Programming New Road Features for my City-Builder

[@DevDuck]

I really enjoyed that explanation of the road placement animation. I know you said it's something you probably shouldn't be working on - but I think adding fun and creative little polish whenever you feel like it is a good way to stay sane when you're working on one project so long. Great devlog!

[@nikudayo7927]

devduck!

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks, glad you liked it ^^

[@domvinyard1133]

Big fan of both of you guys

[@diligencehumility6971]

Those road textures really added some life to the scene! The bounce effect when placing roads should IMO start from the top and go down, so it seems they are being laid down, instead of starting from the ground and bounce up.

[@sakeusberg]

I agree with you here. As I wrote in another comment, I think it would be cool if the player could affect how cars behave on the roads, for example there could be an option to make certain road tiles "no parking" zones so no cars park there. Or certain intersections could have no turn-rules an so on. Maybe even make it so that certain roads can be set to "high speed" så that cars will drive a bit faster on those tiles.

[@ThinMatrix]

I like that idea for the animation, I'll give that a go and see how it looks :)

[@SizzlingSquiggle]

I agree. A slight alpha fade in, as if it appeared from above and laid down, seems most fitting.

[@jackdavenport5011]

And since the timing is per-vertex, you could make the timing increase across the surface of the road tile so the whole tile doesn't move at once.

[@mattevans3440]

@@ThinMatrix Also instead of placing each road tile down individually, I think it would look nice if the road stays connected and gets laid down in one long strip, from beginning to end in a wavelike motion.

[@GoldenEvolution]

Sometimes you just have to make stuff like, the road placement animation for example, way earlier than expected, because it simply makes play testing a lot more pleasant. I could just see myself placing roads all over the place and nothing else, and still be entertained.

[@sakeusberg]

Finally a new devlog, I have been looking forward to this. I always enjoy watching your content! I think it would be cool if the player could decide which traffic rules apply to the road, for example if cars are allowed to turn a certain way in an intersection or if parking is allowed on certain road tiles.

[@ben_solo]

same

[@ThinMatrix]

That would definitely be good, and I'll be working on traffic soon so I'll think about implementing it then!

[@sakeusberg]

@@ThinMatrix Cool! I wish you best of luck!

[@paliszarok]

@@ThinMatrix you are a chad

[@embergamedev]

It was really cool that your Dad's math is included in the project. The animation has a nice bounce to it! Great addition ThinMatrix Sr.! Also, I love how the game is coming along.

[@nichegames9590]

Oh shoot, it's the guy who started it all. Glad to see more devlogs man. Game is looking great.

[@tysbc]

There are many city building games. But there is so much passion and love put into this one by this just one young man. It is great to see the progress you're making. You're not just a coder but you're also good at player feedback/gameplay. I will be buying this when it comes out and like every video you publish.

[@crispy_dev]

It's crazy that he made all of this game from scratch. Programming god.

[@DevNoob]

Understatement of the year haha

[@mkay2223]

Search for Inigo Quilez he is a real shader god

[@paliszarok]

he is

[@milesrout]

It's not crazy at all and it doesn't make him a "programming God". Stop putting people on ridiculous pedestals.

[@milesrout]

To be totally clear it is still a really cool project :)

[@emptytomb4967]

i like the coziness of the town. when you make them go to their own houses, it adds to the relatability of the characters and areas.

[@volcano3398]

Babe, wake up New ThinMatrix video just dropped

[@NyleGames]

There is nothing like some non-linear easing functions to make a game feel that much nicer. Very satisfying, I could practically imagine the sound effects that would go along side it in the future. :D

[@kg4frdz]

Thanks for your devlog! There is a simple way to fix the texture glitch. Just add 2-4px borders for each texture tile. It will fix the issue

[@SnirDavid]

I missed your devlogs! Good to have you back

[@Dolute]

Hey Thinmatrix, was just thinking of your videos the other day too! I find them very calming and interesting too, so thank you :)

[@souls.7033]

I'm a CS student, and I don't do any form of Games Tech, but your videos are so entertaining and I've been hooked ever since I watched one a couple of months ago, thank you so much for uploading! You are amazing

[@jona_archi]

I'd super love to see other house access systems that work independently from roads. For example bicycle paths, walking only paths, public transport or canals like in Venice. It would set you game apart from other city builders and allow for experimenting with future or past style cities, where there could be (very dense) quarters without cars

[@StaredownGames]

That sounds AMAZING!

[@richardbloemenkamp8532]

Indeed do not forget that the world wants to become greener. Urban sprawl and huge roads filled with polluting cars are quickly becoming old-fashioned in large parts of the world. I think you would want your game to reflect the greener thinking. Look at games like Factorio and Oxygen not included who include this notion of reducing the pollution and working towards a sustainable and responsible society.

[@wafan0]

Always love when I see a new video by you!

