Diary #1 was about drawing roads. This diary is about everything that happens after you draw one, because the real test of a road tool isn’t the first road you place, it’s the fiftieth one you need to fix.
Dead ends
Roads can now terminate properly with a capped end instead of trailing off. Sounds trivial, was overdue.
Move sh(it)
The headline feature. Grab any point along an existing road and drag it. The road deforms around your grab point with a falloff, so nearby geometry bends naturally instead of kinking. There’s a live preview through the exact same pipeline the road actually bakes with, so what you see while dragging is what you get, plus a straighten cue if you want to snap a wiggly drag back to clean. This is the tool that turns “delete and redraw” into “just fix it.”
Lane-level connections
This is the one I’m proudest of. You can now anchor a road’s end to one specific lane on another road, not “somewhere on this road,” but a precise lane at a precise angle. Hold CTRL, click the lane, and it locks in with an orange hover cue so you know exactly what you’re grabbing. On-ramps, service roads, and merges all connect at the angle they should, and the connection survives rebuilds.
Props
Roads got a roster of street furniture: lights, signs, and more! All placeable one at a time or dragged as a line down a stretch of road. Small feature, big difference in how a street reads.
The Upgrade tool
Changed your mind about a road type after the fact? There’s a dedicated paint mode now that reclassifies an existing road without a rebuild.
Slopes
This was the hardest piece. Junctions, merges, and tight V-shaped intersections now conform to a real vertical profile, crests and sags calculated the way road design actually works, with design-speed limits and clearance warnings when a slope gets too aggressive. Roads on hills used to be a fight between “looks right” and “doesn’t clip through the terrain.” They’re the same thing now.
War stories
One bug earned a permanent spot in the war stories: on short, tight corners, dense elevation data could make the road’s corner geometry collapse in on itself, not a visual glitch, an actual folded mesh. The fix was to thin the elevation data on short legs before building the corner, so the geometry never gets crowded enough to fold. Also, minor but permanent rule I set for myself early: the mouse wheel is sacred, it’s for zoom, always. Every tool that wants a “cycle through options” control uses arrows or UI instead. Small thing, but breaking it once was enough to convince me never to again.
What roads are now
Roads are no longer just a drawing tool. They’re an editable, terrain-aware system you can keep refining after the fact, which matters a lot once a city gets big enough that redrawing isn’t an option anymore.
Next diary: buildings. The city stops being an empty road network and starts looking like somewhere people actually live.
Cumulative status: roads ✓ traffic ✓ terrain ✓ grass ✓ parking ✓ roads v2 ✓. Now: zoning & buildings.