Procedural cities

[Redrobes]

All links are still appreciated tho even if they end up being research or have price tags on the final software.

For those new to our continued search for the holy grail of auto generated city mapping there's been a few threads posted in the past.

IMO whats needed first is for someone to break the deadlock of fitting a 2D set of building footprints (like just black silhouettes) into an arbitrary shape boundary (like a white polygon). If I had the time id work on it and it has been worked on in similar fields like where people have to cut odd shaped panels out of sheet material. Once we know where a house needs to be planted then the rest all follows. The placement of the house needs to allow for access and light and yet also use lowest build cost so sharing walls etc.

There's been a few new scripters out there recently joining. I have seen python and ruby mentioned a bit... if anyone would care to have a pop at it then it would allow some amazing city mapping.

[töff]

needed first is for someone to break the deadlock of fitting a 2D set of building footprints (like just black silhouettes) into an arbitrary shape boundary (like a white polygon)

Doesn't that procedural forest script do that? Just change the trees for boxes.

[töff]

All links are still appreciated tho even if they end up being research or have price tags

Sorry, didn't mean to imply otherwise.

[waldronate]

Sorry, didn't mean to imply otherwise.

S'ok, toff. I'll make allowances because you're on the moist side of the mountains.

My goal for those posts was to add some research papers to the mix. The second link is a collection of papers that works well enough that they're able to sell the resulting tool to game and movie studios, while the first spawned a good series of SIGGRAPH posters.

I have a very old and slow implementation that involved the user dropping a basic layout for water and roads, then the software would drop rectangular boxes along the road and water, aligning them to the roads and rivers. The original specs for that software called for automatic road and building placement given a few parameters such as an underlying height field, blocking items (walls and rivers), and goals (try to make roads reach places such as gates, fords, and keep preferentially close to water, buildings, and other good things). The results weren't great. It's been 5 years or so and I should be able to do better if I can crack free a few dozen hours.