Yet Another Town Generator (3D)

[Ramah]

Wow, this looks really great. Unfortunately I have no experience in any of this so the only aid I can offer is via words of encouragement....

Go go Crayons!

I hope you find the help you need for this as it does look really intriguing with the possibilities.

[allegraissmart]

This looks great.

Is it going to be browser-based, or a downloadable program?

[Crayons]

Thanks for the encouragement guys!

This looks great.
Is it going to be browser-based, or a downloadable program?

It would be a downloadable program - or rather a suite of things depending on what can be written specifically for it.

Basically - it works now, much as I describe on the website but it's really really onerous to manually edit 100 plus coordinates and re-render to see if you got it right.

The process at the moment is...
a) create a height_field - I used Paintshop Pro and the wonderful Wilbur
b) generate a street layout - here I used "RPG Citymap Generator" and PSP and another bit of POVRay code I wrote (badly) to extract all the node coordinates and street links - aaaaand many hours correcting and deleting the results manually... ugh
c) What you end up with is a main POVray file which just calls up macros which are contained in a bunch of library INC include files, which is where all the clever-ish stuff happens.

With a GUI many of the really onerous bits become visual and quick. The program would operate a bit like Moray (another POVRay "front end" program).

So - what would be ideal is a downloadable GUI program. You go get POVray yourself, its free ( runs on Mac, Windoze and Unix - you need to che3ck the website for details?). You can write your own Sketchup buildings and use the plugin to convert to POV (or write new stuff in POV) and make a "mystuff.inc" file which you can share or hide away for your own use.
It wouldn't be just one program, as such.

All this, of course, means that some mug like me will have to write some tutorials and the like too, I guess. Can do.