Actually, yes, I had just looked that up late last night. LOL

R0J0hound - Thank you for your input. That seems to be a bit more feasible. An incredible mental challenge...but feasible.

Taking into account what you've gone over...

Road types: While I would love to have a game along the lines of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (my favorite full-city sandbox racing game) with all manner of city road types, I plan to keep the road types/widths uniform. I don't think there will be any real exceptions even when it comes to the awkward-angled intersections. For the game missions, there might be some unique side roads or "pit stop" areas, but nothing exotic or exceedingly out of the norm.

Intersections: Probably the most challenging given the layout of the city. The trick will be how to merge two sides of the roads coming together when the road lines are considered. Alternatively, I could simply draw custom sprites for the intersections. It would be a lot...but far better than trying to work out a system to merge roads...especially ones coming in at angles.

Road heights and bridges: My plan so far is to have 3 levels, minimum: Ground level, upper level (overpasses, "major" roadways that act kinda like shortcuts between districts), and underground. Alternatively, I was thinking about having the "ground level" have its own progressive elevations throughout the city...much like the real city this is based on. But initial efforts have proven this may not be as timely as I'd like as it would require a lot of manual editing. I'm probably going to resort to keeping the ground level completely flat and having the roads shift between specified elevation levels or just keep it at a strict "ground", "upper", and "underground" for simplicity...

Analog roads: And that's where the trick comes in. The careful plotting of road pieces - many, many of them - that create the semblance of progressive turns and angles. Without drawing them out, the angles of the straight roads connecting will be obvious. That's fine. All of that you mentioned. Then I could connect them all by the custom-drawn intersections sprites.

Drawing roads in-game: My plan does include road segments being constructed along the lengths of lines placed in the editor and then actually spawned when the player car is within range. I've also been trying to figure out if utilizing an Array contained with respective road pieces might help generate roads in-game when the player is nearby.

My take on this would be to store the image information in a tilemap...

You have to deal with roads that are not complete 90 degrees angles over longer distances though. Several interpolation algorithms can be applied here.

I want to say that I'm following your meaning with this suggestion - which, for the very little that I think I grasp, I think could work - but honestly, I'm at a loss as to just how you mean for this to play out. Might I trouble you to detail what you mean exactly? Dare I ask for some images or sketches to help me visualize what you mean?

I literally copied the central part of my hometown in Texas for this part. Using a map of the city provided by the city's website, I created a kind of outline with which to set up the game's road system. There will be some differences, of course. Not all roads are likely to find a game counterpart and street names I plan to change. Nor will any actual building locations be included in the game (meaning, you won't find your house or business recreated in the game). But for all intents and purposes, the roads will be nearly identical.

A key aspect to my game is to have a large-scale cityscape to drive around in. I decided to go "all out" and actually incorporate an actual city into the game...my old hometown of Tyler, Texas.

One thing I'm mindful of...hopefully more-so than not...is the fact that a large size like this will be more demanding on GPU. So balancing a large environment, a large number of objects (on and off-screen...working on that) and yet making sure that the environment is still big enough to drive around in (can't be too small) is all squarely on my mind. And more!

But so far I think I've got the scale just right.

I literally screenshot maps from the city archives and worked them into my game. Later I'll be adding a system which will adapt these map images to incorporate actual game road elements.

This video is just to showcase the non-blocky road system I'm working on as well as the scale of the city and hopeful 2.5D visuals.

Following my post above regarding the technical set-up for the buildings, I used a similar setup for the creation of the sloped roads, too.

At first, I was going to draw each road sprite at different sizes and then arrange them accordingly. The different sizes would represent different elevation levels in the city. And this probably would have worked just fine until I remembered I plan to include bridges, as well. Since I want to employ serious amounts of scaling/Z-elevation factors, it became clear that the roads wouldn't line up properly if different road pieces that represented different elevation levels weren't actually scaled properly.

Simply put, everything that's on a different elevation level in appearance has to actually be on a different elevation level. But actually accomplishing that with the sloped roads was going to be tricky because if there's no way to scale a sprite where one edge is secure at a lower Z-elevation while the other edge aligns with its adjacent road sprite at a different elevation.

What I did then was created "slices" of the road and spawned them in such a way that as the road pieces connect from end to end but are on different elevation levels, the road "slices" would "step" along to connect the two ends. It's literally like a set of stairs but because it's all flat images and aligned just right, it appears near-flawless (at least, I think so...). An actual sloped road that appears elevated from one end to the other.

I was asked how I did the "3D" buildings and the trick is really simple.

It's literally just a stack of similar sprites with a progressive Z-elevation value.

Using For() loops, I spawned [a number of] window and non-window sprites to create a "floor". In my case, I used 5 instances of a window sprite and 5 instances of a non-window sprite to make one floor...hence why the HowHigh variable on event line 3 is set to a multiple of 10.

From there, I just tell it to alternate between a window sprite and non-window sprite. Every five instances of one sprite lead to a swapping out to spawn five instances of the other sprite. And I set the Z-elevation in according to the current "floor" count. To keep the buildings from appearing too tall, I divided by 4...but this is subjective and will depend on how you might want to use this setup for your game.

jobel - I wanted to avoid using additional layers because, with z-el now a feature, it's unnecessary by-and-by. At least, if there's a better way to accomplish the visual effect I'm hoping to achieve. It's more details to manage and it can get rather cluttered in my mind.

oosyrag - Ah okay. I'll try those effects instead. Thanks!

Sorry slightly offtopic, but that looks great! Hopefully you want to do a tutorial some day (in high concept form - to save time).

Good luck!

I appreciate that, very much! Thank you!