it. Please drop me a line!


Special Thanks:

I gratefully acknowledge the support of Bedavd (ATS IRL Map) and truckermudgeon (ATS Slippy Map).

[nautofon]

Overview of selected notable changes to the C/FD:

• April 2024: add New Mexico, add Texas
• February 2024: introduce chapter-based page numbers, per-state PDF files
• December 2023: add Kansas
• October 2023: add Montana, add Oklahoma
• July 2023: allow reuse under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
• May 2023: add Utah
• April 2023: add Wyoming; add maps to a few select cities
• March 2023: add Colorado
• February 2023: initial preview release: Arizona, Idaho, Washington

For more detailed changelogs, please see the list of C/FD releases on GitHub.
The list of commits allows tracking changes line-by-line.

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When this thread was created, the first post included a list of ideas for possible features of the C/FD. In February 2024, that list was removed from the first post to allow for a more accurate description of the C/FD preview and its actual contents. The original list of ideas is archived here for completeness' sake:

• Complete register of the companies and trucking facilities in each city.
• Brief location descriptions for every single company depot.
• Overview tables showing the distribution of companies across cities.
• Tools to help with en-route trip planning, esp. with regards to rest stops.
• Catalogue of truck stop locations and the facilities they offer.
• Index of scenery towns which have company depots ("suburbs") and other relevant names.
• Separate versions optimized for screen viewing and printing on paper.

(Not all ideas will necessarily be implemented.)

[nautofon]

To help start a conversation: Here's a screenshot of the C/FD, showing Twin Falls in the first preview edition.

As you can see, the style is very plain and entirely unadorned. The typesetting is done in TeX, and I mostly stuck to the default settings for now. The reason is simply that lack of content is for the time being the biggest issue by far. This project is, and always will be, content first.

That said, I do intend to experiment with style variations at some point. In this first preview edition, the contents are still arranged in the same way I used when I shared them on the wiki. But what's good for the wiki is not necessarily good for a printable document. I'll have to play around a little, try different ways to collate the data, see what works best. Maybe there'll even be separate PDF versions for print and screen eventually—I'm thinking about a "dark mode", so that you don't go blind when you cmd-tab/alt-tab to look something up, but the differences could conceivably go much further than that.

Something I hope to work on soon-ish are graphics. As you can see above, everything is text in the first preview. I plan to design new icons for trucking facilities to replace the black text blobs. These icons should ideally use color, but they also need to print readably in black&white. Additionally, I'll look into replacing the road numbers with graphics showing route shields. However, I'm rather concerned that this might make the actual route numbers too small to read. Perhaps using text to identify routes as shown in the screenshot above is the best solution after all.

As for the list of planned features—they're just ideas. While I have been working on this and similar themes in ATS for years, the C/FD is an entirely new project, and I don't really know yet where I'm going with it. Content-wise, I intend to concentrate on writing location descriptions for the time being.

SCS keeps producing DLCs that add new locations to ATS. I expect to catch up with them and have location descriptions for more or less every city in ATS completed in 2024.

Yeah... It's going to take a while.

If you have any thoughts on the C/FD or its future, I would love to hear from you! Please write a reply below.

[TexasWhirlwind]

It would be extremely great if these companies has a sleeping spot.

[nautofon]

^ Some of them do! They're marked accordingly in the C/FD.

This allows you to plan ahead, know those rest areas exist at your destination, and actually sleep there. Because rest areas co-located at companies are somewhat rare and are not always obvious in-game, they can otherwise be easy to miss.

[truckermudgeon]

A very interesting (and very ambitious) project!

assist driving in ATS without GPS navigation

Is your vision to be able to navigate ATS with just this directory? Or to use the directory along with a printed map?

I'm also working on a map-related project, but it is very much meant to be used with GPS navigation . Out of curiosity: what's your workflow like? Are you collecting the data for companies/facilities completely manually (maybe by using the map editor and visiting cities one by one)? Or is there some form of automation you're using to help with the work?

[nautofon]

Hi truckermudgeon, thanks for your questions!

