Post
by Jeoshua » Mon Dec 02, 2019 5:13 pm
I think one of the biggest problems in creating a realistic road network for Daggerfall is that in order to link cities in a realistic way, one must first have realistic placement of cities. Roads are built along paths, paths connect places, yes. But also places grow up along paths, and roads can make places dry up if they make passing through or around them easier than stopping by. There is not a strict order in which things are built, place or path. They come together or not at all. There aren't places people live in, in the world, without paths to them. And there aren't paths which don't lead to places, however marginal. This goes back before people, even, as one will not find a game path than doesn't lead to some place, be it a den or a watering hole, nor a location that doesn't have a path (excepting those places only flying animals frequent).
That being said, I think what I'm trying to say is that you're not looking at a one-step process to make a perfect set of roads to realistically connect places, as the existing cities you're looking at aren't realistically placed. Instead, you should focus on the idea of paths between locations, then giving each one of them a weight based on the amount of traffic expected between those nearby places, then attempting to "bend" those paths together, and at the final step taking the most traveled paths and making them roads, everything else remaining as a dirt path.
Weight of paths could be calculated based on several factors:
Population - Obvious, just use size.
Type - Cities being highest, Temples second, Dungeons third, and Graveyards fourth.
Location - People live near the coasts, so you might think there is more weight, but people there can travel on the water. So, weight between locations with a port should be reduced (not eliminated as coastal roads could still exist). Weight between coastal locations and inland ones should remain the same.
Terrain - Take a simple look at roughness and overall elevation in the height map. Higher or Rougher means worse terrain for travel.
Realistically one would worry about grade and terrain, not wanting to take roads up steep inclines, but given the nature of the terrain we are working with (very sparse), that part can be safely ignored when generating paths and instead handled when the roads are drawn on the map in later stages, warping the terrain into something that makes sense for the paths that will be there. Roads are flat but paths can be whatever, and elevation weighting already would make mountains and hills less attractive for roads.
I have also noticed a lot of talk here about rivers... Forget it! The height map as given is just simply not hydrologically correct, as I discovered in trying to use GIS tools and World Machine to automatically map out a river map. I do have a great rendition of a more in-depth height map that I have made with these tools, which uses Daggerfall's Height and Travel maps as rough inspiration for what IS a hydrologically correct map, but that's not what you're dealing with in Vanilla.
That being said, if anyone wanting to make rivers does need an eroded height map and basic river map, I am willing to provide.