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Comment by Ef996 | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I am the creator of this road system. The thing is that I myself don't even know what I want to do with it. lol. Maybe an asset or a game (a bit scared to jump in a full fledge game to be honest).

I am a fun of Junxions my self which follow closely. But the approach in my system if very different. Junxions creator uses the same kind of node base/bezier shapes paradigm where intersections happen as node graphs and not automatically as collisions between road segments. It's hard to explain but I am planning to dive into more details on why those two approaches are different in my next blog deep dive.

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> The thing is that I myself don't even know what I want to do with it.

Embrace the next challenge: Instead of roads on parabolic (Euclidean) geometry, have roads on elliptic (non-Euclidean) geometry, like the surface of a sphere. Plus, on a sphere every line is already a circular arc anyway (no matter if straight or bent, the difference is just the center, radius and normals). Thus, this system of circular arc segments really lends itself to such a space.

Little prince style micro planets with their own miniature infrastructure will always have a special place in my heart. Half a year ago I started with laying out the basics https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_ellipsoid_billboard https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_geodesic_grid but got distracted by fixing some engine bugs in Bevy along the way. That reminds me I have to update to the newest engine version ...

anyway you can find some of the roads on spheres stuff here: https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_geodesic_grid/blob/main/src/... it can not only generate the extrusion mesh but also calculate how the mesh overlaps with a geodesic grid of triangular tiles on the surface.

Go full science fiction and enable vertical or even upside-down roads for a 3D experience. :-)

Imagine an environment where ground/walls/ceilings always have gravity and one can build literal city mazes in horizontal and vertical directions. All that traffic going everywhere, oh my..

Thanks for references! I initially considered bevy for this but I was a bit scared it was not mature enough. How do you find it now?

Really depends: In some areas it is quite advanced (rendering) and in others it is lacking / underdeveloped (editors / tooling). But there is an incredible amount of progress and also churn in keeping up with that.

https://thisweekinbevy.com/ https://bevy.org/news/

Sounds pretty fun! Do you have any screenshots to show?

Honestly if you made your system a plugin or mod for Cities, I’d consider reinstalling it. I got in early and realized that my patience for city building had waned since the days of SimCity 2000, and I’ve not seen roads in CS that ever looked appealing to me. Watching ridealong streams of sharp turns or cars moving in a way that would make my kidneys hug the sidewall of my abdomen really hurt the experience for me.

So if you’re ever feeling alone about noticing, you aren’t.

Are you using SDFs for your road system?

Nope. But I mean aren't functions of circles essentially some kind of SDFs in 2d? Or at least those of disks.

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