Can City Designer do a modern town?

[alp]

You can also check out theses annuals for ideas
http://sub.profantasy.com/2010/june10.html
http://sub.profantasy.com/2011/may11.html
http://sub.profantasy.com/2007/september07.html

Unfortunately they are from 3 different annuals, but all the annuals are a great source of symbols / styles / fills etc

Adam

[Gozdom]

In terms of adapting to terrain, I'm guessing you're wondering if it's always linear or if it can handle curves and such? It can do curved roads, etc. It can't generate a city, so you will have to draw it in manually, but they do have some tools to help with that (including a random building road setting, where you just draw in a road and it "auto-populates" it with generic buildings). There are also some good tutorials here that people have written regarding how to successfully learn and use CD3.

No, by adapting I mean importing a river/coast layout, but this only involves software that can generate a city. Drawing all streets by hand is a bit frightening. CE can generate a very convincing street layout even if it needs some touchup.

[Joshua]

I agree with you, creating all the streets by hand is no easy task. It's one of the main reasons why I scrap every city I attempt! It always ends up looking unnatural and forced for me. But some of the designers here create masterpieces, so I know it can be done.

[Katto]

Both programs can do the job. You could even use PS/GIMP or Illustrator/Inkscape. You should be more precise concerning the style you imagine for your maps: top down view/3D, realistic/atlas style etc.
AFAIK there is no ready to use style for what you want. That means you will have to spend time on learning the desired program and then work on the style.

[Gidde]

You may want to try out the RPG Citymap Generator (you can find it here: http://www.stargazersworld.com/2009/...map-generator/) to get a starting point for street layout; it has presets for modern cities in addition to more medieval/fantasy stuff.