Improve road visuals

[thedyze]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In BN today, the roads are very tidy and square looking, with step-like diagonal sections. The visual presentation of the roads have much room for improvement.

Describe the solution you'd like

I propose adding edge tiles to all roads to break up the straight lines. This way we could also get rid of the step-like diagonal look.

• Add a number of straight edge tiles to the external tileset. (See: 1)
• Add a number of diagonal edge tiles to the external tileset. (See: 2)
• Increase the number of cracked/worn tiles that already exists on the roads (which are very underused today).
• Add at least 16 of each type to avoid visual repetition.
• Add code to append these tiles when roads are generated

By flipping and rotating the tiles when placing, straight and diagonal should be enough. This idea is purely visual, although one could imagine game play impact as well (e.g pot holes affecting car speed).

Mockup:

If this was implemented, I would be more than happy to contribute with the actual tiles myself.

Additional context

No response

[RoyalFox2140]

This looks good

[RoyalFox2140]

Just changing the graphics of course is easy json and gfx work, code support is its own beast. Depends how far we want to go here

[scarf005]

i like the old visuals more, maybe we could make it a mod so it could be toggled?

[thedyze]

i like the old visuals more, maybe we could make it a mod so it could be toggled?

With old visual you mean not have any edge tiles? The screenshot is just a quick mock up. On discord a few days ago quite a few people seemed to think this was a good idea at least.

[scarf005]

oh, wait, i thought old roads had diagonal tiles, my memory was wrong.

yes in that case forget about what i've said, diagonal road tile would be awesome.

[thedyze]

Noticed in a dda video I watched yesterday that diagonal tiles exists there, so some code could perhaps be lent from dda.

[RoyalFox2140]

If it's in Ultica they may have just drawn diagonal specific tiles and redid the road gen

[thedyze]

Found this PR, could perhaps be of help?

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/67223