Talk:Road/@comment-25565811-20150202143426

When you use an old world, there will only be roads in newly generated chunks (or you have to remove the old chunks first). I did not find any tunnels even not in the misties. The road just climbs the highest mountains. So I removed that sentence from the page.

For me, as a road specialist, I first have to thank Mevans that he included these at all. I know, how difficult it is, to build a really good road. As far as I see it, there is only the unchanged surface of the world replaced by road material where a road is going to be built. As Mevans wrote, this is done by using pre calculated bezier curves to save generation time.

This is probably a simple but effective way to do this task. But I think it needs more tweaking. I'd try to find a way to alter the landscape in a way, that the road could be flattened out, without getting steep drops on the edges of the road. When the slopes get too steep, there should be tunnels.

Having been a programmer myself, I'd say to realise something like that is not so easy. You've got to find something, that looks nice and that takes not too much time for chunk generation. - It will be always a compromise.

Let me point out a difficulty of road generation, that I can think of: When you approach a chunk, where a road should be from the side of the road. How do you decide if that road at this point will be in a tunnel or on the surface? You could look a (potenially) very far way along the road in both directions and try to find a steep slope,where you would have started a tunnel and carried on to the actual position. This could result in a lot of chunk generation which consumes a lot of time.

You could also restrict roads to a certain heigth (lets say between 64 (sea level) and 80 (normal mountain)). If the terrain height is below it you build bridges, above it tunnels. That would solve the problem of the decision quite quick, but probably cause other problems. Perhaps at the beginning/end of the tunnel or in regions with heights alternating around one of these limits this could become critical.

You see, there is more about roads than you would have thought of. On the one hand, I hope, Mevans will put some more effort in this road geneartion and whish him good luck and a lot creativity for that. On the other hand, I hope he'll put his effort in other things, we probably miss, when he spends too much time with tweaking roads.