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Medieval Fantasy City Generator

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81–90 of 119 posts

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#81
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.

You really need to grade-separate car traffic, public transit traffic, bicycles, and pedestrians. If you set your citywide story height to be 3.5m, you can put the automobile traffic at ground level, the pedestrian deck at +7m, and in the city center, also elevated bicycle lanes at +10.5m, and elevated trains at +14m.

That allows for 1 or 2 stories of parking for each steel+concrete building, a double-height lobby level, with a bicycle-locker mezzanine, the possibility of double-height train stations built into buildings adjoining a mechanical floor, and "streets" that are narrower for walkers than for cars.

I'd bet that the cost of putting a 7m deck over every road you pave, or at least an elevated walkway 2m wide, is easily saved by subtracting the sidewalk width from the ground-level road footprint, allowing greater building density. A 21.25m road footprint can fit 4 3.25m travel lanes, one 2.75m center turning lane, and two 2.75m right-turn/breakdown lanes. A 12m footprint can hold 2 3.25m travel lanes and 2 2.75m turn/breakdown lanes. Additionally, above the 7m vehicle clearance level, buildings can be cantilevered over the roadway, making the pedestrian "street" narrower than the road-for-cars below.

In the US, the usual minimum acceptable neighborhood curb-to-curb street width is 8.5m, but then add sidewalks for a total footprint of 15.25m. Some neighborhoods allocate 18.25m for the right-of-way, with 12m for the road, then they add infuriating speed bumps. In Chicago[0], the major arterials are 30.5m wide, with at least 20% pedestrian width; minor arterials and collectors are 20m wide, with 33% for pedestrians. It's all based on the 66ft surveyor's chain. Stack the sidewalk over the street, and you give your city greater areal density and better use of available volume.

[0] https://www.cityofchicago.org/dam/city/depts/cdot/StreetandS...

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#82
post #69
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been forever since I read about this but the map itself was generated randomly. It was then manicured by hand. The buildings and cities and dungeons were all hand made, yes. But the dungeons were all using such similar art assets and there was a real lack of variety, so they all rather felt the same. Not that I'm complaining, it was an amazing game and probably one of my favorite gaming experiences of my life. It was way ahead of its time.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#84

One 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.blogs…

Nice! This reminds me a lot of "City" by David Macaulay (https://www.amazon.com/City-Story-Roman-Planning-Constructio...). Absolutely loved that book.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#85
post #41

I 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…

Why story? The breakthough of SimCity was the concept of software as a toy. The user creates their own fun. In a more modern context, open things to the community by allowing them to write and share their own stories.

Anyone familiar with the history of Kerbal Space Program knows this issue. KSP's developers releases a "contracts" system that was essentially a random story teller. A few variables were randomly selected to generate a task. Of course many of the tasks ended up being ridiculous and they had to back-fill with a series of rules, but it is still rather silly. Then in a more recent update they allowed users to create "missions" and share them via steam (yawn). But this was layer atop the previous contracts scheme, resulting in a grinding mess that many/most players simply ignore. They instead play according to self-created story arcs and self-imposed rules.

SimCity did it best. Give the players the tools to play, but don't tell them how to play. Build a world full of towns and potential then let the players loose to explore and play how they want. Don't try to randomly build quests. Create the interface so that players can write and share their own storylines. I envision something more like OpenOblivion, aka Elder Scrolls with community-created quests/factions/stories.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#86

One 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.blogs…

I was fascinated as a kid about "Una calle a través del tiempo" (a street through the ages), which is a very similar concept but with a first-plane of a street (and some general details as a background). Google images reveals some details with this title.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#89

One 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.blogs…

> the structure is partially used and cannibalized to create a circular set of apartment buildings

Something like this happened in Barcelona, where columns of an ancient Roman temple where found INSIDE regular workers' apartments.

Oh, I found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Augustus,_Barcelona

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#90
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a thing exists, life ;-)

Yeah, only in life we are bound by various constraints. Whether it's that you wouldn't want to be a criminal in real life, you don't want to risk your life in extreme sports or battle, or you were born too early to explore the universe.

+1. Alternatively, maybe you were born with or acquired some disability that makes it difficult to do what you want in real life. VR games especially can be amazing here for people with mobility issues. See this, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs0QPkR3BcY ("Virtual reality opens new worlds to a man with cerebral palsy")
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