Fences

Some time ago I started to work on the task to add park borders. The first thing I did was to add land ownership which I guess some of you have seen when you tried to build things near the border of the map and suddenly there is an invisible border there. I’m sorry for anyone who may have been upset about that.

Well, now this border is not invisible anymore, because finally my work on fences has resulted in park border fences. I think it is now more than 8 months ago that I started with the fences. Then got busy with other things, got back to it a few times and then now finally got the time to finish it up so that you all can enjoy not hitting the invisible wall.

The fences in FreeRCT now come in 4 types. A park border type which you cannot build yourself, and 3 types that you can build yourself using the new GUI for building fences. A feature that I don’t remember if RCT had, is that you can use the landscaping tools on a tile and the fence and the fence will adopt to the new slope.

I have also worked on making paths and fences aware of each other, and had it working quite nicely 7 months ago, but this patch is now in a broken state and needs fixing.

On the technical side, one of the challenges with fences is what to do with sloped tiles. As you might know, the world is composed of voxels. For flat tiles, it is easy, store the fences in the ground voxel. However, if the slope have two raised corners and a fence between those corners, then that fence actually belongs to the voxel above. Furthermore, in FreeRCT there is also so called steep slopes that cover two voxels. This adds more special cases that all needs to be handled to build, draw and update fences correctly when the landscaping tools are used.