Devlog - January 23rd 2022

Road Network Generation

This week’s focus was almost exclusively on procedural road network generation. Only on Monday I worked a bit more on the procedural terrain texturing for which I am not yet sure what approach will be the best one to continue. I’ll be talking more about that when I go back to that topic. I decided to continue with the road network generation instead because it will get me closer to a playable demo for which terrain textures are not necessarily needed. For the road generation itself I am using an asset called EasyRoads which has many great features to generate spline based road systems. Since the game world is generated in chunks and roads need to be reproducible I also had to go with a chunk based approach on how road markers are calculated. The current approach is rather simple, yet effective and sufficient for the first iteration of the road generation. In essence road markers are calculated on all edges of a chunk. Since an edge between two chunks shares the exact same coordinates for both chunks the calculated position and/or existence of a road marker will also be the same. This ensures the continuation of a road across chunk borders continuously. Since a chunk may also not have any road in it an additional system handling that case will be added in the future to ensure all roads are always connected to the entire network in at least one way..

Notable tasks this week:

• Further experimenting on procedural terrain texturing
• Experimented with procedural road network generation
• Implemented basic chunk based road network generation

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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.