Hello, first time posting in forums. would like to be able to make nicely formed curved roads, bridges and tunnels.
I'm horrible at making visually appealing city plans... I consider it anathema to waste space making curved roads :D
I'm sure that one of the other artistic players will join in the discussion soon :).
Ah, yes,
@grumpyoldowl, the quest for the curved road which has plagued so many city-builder fans, myself included. In Banished if you hold down SHIFT while lining out the road you can get diagonals. BUT: The best you can hope for at this point is stair-steps. (Expletive deleted) ugly in my opinion, but there you are. The game is based on squares and the roads cannot even visually appear to be diagonal. Fixing that would take someone who knows their graphics programming, I imagine.
Of course, curving roads aren't much good if all the lots and buildings are square or rectangles. That's right, I'm lookin' at you Cities XL.
Quote from: grumpyoldowl on May 12, 2014, 05:44:12 AM
Hello, first time posting in forums. would like to be able to make nicely formed curved roads, bridges and tunnels.
Great idea and shared by many. I would also like to be able to build paths that may require some digging or filling to make the path/road pass through where I want it to go.
rkelly, the knock on cities XL... haha. But their curved roads were so interesting to me. I'm one of the least OCD builders apparently, (after watching lots of let's plays I get this impression)... Tropico 4 is similar I think. Curvy roads but only square shaped buildings. But you can rotate them on diagonals at least. Why not just make them spin on a 360 axis? It must be really hard to program?
Since we're stuck on a grid, I think the max we can get is similar to how curved roads were introduced in SimCity 4 through the NAM mods. Which would be pretty nice, btw, for just rounding some corners and more road diversity.
As for rotating a building: with a square grid, every building will probably have to fit a square box. You could ofcourse design a building to look diagonal, but the footprint would still be a box, making it hard to fit a diagonal (stair steps) road. Unless you can make your building seriously extent over the boundaries of the box, as is possible with SimCity 4 and SimCity 2013 mods. The mod kit will tell, when it's ready.
All just theoritizing (is that a word?), as I'm no modder, pretty low on graphical skills and we have no mod kit yet.
Oddly enough, I really am not missing curved roads too much. Maybe I've been playing Minecraft too long/much; I never even thought about it being on a grid (though I know it is), though this used to bother me with past city builders. With Banished it might be one of those things that I don't miss until I have it.
I do agree that the diagonal road is not very attractive though.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a programmer and probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but my impression is that at least the NAM curves of roads and RR tracks were graphical puzzle pieces. That is, they made the underlying stair-steo necessitated by a square grid look much better. If the modkit gives access to graphic overlays, someone who DOES know what they are doing should be able to makes something--though one may have to "plop" it in as opposed to stringing it out.
I would use curved roads if they were available, but I don't have a burning desire to have them. I kind of like the squared look of a city grid. To be honest, if the game gets away from the strictly squared-off approach, I'd rather see buildings that can be placed at an angle, even if the only choice is 45 degrees. The best example of where this would be useful is in placing trading posts along rivers/lakes where the shore is not NS or EW oriented.
And, with a 45-degree option to placement, only 45-degree diagonal roads would be needed when they run along a building side. Making the tile graphics for better looking diagonal roads would be much simpler than having tiles for different sections of a curve that could have any radius.