PSA: be very wary of clicking on the "overworld" link in the bottom left of the city map. It showed a continent-scale map, but then locked up the whole machine, swapping like crazy, for about 10 minutes before I finally managed to kill it. No idea what it was doing but it even managed to break Ctrl-Alt-Del on one attempt, which I'd never seen before, and was eating over 6Gb memory when I finally got Task Manager open.
Medieval Fantasy City Generator
61–70 of 119 posts
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like they were downright crappy only a few years ago. What's changed?
A wild guess: more computing power means more content that can be processed and the need for more content can be addressed by computer generation. For example, just a few years ago open world games were just a handful and required a lot of work. Nowadays even a simple game can have a large procedurally generated world.
Adding to this, more computing power at everyones desk. Very good computers were probably capable of generating good maps five years ago, but if everyone can play around with generators and models as a weekend project there is a lot more innovation and development!
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#63I 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…
A problem I have with a lot of modern games is the fake sense of scale. In the Mass Effect games the Citadel is supposed to be some vast city floating in space but you’re limited to a few rooms with billboard textures to show the rest of it. On the other hand the game Fuel delivered a massive sprawling (mostly empty) wasteland to chew up in your buggy and was non-random per user. I would love to see this kind of procedural generation to deliver an actual Citadel type world where the developers could then sprinkle landmarks across it. You could just ignore it and take your flying car to the waypoint or you could drop down into the streets and trade, craft or just soak up the scale.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#64I 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…
There are many different games types that can benefit from procedural content.
I've lately been playing Dead Cells a lot, er too much. It's a roguelike-metroidvania hybrid with a bit of Prince of Persia sprinkled atop.
All levels are procedural. Every time you die you start from level one again. But since it looks different every time, it doesn't bother one much or at all.
Curiously, there is no narrative or story line at all. The Indie studio behind it, Motion Twin, simply doesn't have the resources or budget for doing this 'properly'.
The typical approach is then to just use text -- just because you have to have a story. But they opted not to even do that.
For me Dead Cells is a great example of on-the-fly procedural content done exactly right -- w/o any narrative.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#65Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#66I think this stuff is interesting but not heavily moving. Every few years someone shares a tool like this. But why not have such a tool connected to something useful like a flight simulator or openstreetmaps, or in a format that game engines can use as foundation for a game? Then people could actually do something with it instead of just looking at it.
Agreed. The Map is a great start. If this content could be exported to another type of game such as Elder Scrolls Morrowind or Thief. Even OSS games like Battle for Wesnoth , 0 A.D., and SuperTuxKart would be interesting.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Are you asking if mmo beats pen-and-paper? IMO, no. There are no programming limits to how 'alive' a pen-and-paper game world can be. MMOs have no persistence and NPCs are little more than cardboard cutouts.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#68One thing I would love to see in a city generator like this is a simulation of time and how gradual evolution shapes a city.
There's a picture book called "Barmi: A Mediterranean City Through The Ages" by Xavier Hernandez and illustrated by Jordi Ballonga. It illustrates a fictional city from Neolithic settlement to Roman outpost to medieval town to modern city. Some images can be seen at http://jordiballongaen.blogspot.com/p/baronia.html
In this book, you see how a Roman amphitheater decays during the Dark Ages, and the structure is partially used and cannibalized to create a circular set of apartment buildings, which then influences the later layout and design of the city in modern eras.
Procedural generation unfortunately tends to try to generate everything at once, as if a medieval city was created ex nihilo. It would be interesting to see what it would look like if such designs incorporated evolution over time.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#69I 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.
This isn't exactly correct. Oblivion's overworld and most dungeons were hand-built. The only procedurally-generated parts were unnamed caves/dungeons.
Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator
#70Serious 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…
I don't think it's smart to build a medieval style city in this age, due to transportation concerns. But I think there's merit in using computation to plan and simulate a soulful city.