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Medieval Fantasy City Generator

watabou.itch.io

31–40 of 119 posts

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#31
If you like procedural generation and maps, you definitely need to follow this high-quality series here:

http://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/

It's ranging from generating city icons to picking appropriate names and placing ocean labels. Really, check it out if you're even slightly interested in such stuff.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#34
post #28
post #25

Serious application for these tools: crowded countries like the UK often talk about building new towns rather than annoying everyone is existing towns by more and more building work. Unfortunately, new towns tend to be rather formulaic and dull. With tools like these, you could start with a medieval city generator and use algorithms to apply changes that would have happened over 500 years and then build the new town…

One problem. Cars! Unless you can lay down some serious infrastructure as a constraint first hand. Driving in these types of places is always insane. Just look at Italy. It'd be an easy problem to solve by pushing for a carless city or smaller car city paradigm. But folk will want their cars.

Medieval cities were limited by the size of the fortification walls, so streets had to be as narrow as possible to save the valuable space. You don't have such limits with this, so you can turn all streets into boulevards if you like...

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#35
post #5

A couple of small discussions that agree on triangular buildings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14407996

Interesting about the overhang being due to taxation laws. I could swear they told us in school that it was because people often thew their dirty water out of second storey windows, and this way it could go straight into the gutter in the middle of the street where no one walked.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#36
It looks nice. What I like about procedural generation is the great freedom in design. It's a great opportunity to tackle the problem of managing complexity in a visually rewarding way.

There is the top down approach where you start laying out the road networks, it defines neighborhoods, which you split up into individual houses. It can be made as nice as the programmatic time you are willing to invest, ultimately it's realistic, but quite repetitive and boring.

There is the scoring based approach where you get points when certain type of building are near other type of buildings. Then you optimize more or less. Quite often it's not as repetitive and boring, but not very realistic, so you can add some statistic matching penalties to make it more realistic (eventually using neural networks like GAN).

There is the more ambitious and computer-intensive bottom-up approach, where you start defining the rules of the game (like a sim-city generator) and have your city evolved by playing the game eventually from the point of view of the various agents in the game. The city will have a more organic feel and look. By defining the right rules, you can even witness some emergent behavior. You have less control but it'll give you a world deeper than it looks.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#37
post #18

This is great! Would love to see it used by city planners too - turns out a lot of medieval cities/towns are really pleasant places to walk, and just be.

> turns out a lot of medieval cities/towns are really pleasant places to walk, and just be. minus the poop I'm assuming

CalRobert means walking _nowadays_ (i.e. without poop) in cities that were built in the middle ages.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#38
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem. Cars! Unless you can lay down some serious infrastructure as a constraint first hand. Driving in these types of places is always insane. Just look at Italy. It'd be an easy problem to solve by pushing for a carless city or smaller car city paradigm. But folk will want their cars.

Medieval cities were limited by the size of the fortification walls, so streets had to be as narrow as possible to save the valuable space. You don't have such limits with this, so you can turn all streets into boulevards if you like...

please no :(

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#39
post #28
post #25

Serious application for these tools: crowded countries like the UK often talk about building new towns rather than annoying everyone is existing towns by more and more building work. Unfortunately, new towns tend to be rather formulaic and dull. With tools like these, you could start with a medieval city generator and use algorithms to apply changes that would have happened over 500 years and then build the new town…

One problem. Cars! Unless you can lay down some serious infrastructure as a constraint first hand. Driving in these types of places is always insane. Just look at Italy. It'd be an easy problem to solve by pushing for a carless city or smaller car city paradigm. But folk will want their cars.

I just spent some time driving in the Italian countryside. Dreadful if you are used to relatively newer infrastructure, but the people that are used to it don't seem to have an issue! It was terrifying.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#40
post #2

Awesome! This is by the maker of Pixel Dungeon[1], the best rogue-like on Android. Anyone who's played it can testify that (s)he knows all there is to know about procedurally generated maps. [1] http://pixeldungeon.watabou.ru/

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/thumb/c/c2/Town_map_43.p... The wiki is well organized for that kind of resources. It’s important to note that some of those irregular area are zones, not building. Actual building are simpler with the exception of some special cases.

I think perhaps you replied to another comment than the one you intended to reply to.

Seems like the one you wanted to reply to was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931944

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