A while back I mentioned how I finally turned my attention to the roads. What I didn't say is that once I started, I couldn't quite stop, so this past month has gone almost entirely into modifying the road tool to achieve what I had envisioned.
The biggest part of that vision was to have the road now carving its own ground. Instead of lying on top of the terrain and hoping it works, the road cuts into a slope where it needs to, and builds itself up where the ground falls away, so it acts like a real road does. The ends don't just stop dead anymore, but seamlessly fade into the terrain.
This opened up possibilities that were previously impossible with prebuilt roads. You can now place roads under ledges or along the top of a cliff and the road won't damage the vertical rock face... you cannot imagine the pains to have that implemented. Seeing a trail winding along a steep slope for the first time was worth every hour of tricky work. I also took time implementing complex intersections, and visual diversity. There are now new junction pieces in the set, and the curved parts are arranged a little more irregularly, so a long curve no longer looks like the same tile over and over again. Where a road meets a river, both finally behave harmoniously instead of the road trying to dig up the riverbank.
And the part I'm quietly the most pleased about: every road across every world section has now been replaced with the new road system. This resulted in the deletion of the whole set of old road tiles (well over a hundred!) that had been sitting there unused. It feels so good having the whole world run on one road system, and be done with the old rigid baggage.
The full version is up on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/CallOfSaregnar/posts/devlog-174-roads-165064470
If you like what you see, please spread the word. As an indie dev, reach is the hardest thing to achieve, so wishlisting and telling your friends helps us tremendously. Thank you!
Rhu