Daggerfall Mod:DFRemake/Fractal Roads

Wilderness exploration in the original DF was relatively unexciting. One idea would be to link towns with some sort of road system which would at least link the towns together and help improve the overall state of the wild. While this is certainly an 'extra' in the remake development, if such as system is relatively simple to implement, it should be considered.

Simple Linear Linking

A basic road system would simply be straight lines from a given town to its closest neighbours. This would be something done before-hand (since its relatively time consuming) and stored externally for later use. During landscape creation, this road data would be accessed in order to appropriately texture the land with roads.

This has the advantage of being quite simple to implement but creates boring roads with no overall structure.

Noisy Linear Linking

This builds upon the previous concept but adds some random noise into the road position to provide variety. Any sort of random variations from a straight line would be fine, as long as the start and end locations remain the same. This still has the disadvantage of not having any overall structure.

Size Based Linking

This is again built off the previous concepts with the change of linking towns is based on their size. The pre-computed road linkage would be performed over several iterations. The first run would link major towns together, the capitol of each region for instance. These roads would be considered as major roads. In subsequent runs, roads would be created to join up smaller sized towns. Roads would not only join towns to towns, but towns to nearby towns as well. In this manner an overall road network is created and would hopefully make it more realistic.

The implementation of such a system would be similar to the previous designs. The road network would be pre-computed and stored in an external file. Only the start and end of each road segments would need to be stored (along with possibly the road size and a random seed). For the 10,000 locations in DF this would result in a file size in the order of 1 MB (assuming an average of 3 roads per town which is generous). If we stored the road data on a block-by-block basis (making it easier to create them) this would increase to the order of 100 MB. If we only used the medium-large towns to the create the roads, these values could be much smaller (10-50%).