Procedural highway generator

Procedural generation of a highway given an array of modules in Unity.

The Problem

This feature was requested for a VR experience where the player needed to be seated on the back of a pickup moving along a highway, for an indefinite amount of time.

I developed this generator to procedurally build a highway from a set of modular prefabs.

As stated above, the solution needs a group of ‘modular prefabs’. These modules need to have a common origin pivot, so the pieces can connect to each other successfully. For example: As seen above, each highway piece can have a turning angle. This generator takes these angles into account when connecting together the modules, automatically aligning them according to the last generated piece. Also, each module is given a probability value, to make some modules more likely to appear than others. With this, modules wouldn’t “collide” with each other (for example, by spawning multiple turns to the same side).

The next step was to make the pickup actually traverse the road. To do this, I made a controller that uses waypoints in conjunction with the incredible plugin DOTween (Get it, it’s awesome and free!).

As you can see from the next image, the generator maintains a (configurable) maximum amount of modules at all times, attaching new modules forward, and destroying modules on the back. It also keeps the player on the middle, so that this creation/destruction is not visible to him.

On the next image you can see the results from a VR perspective running on Occulus, with final lighting settings and models.

This work was developed while working at Yeltic: http://yeltic.com/en/