For highway navigation in ATS, using readily available real-world maps works pretty well in my experience. (I like to highlight ATS routes on them.) Plus the network of major roads isn't too complex to begin with. So I think being able to navigate ATS highways is not a big problem as such. Perhaps the directory might in future offer some help there, but that's not its primary goal. The way I see it, the real problem is inside cities: Because ATS companies and facility locations are typically fictitious, they can be very difficult to find without GPS navigation even if you do have a great real-life city map.

So that's the motivation for the C/FD: Make navigation inside cities easier.

As for my workflow for the location descriptions, it consists of two parts: First finding out what features exist in a city; second, well, describe their location. For the first part, I have a set of automated scripts that read out the game files and produce TeX source code (which later is used to render the PDF). This is an important help because it's not always clear which city a remote company location belongs to; also, some company locations might not show up on the world map at all (e.g. Nielsen roadworks). To actually write the location descriptions, I then use the dev cam to fly around cities looking for street names, route signage, and other pertinent information. This takes about 20-30 minutes for an average-sized city (but some complex cities take considerably longer).

Now I'm curious, too: Can I ask what your map-related project is about?

[truckermudgeon]

Thanks for your answers, and that link related to highlighting routes. It's led me to your post in Parking Lots are Glorious, and I am geeking out right now over the city map image you posted of Tucson . More on that later!

Make navigation inside cities easier.

Yes. That is a goal I can totally agree with. And I see now how your C/FD would help with that, since there's no IRL equivalent to ATS's city maps you can markup/annotate.

My map-related project's original motivation was to make navigation on freeways easier; specifically, I want lane guidance, because I've missed my exits so many times while driving through complex junctions, and I don't find the guidance that ATS provides all that helpful. I'm sure it's a solvable problem: given a calculated route, examine the junctions along that route, look at the AI Curve data for a junction, and infer the total number of lanes plus the possible lanes you can take to navigate to the next node in your route. It's just "a small matter of programming" .

The desire for lane guidance then led me to ask, "how hard would it be to create Google Maps, but for ATS?". So, a telemetry-plugin based webapp that you can do route planning with, and search for nearby facilities or other points of interest along the way. The answer to the "how hard" question is, of course, "very hard ".

One of the unknowns I've been thinking about in the back of my mind is, how can we get the data needed to label freeways, exits, and roads? While lane guidance is nice, lane guidance that tells you where a lane leads to (like I-10 East, or Congress St) would be even nicer. I'm guessing from your Tucson map, you've already explored similar/related problems... especially if it was generated semi-automatically. My attempt at recreating that map looks like:

Labeling freeways, exits, and roads is probably going to be a manual endeavor (probably need to build a Map Editing tool, similar to the ones used when working with OpenStreetMap data)... unless I try scanning nearby road signs and trying to guess what they mean and use that to annotate the ways. Or training an AI model to do it, haha. But maybe that's a "version 3" or "version 4" task. For now, I'm just concentrating on getting a browsable, decent-looking vector-tile-based map up and running. Basic routing with lane guidance is next. Lane guidance with richer info about where those lanes leads is probably too far in the future for me to worry about.

[nautofon]

Oh wow a slippy map for ATS, now that's amazing!

From your screenshot it seems the road network matches ATS exactly, even for inaccessible roads. So are you reading the geospatial data directly from the game files somehow? You mention the telemetry SDK, but IIRC about the only spatial data you can get from it is the player's current position. So I assume the idea is to use it to display the current GPS position on your slippy map eventually? That's pretty neat.

In the screenshot, I see drivable roads have sections of different types, colored yellow/white/gray. Sometimes the color changes briefly at an intersection or interchange—for example, at the spot where I-19 ends, or at Congress and 7th. How come? (And what's the meaning of the magenta rectangles?)

My Tucson map was 100% manual work. Yes, the result speaks for itself I suppose, but drawing it was time-consuming. Putting in the labels, on the other hand, that was pretty easy. At least for a single city—right now we have 180 of them, so obviously it'd take some time for you to complete it for all of ATS. But it's feasible. For your project, I'd consider exporting your data to like GeoJSON or something. Then you could simply use JOSM or QGIS for manual edits, rather than having to write your own editor.

[Optional Features]

This is pretty cool!

Together with the atlas, players can really get in depth with navigation!