NIMBY Rails — A development retrospective | Carlos Carrasco

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2021-06-10 16:30:06

My new game, NIMBY Rails, is now public. I’ve been working on it for the past 18 months and I kept a development diary. Here’s an abridged version.

I saw @paniq tweet about paper which involved a very smooth, very natural curve interpolation, and I was immediately intrigued. To me it looked like a series of circle arcs linked by line segments at their tangents, and I quickly produced a bézier approximation of the same idea, drawing the arcs using cubic béziers with the often used coefficient of 0.55191502449.

I also had been, for some time, thinking about doing a game about railroads, with the twist of making it based on real world maps, trying to approximate real track networks. But the various games I tried that had vector-based tracks had either a too complicated interface for laying them, or tried to simplify too much and the curves seemed unnatural and quite different from real world track layouts. I was truly enamored with this way of smoothly interpolating a polyline into a curve, which was new to me, and seemed much more usable than the splines I knew. The idea of doing the railroad game with a track design based on this line interpolation started taking shape. So, barely a month before my finals, I started working on the idea for way too many hours every day.

I mentioned real world maps earlier. I really wanted to have the real world maps as the map of my game, the canvas for the player to build their track networks, but doing so would require using actual GIS data. The obvious place to start was OpenStreetMap. I like programming way too much for my own good sometimes, so I decided to start from raw OSM PBF dump files. These contain an optimized protobuffer dump of the OSM database, and can be found already pre-cut down into countries or regions. They are not database, being more like a serialization of the OSM data. In particular they lack any indexing. My idea was to load these PBF files and transform them into my own database format, with heavy lifting of processing ways and relations into triangulated shapes and generating indexes as a preprocessed step. I ignored MapBox, PostGIS and other ready-made solutions. My own map format would be stored as a series of tables in a SQLite database, with proper indexing.