So I am now deep in the refactor well, and I’m pretty sure I can eventually get myself out, but right now everything is broken until I get to the bottom of the well, and start digging my way up.
What triggered this was supporting roads. In the picture I posted on the last update there was a lovely road going through the gap in the forest. But there wasn’t a gap there really.
The road pieces can be spawned on top of any tile, and that’s how it looks like it could be used, but then you can’t really use them on any tile which has other things on it. That is, it works on the plain flat tiles, but not say a forest tile. On a forest tile, you get a look of a road which has trees all over it.
To work around that did a quick hack to just force the tile to one of the plain flat ones when a road gets created on a tile that isn’t so well designed for roads. Thus, the picture of the road going through the gap in forest is really the road mowing down all the forest tiles in its way on the shortest bit of forest to cross.
I didn’t really like that, a road piece that neatly weaved through a forest closely would be nicer. And nicer becomes “let’s refactor the entire world”.
The upside is the tiles will look better when done, and at the same time I have half an idea of how to manage water traversal as well. It’ll involve less objects in the world as well.
I have progressively integrated the road pieces, in some cases recolouring them, into the base tiles and adjusted the decorations on those tiles to allow the road piece to fit in, and then collected it all into a new tile - original base tile plus road piece - so they can be spawned at once.
This is mostly some work in Blender, since the tiles are all easily messed with in Blender. Using Blender falls into that slightly annoying tool space where KiCAD lives in my head as well. It’s one of those tools where knowing the keyboard actions really matters and without that you will struggle to do anything quickly at all.
Anyway, that bit is done, I have many more tiles than I had before, and the ugly code and metadata reorganisation has begun.
I’ll surface in a few days to report why I shouldn’t have done this.