This is what a spline is. OH SNAP! That still doesn't make any sense!
Basically a spline is a curve made from a series of points. In games, we apply a repeating texture, or a repeating series of textures, to the spline line in order to make a road or a river! They can be used for other things, and they are pretty important because, as I mentioned in the summary, they can be used to take your game off the grid, so to speak.
Here were some early tests.
As you can see, there are some serious stretching problems (putting aside how ugly the texture is - Sorry Somjade).
After a few tweaks by Terry (Lead Programmer) we managed to get pretty good looking splines. One of the bigger problems we had was when we wanted to do really sharp turns. By using a separate, 90 degree turn texture we have somewhat alleviated this problem, though as always it has introduced new ones.
I'll post again once we have finished the road texture and made something truly sexy looking. All this work was made petty easy by the Flat Red Ball engine using their Sprite Chain's, which are basically splines.
