Early post, today, as I have roads!  Or at least, I have white ribbons that work like roads.  In this screenshot, what you’re looking at is a starting area in the very foreground, an inn in the middle left, a graveyard in the middle right, and a quest giver on top of the mountain in the background.  All of these are connected by roads.  A bunch of new subscribers (the blue cubes) are seen here travelling along the road from the spawn area to the town;  once they reach the town, most of them will probably follow the road to the quest-giver, and then forage out into the wilds to start working on their quests.

Placement of roads works exactly as in the MMORPG Tycoon 1.1 development branch (for those of you who have played with that); you select the “Road” tool and drag from one building to another;  each building can be connected to up to four roads.  If you click (or release) in the middle of nowhere with the Road tool, you get a “Road node”, which can be used to force your road to travel through a specific point, and can also be used as an intersection between multiple roads.  The roads are recalculated in real-time as you place them and as you move buildings around.  (I’ll put up a video of this eventually, once I’ve fully finished)

The one bit not yet working is detecting when the cursor is hovering over a road.  This means that you can’t yet modify the path of an existing road by grabbing it in the middle, as you could in MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, only by grabbing and moving one of the buildings or road nodes on either end.  But grabbing the middle is next on my list, and I should easily have that working by the end of the day.

Tomorrow’s task:  the graveship, and starting on the remaining UI work to get us to a basic functional level.

EDIT: Finished the last little bits of road handling.  Also fixed a bug in the player AI which could cause a player to try to illegally travel to a different region when he decided to try to grind through a level, instead of completing quests.  Finally, I did put together a video with the road building UI;  am uploading it at the moment.  I’ll add it to this post, once it’s finished uploading and converting.