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jstanleytoday at 8:27 AM2 repliesview on HN

You're missing one very important type of curve: a clothoid (or "Euler spiral") is a curve of continuously-varying radius, these are encountered on roads very frequently. And especially on race circuits.

A clothoid is used to connect two lines the same way your fillet is, except instead of just 1 radius it has a radius configured for each end and smoothly changes in between.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_spiral

They are also used in railways, because on a railway you don't have the freedom of moving the car's position across the road, so a transition from a straight track to a constant radius would imply an instantaneous step change in centrifugal force, or infinite jerk. Using a clothoid to smooth the change between the straight track and the constant-radius turn means the lateral acceleration increases smoothly instead of instantaneously.


Replies

trelbutatetoday at 9:06 AM

I was also confused about that because they did mention clothoids in their first post: https://sandboxspirit.com/blog/art-of-roads-in-games

Although re-reading that it seems they just don't want to deal with the math involved