[@dameck9570]

Dude, I was just bingewatching your equilinox devlogs missing your videos, and now I see this. You're my hero!

[@Monkeypolice188]

as soon as you mentioned the new road feature, I already had an idea of a wave animation as they snapped down.... and then you did exactly that! fantastic job!

[@MarcoMontaltoMonella]

Two ideas, in case you might like it: when dropping a road tile add an earth splash animation (or in the future little mens constructing in a construction site, which in case of simple roads might finish very quickly, but might take longer if you are building more advance roads like highways. This can also be applied to building construction 🏗). And second idea, wouldn't it be nice to use a curve function to distort the tile while it's places to show some sort of wave propagating in the direction of the tile placement, rather than a flat one falling straight from the sky. Just ideas 😊 I love following your devlog videos and I'm sure you'll make an excellent choice whatever you're going to decide to

[@MJPlays2510]

About time for an upload 😁

[@anbagames]

As a shader noob, I must say that was a very understandable explanation of vertex shaders. Thanks for your constant good content!

[@lingonstudios]

Love it when I see a new devlog from you. The game is really taking shape

[@lumek4513]

A small hack-y solution for the texture glitch: force all road decals to be at least some distance from the edge and override the sampling process when near the edge :)

[@CallMeThyme]

I love city building games ! , HOW HAVENT I SEEN THIS BEFORE !?!

[@Mike_Plays]

I'm so glad youtube recommended your video to me today. I surely do not know anything about programming, but I love a good city builder. This is the first video I've watched, and I'm excited to see more of this series!

[@DylanMatthewTurner]

The road animation reminds me of when you finish building something in LEGO Star Wars

[@bluegru]

Awesome series, always love to watch your devlogs. not sure if its too early for that, but a big part in city builders is road hierarchy. Because you need to control the flow of traffic by using different road types

[@Pedro5antos_]

03:04 LOL! Wasn't expecting for that Great content as always, mate!

[@erikbrendel3217]

It's a good thing to keep performance in mind while developing - but only to some extent, I think. At this stage of the game, you really shouldn't worry about adding extra data to the road mesh vertices or other minor things like that. Readability of the code and flexibility are way more important, I think.

[@Skeffles]

Fantastic progress! I really like the placement tool and spawning animation. It'll make the player feel like a god in the tiny town.

[@PianoMan333]

It has been an enternity... Or at least it felt like one. Glad you're back :D

[@younes_9]

The Masaya is back !

[@spoplt]

Just as a suggestion for the pixel glitch on the borders of the tiles: This seems to happen because you marked all tiles with a black border in your texture atlas. If you would make these grid lines white, it should be fixed. You would just have to remember where the tiles are on the texture atlas. Then it wouldn‘t make a difference if the pixels are reused. As another option if you warnt to keep one pixel space between the tiles, you could shrink the tileSize by 1px and shift the uv position on the texture atlas by 0.5px. By the way: It is great to see another video from you! I always like your content and style :) I really appreciate how you keep going with your projects and how you spend weeks in figuring out solutions. My personal projects always fail when there are tedious tasks to do.

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks for the suggestion, but the grid shown in the video isn't actually part of the texture, that's just the image editor's grid which I turned on so you can see where the tiles are. The actual texture atlas image is grid-free :)

[@spoplt]

​@@ThinMatrix Ok then this is not the issue :) Now I see what you meant by the uv glitch and that the whole texture is reversed in just one line of pixels. I think without setting proper uv coordinates for the whole road tile, there are only really hacky ways to figure out if it should be the start or the end of a tile. Maybe you could hack around this by using mip-maps and use a white pixel for the lowest resolution... But there are more important things than having a glitchy line of pixels ;)

[@DevelopAnEngine]

@@ThinMatrix texture array is perfect for correct this atlas problem ;)

[@TehFlaminTaco]

@@ThinMatrix It's because of your textures wrap mode!

[@Nooke95]

Another thing you might be able to do is, in your fragment shader code, whenever uv.x > 0.999 or uv.y > 0.999, you force the pixel to be the same color as the regular road, rather than looking up a color on the atlas using the uv coordinates.

[@rbaleksandar]

The road placement is very satisfying. Especially when you compare it with the previous way it was working this is far superior. As for "should not have worked on this right now" I cannot agree with you for one simple reason - roads are essential for this game and throughout the dev process you will be placing a lot of road tiles. Improved placement mechanics of this particular item is therefor essential for speeding up the testing process.

[@chrisfleger1973]

I love the new road placement animation! It is sooooo addictive. I have been staring at it for 30 minutes straight now. Can't wait for these houses to get a nice animation too! Maybe they can be summoned by huge dog or something. That would be fun. Anyway, I am really impressed by your progress! :)

[@bossmbgaming]

Always waiting for and happy to see a new video! :)

[@sodagames4980]

It's absolutely amazing how you can make cool things like the road animations just with the help of a little math. Great job as always!

