Quote Originally Posted by jbgibson View Post
Newspaper office, stage depot, bathhouse, Certified Painless Dentist & Surgeon, barbershop (often double duty with the dentist), assay office (if there's mining nearby), tack & feed store, bank, post office, land office, jail, supply yard (either there's a local sawmill, or else they bring lumber in by wagon - in either case, gotta have boards & nails), blacksmith, school (or is this town pre-family?), dance hall and/or fraternal hall, firehouse (once the place had burned down a couple of times), corral (parking lot for stock, as the stable might be parking lot for horses?), water tower & windmill, graveyard (OK, might be outside of town), boarding house (slightly distinct from apartment or hotel), a bunch of privies out back...

'Course a bunch of those could double up or be skipped if it's a young/small town. Aaaaand of course many a town would have multiples....

Your initial render is pretty awesome. I agree the missing overhangs diminishes the look; maybe once the board sidewalks are rendered it'll look less stark? Claiming it's in Arizona and it last rained in '47 won't do, since then the sun would be just as big a deal as rain. Could you maybe just blatantly have the overhangs on a separate layer and render 'em only if you're doing a street view? Maybe go all schematic & lightly crosshatch covered pieces of sidewalk in the over head view?
Thanks for the praise! Several of those building ideas are gold! I entirely forgot outhouses--that's a must. Post office is really good too! I'll definitely be coming back to this list. This will be the very first of my "Western Maps," and if it does well I'll go back and do more stuff, particularly things that might be farther outside of town like a farmstead, coal mine, mill, etc.

As far as the overhangs go, I've been trying my darndest to wrap my mind around how I might include them without messing with the usability. It would be easy(ish) to have them as separate images for VTT use, but for I can't think of anything that wouldn't be a huge hassle for printed use.

Doing things like semi-transparency or crosshatching always feels like it throws off the look of the map to me. That's one of the reasons I deeply, deeply hate trees--there never seems to be a good way to handle foliage.