This week I had to improve roads created last week and lay down rail tracks on them.

Performance Issues

Last week's roads severely impacted performance. To get to the bottom of this, I used VisualVM to check which methods were taking the most time. It was Lakes. Unfortunately facet configuration for Lakes doesn't work right now so I cannot disable Lakes. I had to completely remove it from the module.

insert photo of lava lakes

Another improvement is not connecting every city with every other city. So if we have cities A and B when city C is created, a rail will be laid down from C to either A or B depending on which is closer and not both.

Rails

The construction system uses a RoadRasterizer to lay down actual blocks for the road. All I needed to do was create a custom RailRasterizer in MetalRenegades which inherits from the default RoadRasterizer in DynamicCities. I also needed a RoadManager in MetalRenegades to pass this custom rasterizer to the construction system.

For the actual placement of rails within the road segment, I decided to keep it simple. Rails are only placed on two sides, along the border of the segment, as shown below:

insert an image here

I originally thought of filling segments with gravel and then placing rails on top, but that would again severely impact performance so it is left for later. What I still need to fix are some minor issues at segment borders where rails cannot connect properly.

PRs

• Metal Renegades #9
• Dynamic Cities #44

To Do

• Fix these issues with rail borders
• Clean up and finish remaining PRs
• Move on to rail carts and AdvancedRails