[@NattyGameDev]

I have been following your videos for a long time now, and am excited every time you upload! Absolutely love your content! Thank you for sharing your processes, It is incredibly inspiring :)

[@sotrh7974]

Great video! One suggestion I'd make for the road animation is have the bounce start from all tiles that touch an existing road. That way if you connect to roads, the animation will meet in the middle

[@yegirish]

There are few things that make me want to code more than watching your devlogs.

[@emil_lorin]

With the right lighting and a depth of field effect this game is going to look so nice!

[@emil_lorin]

Which as I’m thinking about it for two more seconds sounds incredibly more difficult if you have to write it by yourself instead of using a common engine

[@error17_]

the detail of the road placement preview is some cool code engineering!

[@i.8530]

another absolutely lovely video! i really enjoy how focused this is on the actual implementations of features, with showing and explaining the code behind them.

[@ezrakornfeld8436]

when the world needed him most. he came back

[@chadzulu4328]

Oh yeah, the road placement looks very satisfying. Great work man.

[@gleb.ignatev]

Fascinating work! One thing I'd suggest trying out is coloring the part of the preview road after an obstacle in red, like you color the normal one in white. It might look better and it's still intuitive. Looking forward to seeing your next vlog!

[@nologo85]

I was looking forward for some new content from you! Great content, thank you!

[@ShinoSarna]

Honestly I'm loving this series, this is shaping up to be a very relaxing game...

[@ben771]

That road animation is so satisfying i cant

[@DarkFazy]

As an amateur game dev and a developer, I gotta say I love these. And your plants!

[@elliot_yoyo]

It's getting a bit more technical and I love it ! Thanks

[@SilverlyBee]

This is looking so cool! The road animation is awesome and it's such a nice touch. It might seem superfluous but it gives the placement so much more feel.

[@rolpon2871]

This is great! This game is starting to look like a legitmate game that I would actually want to play! I really will love that you polish everything in your games, as they make then feel like there actually a finished/complete instead of some rushed/simple feature. Also, I think you should add a human maker system, where you can make a human then change things like name, age, date of birth, size, skin color, family, and culture. You should also add a system where a random boy and girl are selected and then can to marry eachother and have kids.

[@eric-jt4ij]

I just went to binge watch your videos again, and right in the middle of my session the notification appears that you've uploaded.What a godsend

[@Samsam-kl2lk]

To fix the one pixel seam, you could bundle the tile coordinate along with each vertex. That way you can calculate the texture coordinate by subtracting the tile coordinate from the vertex coordinate (it would use more vram but it might be worth it)

[@JamalGreenMusic]

I love these videos so much 😍

[@Nadeloehr1990]

Just today I thought about when your next video would come out. Me as a java engineer myself got a big fan of you and your project. Good to see your progression. The new features look amazing, keep the pace and peace✌️

[@rebelmachine88]

Wow, this is great! Thanks for walking us through the process, I always look forward to these videos. Road animation looks great!

[@nadotornado]

The game is looking sick man. Nice work! I started working on my own little game project recently and it's really inspiring to see videos like yours every now and again to get a boost of motivation :) Looking forward to building my own game engine in the future - I hope your OpenGL tutorials are still around when I do!

[@_B_K_]

I love how that road-laying animation looks.

[@liliyaversus4051]

Thank you for continuing posting c: I find your devlog inspiring and happy to see it in my feed every time it happens. Hope your health stays as good as your content c: (gods, i sound like an old person saying that ahah)

[@simoncodrington]

Always enjoy seeing these dev logs. Can't wait to see the next one mate ♥️

[@evilrobot9868]

One method to fix the issue with the road tile set is to use an array texture. This would get rid of the mip map blending between the tiles, although you would also have to get rid of the borders and set up a system for loading multiple images into a array texture.

[@indieprogress7170]

Awesome to see another devlog. Hope you are doing well!

[@lukehibbert3000]

i love these videos so much

[@lubu682]

you are just about the best coder I know man

[@dermitdenlangenohren]

That was an awesome street update! Keep it going!

[@AbhijeetDani_]

That road placement was so satisfying to watch! Great vid :)

[@andredias5061]

Currently there are 4 things in my life that I really look forward. My job application results, finishing my computer science grad, randy and your videos

[@PandemicGameplay]

This is absolutely amazing, the ingenuity behind this from scratch is just awesome, you should be directing the release of Cities Skylines game or SimCity.

