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Medieval Fantasy City Generator

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Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#101

Post by moomin »

gameswithgo wrote: post #59
moomin wrote: 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.

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.

I think I’ve misremembered this rather badly. It was used for things like tree placement, but not gross physical features like mountains.

I’m sure I read something at the time that said what I’m describing though.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#102

Post by mywittyname »

CalRobert wrote: post #52
shusson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Costs.

Replicating that beautiful masonry and hand-milling the timber would be outrageously expensive today. Plus, I doubt the raw materials are nearly as abundant, especially the old growth trees. Then there's modern building codes.

I agree that these are stunning cities, but more modern European buildings can also have similar charm, I think.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#103

Post by jsilence »

duiker101 wrote: post #15
presscast wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

When are generators going to replace real world architects?

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#104

Post by kiliancs »

iagooar wrote: post #89
DanAndersen wrote: post #68

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

This is common in Tarragona, where Roman ruins are found pretty much every time there's some digging or work in existing houses in the old city. See Tarraco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarraco

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#106

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

indigochill wrote: post #46
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty is that it is relatively easy to generate patterns that follow rules because computers are really good at it, but it is incredibly difficult to make an algorithm be creative. 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, which procedural generation has been, thus far, unable to provide. This is not surpr…

>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…

>> which procedural generation has been, thus far, unable to provide

> Disagree.

We'll have to agree to disagree here. I've played hundreds of hours of Dwarf Fortress and it becomes very same-y and uninteresting.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#107

Post by setr »

knolan wrote: post #63
thom wrote: 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…

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 proc…

I think its more an issue with game design than it is with how big it actually is. Like you don't need infinitely generated worlds to produce a sense of scale, you just need it to take time to explore, and a good reason to explore. And this is ME's greatest failure I think: You can't interact with anything. You skip around space instantaneously, so the largest thing in the game is the citadel.. it's the only object that takes any amount of time to actually traverse (that, and planets, which you don't really want to explore). Yet you jump around that too, and are only actually interacting with preset objects.

The problem I think is that there's nothing to interact with. And there's no interesting ways to interact with the things you can interact with. Like star control 2 is technically a small game, and a small world; it just feels big, because it actually requires time to traverse, and there's actually things to find. Zelda games tend to be even smaller (primarily a sequence of small rooms), and yet feel much larger. Again, time, secrets and interest play a large role in why it feels that way.

people try to use procedural generation as a crutch, to avoid actual game design (see: no man's sky, minecraft; note the latter is popular by accident, adventure mode was intended as the primary, but loses its appeal quickly. Creative mode became the primary appeal by accident.) but its simply not sufficient without giving a compelling reason to actually explore and interact with the map.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#108

Post by CalRobert »

mywittyname wrote: post #102
CalRobert wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Costs. Replicating that beautiful masonry and hand-milling the timber would be outrageously expensive today. Plus, I doubt the raw materials are nearly as abundant, especially the old growth trees. Then there's modern building codes. I agree that these are stunning cities, but more modern European buildings can also have similar charm, I think.

Fair enough - I used to work under a board that was about 20" by 20" by 30 feet. It was crazy to me that it's now rare to ever see a tree that tall and straight on this entire island any more, but once it was just a normal piece of building material in an old grain mill.

There were also markings on the wall about max weights in hundredweight (cwt) - I think the building was from the mid-19th century.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#109

Post by Maultasche »

arethuza wrote: post #79
DanAndersen wrote: post #68

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…

Split in Croatia is a great example of this - where a part of the layout was based on the Emperor Diocletian's Palace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split,_Croatia Maybe Edinburgh and volcanoes as well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology

That was one of the most interesting cities I've visited. The city was a mix of medieval architecture and pieces of a Roman palace. There were the brick walls of buildings built between Roman columns and there was a Roman-era mausoleum on one side of the street. It was clear that it used to be quite an open layout that was filled in by buildings in later centuries.

It must have been interesting in the early days of the city with a bunch of people occupying an old palace, fortifying it, and building houses for themselves within the grounds.

I wondered what Diocletian would have thought to see his old palace transformed in such a way.

Re: Medieval Fantasy City Generator

#110

Post by knolan »

setr wrote: post #107
knolan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proc…

I think its more an issue with game design than it is with how big it actually is. Like you don't need infinitely generated worlds to produce a sense of scale, you just need it to take time to explore, and a good reason to explore. And this is ME's greatest failure I think: You can't interact with anything. You skip around space instantaneously, so the largest thing in the game is the citadel.. it's the only object t…

> people try to use procedural generation as a crutch, to avoid actual game design

I agree. I guess what I’m saying is that procedural generation need not be a crutch. It should allow the game designer to treat a procedural world like he were a location scout. They can then build sets within that world where story elements can take place, locations modified as required and the remaining 99% left as a living world that swallows up the player. Perhaps as games slowly evolve out of their ‘save the world’ routine this might make more sense. Instead we get endless collectathons that require scouting every polygon of the world.

I’ve also wondered about reduced scale in open world games. Instead of building a hollow and empty city like San Andreas, why not build a fully populated and detailed city block? Every building has detailed stores and accommodation where characters live and work. Your character is perhaps a shut-in (Rear Window) or a beat cop (back to L.A. Noir) where you somehow interact with that compact world.

Remember the often limited worlds of the N64? Racing games could only fit a handful tracks on a single cart. Every inch of virtual real estate was utilised. Such games have gone from a hundred MB to almost a hundred GB. It’s probably the only medium where you don’t need to sit through everything to have a full experience. The virtual worlds no longer need to feel like oversized jumgle gyms.

I’m probably way off the mark but I think we’re in for interesting times ahead.

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