[MOD] Basic Roads

[tmsbrg]

Hey. I really enjoy this mod, thanks for working on it. I've noticed with interesting eroded terrains that a lot of roads in the mountains are weird or even dangerous to follow. Would it make sense to make some alternate road networks that fit popular terrain mods? I'm currently checking out the road editor in the Wrothgarian mountains to see if I can fix some of the weirdness that I see.

[tmsbrg]

I did some repathing around the cities of Uphope and Hollech in the Wrothgarian mountains as a proof of concept. Took me a few hours. The mountainous terrain is difficult to path around. Still I'm pretty happy with the result. (Really nice editor by the way, even with no experience it was quite obvious and fun to use)

Found though that when I load the game after making changes to the roads will revert back to the original. Actually it will load both the original roads and the roads I added, but only the original roads are added to the travel map. I guess the path editor wasn't made to repath existing regions.

Here's some screenshots of some of the edits I made locally:

Spoiler!

Old Uphope:
New Uphope:

Road that goes straight into the cliffs south removed, also road going west went into (off screen) cliff downwards. Instead made Uphope only accessible from an ascending path from the North (see map below).

Old Hollech:
New Hollech:

Removed the road straight south down the cliff with Hollech. Now it's only accessible by going around the north side. Also removed the dirt paths going down cliffs east and west.

Old map: . New map:

Other edits are all basically made to avoid cliffs and rocky terrain, to make the roads as smooth and realistic as possible. The main road is moved from the hilly area in the east to a flat valley area in the west (map colors don't correspond to actual elevation, sadly)

Maybe if the basic roads mod could support alternate routes for different terrain mods, it would be possible to let the community build the different routes to ensure terrain compatibility. I for one would find it fun to make sure the Wrothgarian mountains have some realistic roads when combined with interesting eroded terrains.

[Hazelnut]

yeah the editor is setup for me to get contributed layout data, I would need to change it up to let you re-path for certain mods. Are you still keen to do that?

[tmsbrg]

Yeah, I'm still interested. It'd probably take a while to repath the mountainy areas but from my experiments it seems fun to work on.

[Hazelnut]

Okay I've made a change which allows your deletions of existing paths to take effect when using the editor. The edits still go into a text file and you will still need to export that into the binary data if you want to set you changes in stone. Then you can use them to reset to if your next edits go wrong. The text file was my way of gathering contributions which I would check and edit before updating (exporting) to binary file.

So when ready to checkpoint your edits, type

Code: Select all

exportroaddata

and

Code: Select all

exporttrackdata

in the console after exiting the editor. These files will also allow you to see your changes in game once added to the mod. You can do this easily yourself if you know how to run a mod in Unity editor using virtual mode.. or if not, I can build you a test version if you give me the binary files.

Now I've not tested this process, so I suggest you experiment and let me know if you have any issues before investing too much time into edits. To be clear this custom version of the mod allows edits to delete existing paths with a single changed flag, other than that it's identical to the current release.

[tmsbrg]

Hey, cool! It seems to work so far. I've got a virtual mod set up with the roadData.bytes and now it's loading my data with the mod and also respecting it in traveloptions. Thanks for the work.

I'll see when I've got some time to do some repathing. First priority should be to fix the extreme paths which go over cliffs or on the sides of mountains. Then I'll see how far I can go with making the roads in the Wrothgarian mountains a bit more fitting the terrain.