[@MistaSmith]

Always looking forward for your next update

[@amisner2k]

Another great devlog as always. I would recommend however, that when dragging a road out that it can just automatically bulldoze any houses that are in the way. Players and I'm sure you yourself will eventually realize that it will be a nuisance to have to switch out of the road-laying mode, bulldoze obstacles in the way, then switch back to road-laying mode. Besides that, your project is really promising and I know I don't just speak for myself when I say it's very enjoyable watching the progress. Your videography and narration are very well done. Cheers. 👍

[@ThinMatrix]

Hmm yeah, I think you might be right there; I'll probably change that at some point. Glad you liked the video :)

[@adam-the-dev]

@@ThinMatrix When I was watching the video I was thinking the most intuitive action would be if the road automatically wrapped around any objects to try to get to the mouse. Would obviously be more complex for implementation, and may not always be what the player intends, but it might be nice QOL. I obviously don't know your codebase but it may just come down to a simple A* implementation if you liked the idea. Cheers!

[@0xDE57]

@@ThinMatrix if you do go that route, maybe some sort of indicator that you're making "destructive changes". ei: you're dragging a road and it decides to bulldoze / eat houses, but the houses are offscreen so the user isn't aware their road has bulldozed a house they didn't actually want to bulldoze, and didn't notice till they scroll back to where they were.

[@rollinmarbles2908]

It would be really cool if you could have a first person view and walk around your own city!

[@kinsondigital]

Amazing work as usual. I myself have been working on a game framework, 2D engine, 2D particle engine tool and more. This stuff is difficult so I admire the work you have been doing and its inspiring. Keep it up!!

[@dandymcgee]

Dude that animation looks amazing! Really like the polish of the road details and red x quads, too. Great progress. :)

[@thek3317]

welcome back man

[@UCfvFxl5fVfTuA9DH353dJzQ]

So glad to see you back!

[@joao13soares]

I wonder if you plan on adding roundabouts. That sounds tricky at first because of how the game works in tiles. Anyways, will definitely buy your game dude. As a recent game development engineering graduate myself, your series have been truly inspirational for me throughout this last year and a half. Congrats on your talent, both on game design and development as well as on presenting it to us on these videos. Cheers from Portugal!

[@pij0n]

Love your devlogs! You got me screaming happy with this new upload!

[@6ocram]

Your work is really motivating :D Don't stress a lot about the small glitches, even AAA games got them.

[@legendsofthepitch5328]

i just searched what have you been up to lately to find there is a new video of yours ^^ Great progress! Little idea: I dont know what happens when you put 4 road next to eachother (little square) It would be cool i think if it would merge into a mini roundabout. Oooor, if you make double road next to each other it merges into a 2 tile wide 2+2 lane road. Anyway, inspiring work!

[@KamranWali]

This is looking super kool. The road animation is on point and it looks really good :) Keep it up! :)

[@Destroyer19941995]

Damn I love this project. Keep going legend you are inspiring me to keep working on my game!

[@AryanShahGamingMusic]

Absolutely amazing video! I’m astounded at how you can create such entertaining videos

[@roktoka]

Cool! Nice explanation on the shader usage

[@troligtvisme]

Wow! Really liked that you went with your animation idea! Great job :)

[@faisalsheikh6695]

Hey very nice devlog! I was just thinking about you and so happy to find out you uploaded a new video! A suggestion I would like to make is to implement a system where you can change the size of the road (one lane, two lanes,etc) and if they’re one way/two way. For the cars of your city, I would like to suggest implementing a gas station system where cars would need to be filled up at sometime on their routes to break the infinite feeling of never ending. I know you are still early in development and these ideas are not a priority but I would love to see them come into fruition. Keep up the good work and can’t wait to play it!

[@ThinMatrix]

Thanks, and thank you for the suggestions!

[@tamat]

The border glitch is due to mipmaps of the texture as the UVs change dramatically it goes down the mipmap chain. Disable mipmaps and it will be fixed.

[@AgsmaJustAgsma]

7:19 It's small details like these that add personality to a computer game.

[@Kahitar1]

I loved this video, especially because of the in-depth technical explanations! Really miss your tutorials haha

[@Gabriel-cs8wo]

You made my day

[@nickcy5083]

Awesome road updates! looking forward for more videos!

[@stanstanstan]

Absolutely love it! Keep up the great work chap

[@64jcl]

The texture wrap glitch is the first thing I also encountered doing some game in WebGL where I had tiles. The solution was to not use UV coordinates that are on the edges so that my texture had one pixel free on the right and bottom edge that were always blank.

[@gunschlinger]

Some good progress here. I think for the road blocking system i would just color the entire road preview in red when blocked and not allow the player to place it. With the current system i can see a lot of cases where the player might have placed a road unintentionally

[@NeilRoy]

Looking great! Hope your health is doing okay.

[@infelicitas]

I love how its turning out so far, it looks nice and polished for where its currently at, very solid work man, Been following your logs ever since about mid way done with your last game

[@isaac_opeyemi]

Much happiness!!!

[@larryd9577]

Amazing and long awaited update! I was wondering, which chair you use.