February 8, 2026
Road rage, but make it artsy
Art of Roads in Games
Gamers swoon over curvy roads; Romans shout 'make them straight'
TLDR: A developer explains why game roads feel wrong: engines use simple curves, but real roads follow car-wheel geometry. Comments split between Roman-straight jokes, reminders that real curves are huge, and demands for walkable city-builders—showing virtual roads influence how we imagine real cities.
The article is a love letter to the art of roads in city‑builder games, from SimCity to Cities: Skylines, and why virtual streets feel off. Games draw roads with simple curves, while real highways are shaped by how car wheels turn. One camp went Roman: zabzonk joked about straight lines and dropped a RAF runway kink story. Fans swooned; serious_angel called it ineffably magnificent and shared a movie UI craft link. Modders flexed a turbo roundabout like a masterpiece.
Not everyone’s sold. heliumtera looked at the demo road and asked why the interchange is still bonkers. bombcar reminded that in real life, road and rail curves are huge, and games shrink them, making highways look wrong. Then the mood swung: chongli loves SimCity but slammed car‑centric sprawl, asking for a builder that teaches walkable, transit‑first cities. The thread split: art vs realism, curves vs straight lines, and car love vs livability. Everyone agreed on one thing: roads make us strangely emotional, and if aliens visit, they’ll judge our layouts.
Key Points
- •City-building games have steadily improved road tools, from SimCity 4’s elevation/diagonals to SimCity (2013)’s curved roads and Cities: Skylines’ free placement and complex interchanges.
- •Despite progress, common issues persist: sharp or wobbly highway ramps, odd intersection radii, and unrealistic curvature for high-speed lanes.
- •Community mods enabled more realistic merge lanes, markings, and smooth transitions but remain limited by the underlying game systems.
- •Cities: Skylines 2 further refined lane behavior and markings, approaching visual realism for non-experts.
- •A fundamental limitation is reliance on Bézier splines; while smooth and intuitive, they don’t capture real-world constraints driven by fixed vehicle axle geometry, leading to unrealistic road shapes in games.