Tutorial X: the roads between the cities

[EtienneBruines]

So, at some point, it'd be nice to connect cities by means of roads.

The back-end knowledge is easy. Allow passengers to use those roads, also not much of a problem.

But I am wondering how to render the roads. I mean, we might have a road-texture (.png or something) which is 10 units long. If we wanted to create a road that's 100 units long, we somehow set OpenGL to repeat the texture (not sure how again? But I'm sure I can look that up). Or should we physically have 10 of those "10 units long" road-pieces (also in the game-logic), and let them be "connected"?

We would need rotation support, which will be added soon (I hope), if we want to add diagonal roads.

Thoughts? Any possible solutions? Any possible difficulties anyone foresees? @paked do you have anything to add on this?

[paked]

The way most games would tackle this problem is with tilemaps. So you have a lot of small images, that get placed on a grid in a specific order make up the map.

This kind of thing:

Unfortunately, our tilemap system is broken/non existent anymore. So we're going to need to fix that. EngoEngine/engo#162.

[EtienneBruines]

Yeah, I was looking for a way without tilemaps; but I think that's probably the hardest way to do things (and why they have only been doing it the "new" way for a few years).

[paked]

@EtienneBruines What do you mean by the "new" way?

[EtienneBruines]

I mean being able to draw a straight road between points (10, 10) and (123, 432), render it and then use it in game logic.

[gerbenjacobs]

How about a regular drawn line, which will be a simple coord A to coord B and will introduce simple shapes (if those are in the engine)

[paked]

@gerbenjacobs Not quite yet, EngoEngine/engo#131. But that is a good idea!

[EtienneBruines]

Fixed in the playground branch.

@gerbenjacobs I've indeed implemented them as such (since EngoEngine/engo#131 was merged a few days ago). 😄