Epic Fails in City Road Generation

This is a follow-up to my previous post on city generation where I show some of the fun bugs I had in the code and other failed attempts at placing roads. This first set shows off some actual bugs, though I had to go back and re-break the code in order to take these screenshots. Keep in mind that I did, in fact, encounter these problems when coding this stuff up. Roads aren't easy!

Here we have a road connecting two cities that are on opposite sides of this city shown in the screenshot. It was some problem with the tracking of which city the road is supposed to connect to. Roads are placed after city plots, so they have final say in what the terrain height should be.

But sir, you told me you wanted an express lane THROUGH the city!

This one was a failed intersection test between two connector roads. I was checking for overlap in all three dimensions (x, y, z). These roads don't overlap in z, but there's still an intersection. Just because they don't overlap in z doesn't mean they're okay! Only dimensions x and y should be checked. I had to print all sorts of debug text to the terminal to figure this one out. Doh!

We ran over budget constructing all these elevated roadways, and we didn't have the funds to dig the tunnel. We'll just have to put it on CA Proposition 39 in June for voter approval of a $9 parcel tax.

This is some problem with setting the height of the small 90-degree bend section at the wrong place in the control flow. The two 90-degree straight segments cause some interference here, and the bend has to smooth it over in a postprocessing pass. It took a while to come up with a fix for this one. I had to make several attempts before I got something that fixed all variants of this problem.

If you're not going to add a guard rail, can you at least post a warning sign? On second though, this might be good for drift racing!

Here's what happens when the slope direction Boolean is inverted. A number of different variables are XOR-ed together here to determine the sign of the slope of each road segment. It took a lot of trial-and-error to come up with the right conditionals. Maybe I shouldn't have been so greedy, trying to pack this info into a single byte in memory for each road segment. Ah well, I got it working in the end.

"Speed Bumps"

In this case, the two roads don't overlap, but their sloped boundaries do. The road on the right is created first. The road on the left is going to a higher altitude destination city. It creates a sharp cliff that falls to the right, then the smoothing pass smooths it out - right on top of the other road. The fix is to expand the road by its smoothing border before checking for intersections with other roads. It's a good change anyway, as it spaces roads out better. Bonus: the texture is all squished in that road segment in the lower left corner between the two intersections.

I'll take the high road and you take the low road. Sucker.

A similar problem can occur with cities, since they also have smoothing borders. I had to fix the problem in the same way as roads, by padding city bounding cubes by the smoothing distance prior to checking for intersections.

Someone forgot to build a retaining wall. Oops. I guess the 5th floor tenants get their backyard gardens after all.

I'm not sure exactly what caused steep roads to dip under the terrain. It's probably a floating-point rounding issue when converting to/from integer grid points/texels, or maybe during the 16-bit height <=> floating-point value calculation. One fix is to shift the road up in Z by an amount equal to (dz/dx)*pixel_size_in_x. I'm not sure if this is the correct solution as it causes steep roads to "float" above the terrain, but it's one of the only things I tried that works. As long as the steepness of the road is limited, it's not too noticeable.

Landslide!

At one point early in road development, I had a problem where the grass and roads were using two different coordinate systems. Grass is owned by the terrain tiles and is in tile-relative coordinates, which change as the player moves. Roads, cities, and buildings are always in constant global coordinates so that their vertex data can be stored on the GPU once and reused. A bit of math was required to fix this problem.

Can someone send a landscaping crew out to cut the grass growing on I-101? Maybe that will keep the cows from grazing in the middle of the road.

These next four screenshots weren't actual problems I ran into, but they still look interesting. This is the insanity resulting from disabling the connector road intersection tests so that they can go anywhere they want without restrictions.

Connecting every city directly to every other city is now possible, but not a good idea:

Ready for some off-road action? I think the engineer was off his meds when designing this.

A road was routed underneath this city. Presumably, it connects together two lower elevation cities on opposite sides of this one. I can't really tell in all the chaos. Some buildings have decided that they want to use the mesh height from the road rather than the mesh height for the rest of the city.

To protect against nuclear attacks, this shopping mall was built under the city. Or maybe it's a secret spy lair (with a big road leading up to it)?

This is the same problem, but inverted. Here the road connects together two higher elevation cities, dragging some buildings up with it. I could fix both of these issues by using the city elevation for buildings rather than terrain elevation. But this is just an experiment; this situation shouldn't come up, so why bother trying to handle it?

Now guests on every floor can have a room with a view! I just hope the kids don't decide to roll tires down that hill.

In this next case, the upper road was created first, and the lower roads were created later. Once a road is routed, it's done. The lower roads will modify the height of the terrain, but not the height of the upper road. In this particular case, it looks like a pretty cool bridge, though it needs some actual structure to be more realistic. Maybe I'll try to come up with a way to make this work. We still need to get rid of that road in the very front though.

A marvel of modern engineering, or a waste of our tax dollars?

That's all. I'll spare you the dozen or so screenshots of misaligned and incorrectly oriented road textures, which was another big time sink.