Road network generation

This week’s focus for development was on the generation of believable road networks connecting all the locations for future towns and points of interest. The development time for that however was limited to the last 2 days of the week because I had to work on some important project management related and other non development related tasks. Unfortunately those took 3 days of this week. On Thursday I was finally able to start working on the generation of the road network and got pretty good results already by the end of that day. On Friday I was able to expand the system to also modify the terrain heights below roads and texturing to blend it with the existing terrain features. This algorithm does take a good amount of processing time because creating a road network that does not only look believable but also makes sure to connect all existing towns is quite the challenge. The algorithm time does increase exponentially the more towns are added to the game so there will likely be a limitation on how many can be placed to ensure world generation time stays within the target range. I did manage to cut the processing time in half by lowering the terrain resolution for the road network calculations and going back to full resolution after. This brings the current generation time for a 5x5km terrain with mountains, 10+ town positions and road network generation to around 10 to 15s in the editor. Next week I will be conducting some performance tests in a build. After that I will be looking into ways to generate the roads for the different towns and potentially be looking at biome placements in preparation for the addition of vegetation.

Notable tasks this week:

• Implemented road network generation to connect all towns and points of interest

• Lots of project management and other non development tasks

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.