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Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2019 6:39 pm
by Skipper
jayhova wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2019 6:53 pmI'm not a developer. I'm a guy who has read a bit on ancient roads and how and why they were built.
Keep in mind, the game is not real, and it does not have to follow most of real rules.
Also, you want to keep an algorithm as simple as possible, getting somehow believable result at the same time.
Throw away everything, except few rules that make sense for a game and fit into it.
1. Roads connect places. This is good rule. It fits into game concept and allows to explore the world without need to constantly check your map. You just follow a path defined by road and you end up somewhere - a city, or other settlement type, or ruins, or tomb, or camp, whatever point of interest you want.
2. There should be various roads (not many types), e.g. stone roads between big cities, dirt roads leading to smaller settlements, and abandoned variations of both types for ruins and wild, secret or hidden places.
3. Roads cross each other sometimes. Period.
4. Roads are not straight lines, for various reasons. And, human's eye likes when roads are constantly wriggling, it gives more natural look to roads.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2019 5:02 am
by CrazyCyrodilicCat
Skipper wrote: Tue Apr 16, 2019 6:39 pm
jayhova wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2019 6:53 pmI'm not a developer. I'm a guy who has read a bit on ancient roads and how and why they were built.
Keep in mind, the game is not real, and it does not have to follow most of real rules.
Also, you want to keep an algorithm as simple as possible, getting somehow believable result at the same time.
Throw away everything, except few rules that make sense for a game and fit into it.
1. Roads connect places. This is good rule. It fits into game concept and allows to explore the world without need to constantly check your map. You just follow a path defined by road and you end up somewhere - a city, or other settlement type, or ruins, or tomb, or camp, whatever point of interest you want.
2. There should be various roads (not many types), e.g. stone roads between big cities, dirt roads leading to smaller settlements, and abandoned variations of both types for ruins and wild, secret or hidden places.
3. Roads cross each other sometimes. Period.
4. Roads are not straight lines, for various reasons. And, human's eye likes when roads are constantly wriggling, it gives more natural look to roads.
IMO roads must have some logic.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2019 5:24 am
by Jay_H
Here's a quick drawing of a hub-and-spokes model for roads.

Image

The yellow roads connect major cities in the region. The red roads are smaller and reach out from the cities to the lesser settlements. The idea is that everyone out in the ranches and temples will occasionally go to the nearest major city for the uncommon goods they need.

This would provide a model that's not calculation-intensive for large regions, and provide the player a guarantee that each little road is going to at least lead somewhere interesting within a few kilometers. I think players should find the roads to be logical enough to be immersive, but also purposeful. There's some appeal to just dropping all the quests every once in a while and saying, "I'm gonna follow this road as far as it takes me and camp by the roadside as I go."

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2019 10:26 am
by charlieg
That's a good idea. Would also make it easy to e.g. add signs to show where a road leads.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2019 4:06 am
by Kayzee
You know, one of the things I really liked about Arena is how interesting the wilderness could be, with long roads leading to little villages and inns and farmsteads and things all over the place. So yeah, I think having roads in Daggerfall would be super neato! Though I wonder about something. In Arena, it seems like little random locations are placed along roads and at intersections. In Daggerfall, locations are pretty much scattered about randomly. So I kind of wonder if it might be better to use Arena's fast travel map (come to think of it, If you look at High Rock's map in Arena and the map in Daggerfall they don't quite match up do they?) as a base to create a basic road network, randomly create subnetworks and redistribute locations based on that? Would make a lot more sense for inns and small towns at least.

I kinda think it would be nice to rearrange a lot of stuff anyway, like making port cities like Daggerfall actually at the shore and have a docks area, but that's just wishful thinking. I donno. I mean since a lot of vanilla Daggerfall's world was randomly cobbled together anyway I don't particularity care that much about the world being 100% the same. Might even be nice if there were a lot of it that even changed from playthough to playthrough, but let's not go crazy here. :P

Regardless I like the idea of using Arena's fast travel map as a base to figure out how major areas are connected, and work from there. Arena is basically the blueprint for the whole series after all, and it does have clearly marked roads on it's travel map, so why not use them?

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Fri May 31, 2019 7:31 pm
by hedgelord
Did Uncanny_Valley ever release the original roadEditor tool? If we had that to start with it would be a lot easier that starting from scratch.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Sat Jun 01, 2019 7:13 pm
by hedgelord
I started working on another implementation of the road network in Daggerfall. I broke the locations into four categories, marking them as Major, Standard, Minor, or Offroad locations.

For now, Major locations include only major cities, while standard and minor locations are for smaller towns, taverns, and other things like that. I'm connecting the Major locations using the algorithm that hurleybird described, to make a series of major roads throughout the world. Once that's done, I'm planning on using another algorithm to connect the standard and minor locations to the bigger cities in a system of smaller roads.


Here's my first attempt at the major roads of Daggerfall
Image
That's my first time trying to post an image so sorry if it doesn't work.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2019 9:15 pm
by hurleybird
Hmm, looks like something isn't quite working right there.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2019 9:24 pm
by hedgelord
Yeah, there's a lot of steps where I could've implemented something wrong, so I've been debugging trying to figure out what's going wrong.

Re: Roads of Daggerfall

Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2019 7:23 pm
by hurleybird
Here's the source file from Dominus Galaxia, if that helps you:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qcs11xqd473x ... en.cs?dl=0