How realistic do you wish for Geology to be?

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[CoconutKid]

I have been worried\irritated with the description of paved roads in games (and other places) for some time. It is particularly bad based on era.

In early era games, cobblestone is horribly misused. They are naturally occuring, rounded stones having dimensions between 2.5–10 inches typically found in active or former river beds. They were gathered in their natural state and spread on heavily used roadways to overcome the muck of wet, untreated earth. Their use may have been more or less elaborate as to placement, but they consisted of little more than what we today recognize as a "graveled" road.

The horrible mistake in games is calling and picturing a quarried stone a "cobblestone."

A sett, usually the plural setts and in some places called a Belgian block, often incorrectly called "cobblestone", is a broadly rectangular quarried stone used originally for paving roads. A sett is distinct from a cobblestone by being quarried or shaped to a regular form, whereas a cobblestone is generally naturally occurring.

Cobblestones were largely replaced by quarried granite setts in the nineteenth century. [Perhaps in Britian, the product of the prisons which reformed the inmates by hard labor. (?)] Cobblestone is often wrongly used to describe such treatment. Setts were relatively even and roughly rectangular stones that were laid in regular patterns. They gave a smoother ride for carts than cobbles, although in heavily used sections, such as in yards and the like, the usual practice was to replace the setts by parallel granite slabs set apart by the standard axle length of the time.

Cobblestoned and setted streets gradually gave way to macadam roads, and later to tarmac, and finally to asphalt at the beginning of the 20th century.

I question the last sentence, at least in its implication. The time and location (urban vs rural) is not correctly reflected.

However, my central point is that too many game producing studios have no knowledge or perhaps concern with historical accuracy. Their artists simply fling down visual representations of what have to be quarried stones all over the ground -- no mater the era. Meanwhile, the gameplay makes a "big-deal" out of constructing roads or not having roads - or else having "more than one kind of road."

Well, it actually doesn't make much difference. There's one exception. That is the inexperenced youngsters who accept that all the stuff in a computer game is historically accurate. That's sad.

[MaxKos]

The road to Hell is paved with many good intentions, bet you don't find them at the bottom of riverbeds, some people even get stoned in bed but never paved.

[CoconutKid]

The first incarnation of this thread was somewhat less than interesting to the folks on this forum. So I shall try for a new start with a broader topic.


City Building Games may be arrayed across a spectrum from pure fantasy to intense historical simulation. It seems to me that there should be a matching level for the "ground" upon which the player builds.

Of course, this has to do with the pyramid of the scale vs subsuming detail.

But I hope some folks will comment on what they prefer when a land surface is generated in a game -- generally or for a specific game. That's very broad. Should the "geology" have any connection with the storyline of the game? Or is it O.K. for the developers to use something that just looks good and/or introduces some level of complication and isn't a match to the rest of the game?

A related question is the vegetation -- on the same spectrum and relationship.

[Virmin]

I think that geology and vegetation doesn't necessarily need to fit in the storyline or theme so long as it doesn't conflict or detract from it either.

[CoconutKid]

@ Virmin,

I'd go with that -- which means that the idea goes to a case-by-case (game-by-game) decision with no applicable standard. It also becomes very much a matter of personal taste with various players either ignoring or disliking cheap or careless rendering.

[Face]

To address cobblestone for road realism, I have a few notes to add.

I live on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.  Several times a year I go to a near by island named Nantucket. At one point the whaling capitol of the entire world. The entire downtown area on the island is still paved with cobblestone(See photos below). That makes for a rough and slow ride, even in a modern cars with shocks, rubbber tires, and associated technology.

I can only begin to imagine what it was like to travel these roads 100+ years ago on a wooden cart. if you have cobble roads everywhere, i would have to argue that they should have an adverse effect on cart speed travel. In some games I have played, the speed of travel will increase as you upgraded dirt roads to "cobblestone". technically this should not be so, as travel over cobble is much slower then dirt. as said cobble stone was used in high traffic areas to keep the roads from turning into giant mud pits when it rained. TO that effect cart travel speed is increased by using cobble over mud, however once into the country side open dirt road travel is much faster. I would imagine a horse would also not be able to run as fast over cobble as it could on open dirt road.

 

[CoconutKid]

@ face,

Your points about the speed of light carts on "undressed" stones from river beds (or beaches) used for road surfacing are reasonable. To some extent, they echo my complaint about studios' misusing the term "cobble" to describe dressed stones -- setts.

In Europe, I have driven on lots of streets which were stone (setts) paved and they were not particularly rough.

There is a factor in addition to speed which may or may not be included in gameplay -- that is weight. Wagons carrying heavy loads of merchandise had little variation is speed; a slow or fast walk of the heavy draft horses or oxen pulling them. The Budweiser beer horses are not an historical picture at all. Heavily loaded freight wagons have a tendency to cut ruts into plain dirt roads, dry or wet. That is why so much of heavy freight was shipped by water (coast, river or canal) before railroads.