Regarding Pathmaking (and hello from All Roads!)

[JSJBDEV]

Hi there!
Firstly as the creator of All Roads I want to say a big thank you for making a pathmaking mod that is actually good (and even linking my mod in your description!) its unlikely Ill update All Roads as I've moved on to other things, so i am glad there is projects now that do this

Secondly, I have a few queries about how some of the pathmaking works in your mod:

I am currently using "Oh The Biomes We've Gone" as my only terrain mod, but find it seems to be common that not all roads can spawn. My first thoughts was to follow the paths to see if they hit any oceans but they did not. I also turned on the verbose logs but it would appear that these paths aren't computed, or they could fall into this second category of being too short, but i assume the too short notification is villages trying to connect paths to themselves?

I have also seen similar results, but not quite as common with Biomes 'O Plenty - my guess, without taking a deep dive into the code, is this is something to do with paths not being able to find a flat route around mountains and chasms? would it potentially be possible to put the failure to compute a path reason in to the logs for this?

If this is the case, what is the best idea to make more paths spawn, is there a configuration option that would give this a higher chance?

And Thirdly, as what I suppose is a suggestion - One idea I had for All Roads when i was in the throes of making it was when an ocean or large body of water was reached, to create a small "port" structure at both sides of where the path would be, perhaps with some direction pointer or teleportation, or even moving ship that could take you back and forth, it something I could also potentially see myself doing if it was possible to have hooks for that in this mod, but I figure it might be harder to expose hooks then it would be to just add it into our existing worldgen.

thank you for taking the time to read this, and well done!

[0xCoDSnet]

Hi! Thanks for the kind words, and for All Roads. It is great to see the author in the issue.

For missing connections. The mod has several limitations due to which some “structure <-> structure” pairs may not receive a route: connection distance, penalties for water/coast, and “roughness” of the terrain. On wide bodies of water and in mountain biomes, A* often gives up, or marks a pair as “too short/invalid” instead of a full path.
I’m thinking of adding explicit reason codes to the debug log so that I can immediately see “why it wasn’t built” (for example: “distance limitation”, “terrain penalty”, “water hazard”, “search budget has expired”).
And also generally improve the display of the debug map.

What can be tweaked to make more roads:

• Increase Max Connection Distance. This expands the radius of the pairs for which we are generally trying to build a road.
• Allow partial acceptance of the route if A* has progressed far: enable Accept High-Progress Partial and select Partial Acceptance Threshold. This increases the chance of connection in "difficult" biomes.
• Reduce water penalties if there are oceans/large rivers nearby: reduce Water Step Penalty, Coast Proximity Penalty and/or reduce Coast Avoid Buffer; if necessary, temporarily disable Prefer Land Over Water.
• If it runs into mountains/canyons, reduce the influence of Terrain Analyzer or temporarily disable it so that A* receives more valid trajectories. Parameters: enabled, Roughness Radius/Stride/Range Threshold/Penalty Scale.

Regarding the idea with “ports”. I like this concept. And I also wanted to do something similar.
I came to two options:

1. simple - create “port” structures on both banks and connect them with buoys;
2. advanced - introduce a separate “intersection” stage into the pipeline and provide external hooks for configuration.

but for now, this is just a concept :p.

[JSJBDEV]

Thank you for those suggestions! I can confirm on at least one of those roads it was a mountain range, so I assume that is one of the "too short" calls in the log. For labelling, this is NeoForge 1.21.1.

Regarding ports, I would argue that bouys might cause problems with bigger ships (say, Valkyrien Skies ships for instance) but I did have them in All Roads spaced apart just as markers so it might be fine, I do think it depends on how direct you want to go but I do feel like just a direction to the next port or say, a lodestone compass in an item frame at the ports could be used also. I like the advanced version but of course that is more work lol.