On my way to the MS4 (“Towns”) milestone, I’ve been working on revamping the user interface for creating roads and paths. Since I’m a big fan of posting screenshots of bugs, here’s a screenshot of the output from the first version of the new road code.
It’s supposed to just be a straight dirt road between the two glowing points on the map (and in fact, the AI understands it that way, and will happily walk between those two points thinking that it’s on a safe path). But due to some bugs in the drawing code, the path is being drawn as a strange scatter of little holes dug into the terrain, extending quite a distance away from where the path was supposed to be.
In MS4, the interface to the game’s road system is becoming simpler. In the MS3 build, you placed roads by clicking and dragging. You could then click and drag on the midpoint of a road, to bend the road away from its current path. Roads would also try to ‘straighten’ themselves, so that if you placed a new road so that it joined a building which was already connected to a road, the building would automatically rebuild both roads so that they would enter the building on opposite sides. All of that is now gone.
The new system doesn’t ever automatically modify your roads. Instead of the old click-drag-release interface, the new interface is ‘click-click-click’, with each ‘click’ placing another segment of road, and a double-click finalising that road. Once a road has been finalised, nothing will change it (apart from outright demolition), so you can rely on roads keeping the shape you initially gave them, which wasn’t previously the case. Similarly, clicking in the middle of a finished road won’t allow you to bend it any more; instead, it creates an intersection at the clicked point, and extends a new path from there.
Finally, roads no longer connect directly to buildings. Instead, buildings can be placed adjacent to roads. This seems a lot more sensible to me, and it’s this part of the system that I’ll be putting together in this upcoming week.
I wanted to hit the MS4 build at the end of this upcoming week, but I suspect that I won’t quite make it; it may be partway into the week following. But we’ll see! I’ll post updates about how I’m tracking as I get closer.
