This is officially the coolest project I've seen on HN since https://github.com/fogleman/primitive
I have always loved that project!
Medieval Fantasy City Generator
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#52This 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
and plague, and increased risk of murder, etc.
But the towns _now_ are wonderful. Beautiful architecture and fantastic for walking, or sitting and enjoying a meal, coffee, wine, or beer while taking it in.
Growing up I wished we had real towns like the ones in kids movies set in medieval Europe. I couldn't fathom that they do indeed exist - after all, why would you stop building them?? I still don't really understand why we stopped, to be honest. It's easy to say "cars" but I think there's more to it than that.
The first time I visited the Alsace I was blown away that places like this are real.
https://previews.123rf.com/images/freeartist/freeartist1609/...
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#53Serious 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.
So, don't drive?
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#54This is officially the coolest project I've seen on HN since https://github.com/fogleman/primitive
I think you would also like https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#55Serious 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.
Well, this is really a two-way problem. Being mostly a pedestrian myself (I don't own a car, and only use one of them very occasionally to cover long distances or move furniture), I really enjoy old historic city centres, which are really easy to get around just walking.
Being a pedestrian in a car-first environment can really be nightmarish (and dangerous!) at times. I think about large shopping centers or industrial complexes, but also about American-type suburbs. Getting around is impractical, public transport i often nonexistent. As a results, this only encourages car ownership, which encourages building this kind of environment.
However, I also drive quite a bit at times, mostly in the countryside, yet I would take an easily accessible parking lot and public transit infrastructure in big cities over large roads. I don't really know about elsewhere, but it seems to me that car-less cities are pushed for in quite a number of places in Europe, and it doesn't seem like the opposite (making cities more car-friendly) pushes back that much in cities that were converted.
Now, about the parent, this could be taken a step further by optimizing for a lot of variables (walking time, access to public transportation, parkings, roads, etc), instead of just making an "historic simulation".
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#56I love this sort of thing, but the far more interesting challenge to procedural games is engaging the player emotionally and intellectually, and giving them a sense of long term narrative progression. I'm mainly thinking of RPGs here, but it's a problem that surfaces up to this day in things like No Man's Sky. Even in non-procedural games that nevertheless allow you to continue playing in a world after all the storyl…
Skyrim and Oblivion are a good example here. Oblivion heavily used procedural generation to create the overworld. It resulted in a pretty samey experience. Skyrim, on the other hand, hand-crafted the entire overworld and paid attention to making sure that things looked spectacular from where the player was standing.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#57I love this sort of thing, but the far more interesting challenge to procedural games is engaging the player emotionally and intellectually, and giving them a sense of long term narrative progression. I'm mainly thinking of RPGs here, but it's a problem that surfaces up to this day in things like No Man's Sky. Even in non-procedural games that nevertheless allow you to continue playing in a world after all the storyl…
This is why IMO a well-run pen-and-paper RPG will offer a far superior experience to any computer game for the foreseeable future.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#58I love this sort of thing, but the far more interesting challenge to procedural games is engaging the player emotionally and intellectually, and giving them a sense of long term narrative progression. I'm mainly thinking of RPGs here, but it's a problem that surfaces up to this day in things like No Man's Sky. Even in non-procedural games that nevertheless allow you to continue playing in a world after all the storyl…
This is why IMO a well-run pen-and-paper RPG will offer a far superior experience to any computer game for the foreseeable future.
mmo?
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#59I love this sort of thing, but the far more interesting challenge to procedural games is engaging the player emotionally and intellectually, and giving them a sense of long term narrative progression. I'm mainly thinking of RPGs here, but it's a problem that surfaces up to this day in things like No Man's Sky. Even in non-procedural games that nevertheless allow you to continue playing in a world after all the storyl…
Skyrim and Oblivion are a good example here. Oblivion heavily used procedural generation to create the overworld. It resulted in a pretty samey experience. Skyrim, on the other hand, hand-crafted the entire overworld and paid attention to making sure that things looked spectacular from where the player was standing.
Are you sure this is correct? I Feel like both were hand built overworlds, but Oblivion just had less decoration because of hardware limitations at the time.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What we really want when we say we want an infinity to explore and interact with is that we want infinitely many new and interesting experiences Agree. > which procedural generation has been, thus far, unable to provide Disagree. I think Dwarf Fortress (and to a lesser extent, EVE Online) has shown how to do procedural generation that does result in interesting interactions. There are four important factors in succe…
EVE Online gains most of it's value from PVP interactions even if they are remote. The random world generation is kind of meaningless backdrop to the human drama involved.
The only thing that makes eve online engaging is players interacting with players. Especially at scale. The market/economy is incredible, the high-consequence pvp is both boring as hell and occasionally exhilarating. The metagame is nuts.
It's a cool as hell set of concepts which would never make it into a modern game imo, but that's the strength of it and what keeps it ticking