NEWS

roads 1.2.1 (2026-01-16)

Change dynamic least cost paths (DLCP) to iterative least cost paths (ILCP) throughout
Change default roadMethod to "ilcp" in projectRoads
Add ability to use a custom weightFunction and add a weightFunction gradePenaltyFn that determines the grade between two cells
Add a vignette and a demo data set dem_example to show how gradePenaltyFn can be used.
Change argument name from cost to weightRaster since it no longer represents a cost surface and can now be inputs to the weightFunction. Also change roadsInCost to roadsInWeight.
returned roads are no longer unioned together.
Deprecate getDistFromSource and use terra::distance instead.
Fix bug in getLandingsFromTarget and change so that patches are used for 0,1 rasters and ids are used otherwise using terra::as.polygons to make it faster.

Fix an issue where updates to terra were causing roads to break
In the process removed raster and sp from dependencies and converted example data to terra and sf formats. This requires a new function prepExData to unwrap the terra objects that needed to be wrapped for storage

converted to using terra throughout the package. raster objects are still accepted but will be converted to terra formats.
Added getDistFromSource function to use moving windows to quickly get a raster of the distance from the nearest source (e.g road).
remove SpaDES.tools dependency because it was archived on CRAN and there is an equivalent method in terra now.
The returned cost raster now includes the projected roads as having a cost of 0. This makes it easier to loop additional road building over time but is a change from the previous version where the input cost surface was returned.