Residential Neighborhood Improvements

This is just a short post on my improvements to 3DWorld's residential neighborhoods. I've now fixed most of the problems with driveways and garages. For example, I widened the right angle bends of driveways coming out of garages so that cars should have enough space to turn. I added walls, fences, and hedges to separate the different yards from each other. I also added in-ground rectangular swimming pools to some of the back yards.

Here's an update screenshot. You can see that I now allow a mix of commercial office buildings and residential cities.

Residential city with skyscrapers in the background. There are now walls, fences, hedges, and swimming pools.

And here's a screenshot with cars and people enabled. I fixed the placement of swimming pools so that they're not next to roads.

Residential city with cars and pedestrians enabled.

I spent some time working on pedestrian path finding for residential areas. I might post a longer discussion on this, but here's a brief overview of the system. People are randomly spawned on a sidewalk outside the player's view. Each person has a destination in their current city, which can either be the door of a house or a car parked in a driveway. Pedestrians now walk on the sidewalks next to roads rather than through city blocks and yards. I moved the streetlights, traffic lights, and fire hydrants off the middle of the sidewalk and to the edge of the road to allow them more collision-free space for walking.

A unique requirement of residential cities is that people can't walk through other residents' yards, except for their neighbors in the same block if there are no fences, walls, or hedges around the property. This initially created some problems where people got stuck against fences/walls/hedges trying to go around the block to get to their destination. My final solution was to first place their target at the point on the sidewalk closest to their destination house or car. When they're close enough to this point (within the axis aligned projection of the house/car onto the sidewalk), they can walk into their own yard to complete the path. That worked surprisingly well compared to some of the other things I tried.