Daggerfall Workshop Forums

Some thoughts of mine:

Rather than the Daggerfall region, it might be smarter to use a small province with relatively fewer points of interest as a starting point to generate the road. Maybe Isle of Balfiera, or Lainlyn, Orsinium, etc. A small province near or in a mountainous region could be a good test ground as you would see how the roads behave moving from more even terrain to more rugged and extreme heights. Smaller region would also mean less time spent on generating the roads, and ability to make faster decisions on tweaking the algorithms. Once the model is set up and working as expected, apply it to a larger province like Daggerfall and see how it behaves. Make adjustments as necessary.


Another concern is that certain mods might break the generation algorithm, unless the generation (based on the graph) is sophisticated enough to handle changes in terrain, or recognize a landscape mod earlier in the load order and use those values instead of vanilla terrain coordinates; have an option for the user to regenerate the roads in the mod options screen.

Recognize load order: load the landscapes mod first, then load the roads mod, and have it do a one-time generation of the roads, detecting heights/coordinates based on the landscape mod. Or something like that.

Since the roads would be generated on a preset criteria, it would only need to be generated once, and simply store the values somewhere rather than regenerate the roads every time you load the game. If the landscape mod is changed or removed, allow a player to regenerate the road map, and overwrite the previous values in the mod options screen.

My chief concern is that all the terrain in Daggerfall is procedural, and massive based on whatever seed the devs used originally. So in some cases, the roads mod algorithm would need to be sophisticated enough to detect large changes in height over a short distance (a road should not go up a very steep incline, or straight over a mountain peak for example) to not generate roads over very steep inclines or cliffs. (not that Daggerfall has actual cliffs or plateaus, but you know what I mean)

A road generating mod would need to have some sort of rule or law in place that prevents it from going up too steep an incline, and instead, seek the nearest path of least resistance around the incline. So, you'd need a rule to check for height, avoid creating a road over very steep terrain, and use some sort of lookahead method to find a better route that makes more sense based on coordinates change in height.

Something like that, anyway. Otherwise, you might have an issue of a road texture climbing up a cliff or very steep hill.

Thinking very far ahead, but perhaps road textures could be based on the size of the points of interest's cells somehow. Roads between Daggerfall and another large city might be paved, but roads between smaller backwater towns, inns or temples, might be dirt roads. Maybe a road changes from paved to dirt X distance from a dungeon or crypt point of interest.

I'm just bouncing some ideas out there since this is still all conceptual in nature anyway.

I hope you guys can make this work.
It would make DFU even more amazing..

Have you heard of http://roadstorome.moovellab.com/? Their road maps reminded me of slime mold. I wonder if they have any useful information.

Is there an active progress report on this mod?

Welcome to the forums Behr11.

I don't believe Uncanny_Valley progressed this past the proof of concept stage. But at least it shows that roads in Daggerfall are feasible, it's just a lot of work to execute properly.

Hopefully someday UV will return to this concept, or someone else picks it up and runs with it.

I think I remember hearing something about Unity getting a new terrain system sometime in the future, so maybe if we're lucky someone could include it in a terrain overhaul.

LorrMaster42 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 02, 2018 4:22 am I think I remember hearing something about Unity getting a new terrain system sometime in the future, so maybe if we're lucky someone could include it in a terrain overhaul.

Unity Engine 2018.3 lists four improvements to the terrain system:

* GPU-instanced render path for terrain, yielding a dramatic reduction in draw calls for most cases.
* Auto-connect of adjacent terrain tiles.
* Seamless painting across multiple connected tiles
* An experimental C# API for building custom terrain tools, which can interact with newly introduced asset types for terrain materials and brushes

https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

In the construction of roads, it is often a better idea to go around a hill than up and down it. The issues are two-fold: the actual distance is not as short as you might suspect owing to the curve traversed cresting a hill, second the force necessary to pull a laden wagon up an incline increases dramatically with the rate of that incline. The second problem is quite a large one for an empire whose lifeblood is commerce.

in my research on the subject, I found this book https://books.google.com/books?id=f9DNAAAAMAAJ

The treatise discusses the fact that a moderately shorter road that dips and climbs make take longer to traverse than a road that is level because animal traffic will slow down on inclines an declines. If fact a horse will go slower on an equivalent decline than the same incline.

I'm sure the math included would be very helpful in creating algorithms for making road building procdures.

This is an absolutely wonderful idea (though ambitious) and I would love to see it implemented, hopefully a good procedural solution can be found with natural-looking results. Daggerfall's bland and empty overworld is by far the weakest part of the game and this would go some small way towards addressing that.

If roads were implemented, there's the potential for further use of procedural techniques to generate POIs along major routes (say, inns at crossroads, random shacks with bandits and loot, shrines etc) which would add yet more life and realism to the game world, and provide the player with reasons to actually explore. More terrain variation would also be wonderful though tricky; one could even implement more detailed biomes with forest areas, farmlands near towns, marshes, etc. Of course there's no way it could ever approach the detail of the later games but even a wee nudge in that direction would make a world of difference.

Every time someone bumps this thread I get excited with hope that progress has been made. Just a reminder how popular the idea is.