Hazelnut wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:43 am
Not replaced exactly, I still hope that in the long run a refined roads of daggerfall materialises that has more natural and complex roads.
I am back to this thread too, at least for the next couple of months I hope...
There is a good chance that I will have some time in the next period to invest in implementing Roads-related stuff for DFU.
My first choice would be to re-use the way you managed to put roads into the game in Basic Roads, if it is alright, I would ask for your help in doing this in the coming months (provided I don't get distracted from this again).
jayhova wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2023 6:07 pm
Another illustration (generated independently) showing the economic costs of road grades.
Thank you for attaching figures to the phenomenon. That really will help to design the algorithm to implement it.
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It occurred to me that transporting stuff is only one role a road plays. Roads are also frequently followed by travelers (like the player in Daggerfall). So, there is more than one calculation to the cost of a road...
- the cost one needs to bear when transporting goods on it (as illustrated above, here, the incline is very important)
- the time it takes to traverse it (postal carriers, scouts, smaller military detachments etc. - keeping in mind that grade is not negligible - I would say length is more important)
The next thought is that not everyone needs to go the same way. There might be a twisting and turning (but relatively level) wide road between two locations (cities, let's say) for freight and there could also be narrower trails (shortcuts) here and there (that are shorter at the price of involving steeper inclines). In our world, some of these trails would be narrow and rarely tread to the point of undetectability. In the world of Daggerfall, we will need to invent categories of routes.
Imperial Roads
I would imagine that the widest, best roads would be along the path drawn into the parts of Tamriel's maps from Arena corresponding to Daggerall. Let's call these imperial roads (or, more legalistically, 'roads of imperial significance').
Maybe a few more shorter roads like that could be where an algorithm finds it economically justifiable (where there are a lot of economically powerful cities clamped together in a relatively small area with little variation in hight above sea level)
Inter-city Roads
Then there could be a kind of road that is slightly narrower but still a good route to transport freight along. Place them to connect significant locations to a seaport or the network of (imperial) roads.
Well-trodden Trails
These could be a kind of path easily traversible on a horse or on foot, easy to follow, but not too wide. Such paths should connect locations that are close to each other and middle-sized settlements to a seaport or the road network (imperial+inter-city roads).
Barely Used Trails
Rarely used, these are hard to follow and even narrower than the well-trodden ones. Still, it doesn't require special skill to see and follow one. These are present where some travalling can be expected between the two locations, but not enough for the emergence of a well-trodden trail or a wider road.
Hidden Trails
Even narrower and, perhaps, some skill or attribute is required to even detect such a trail. These could lead to interesting places (bandit's hideouts, dungeons etc).
Some questions of implementation.
How many kinds of road/route/path/etc should I aim to implement?
How wide should each kind be? What other important characteristics should they have?
Open and grateful for any piece of constructive input.
Even though any code I release would be published as part of MMM, if some progress is made, I plan to post it in this thread (or this thread too) for easier reference.