Medieval Fantasy City Generator

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A topic by Kevil created Sep 22, 2020 Views: 3,152 Replies: 5

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Kevil4 years ago(+1)

As a random generator it is cool. Especially I like the concept of city blocks. But it's lack of customization.

For example, if I want to change some city blocks (add more buildings or mode the castle or rearrange city walls or change empty blocks to full with buildings) I simply can't. Warp-function with displace helps sometime but it's really akward (for example, you displace several points at the same time instead of just one).

I think it will be grate if you can switch type of block from Temple to Market, from Empty to Full or something like that.

Is it possible? or algorithm is not so flexible for it?

watabouDeveloper4 years ago

Well, that's why it's called "generator", not "editor".

Regarding warping: you can change the size of the "brush" using the mouse wheel or +/- keys for more precision.

You can also try City Painter, but it's pretty crude and I'm not planning to fix it (I'm kind of disappointed in the idea).

myth0i4 years ago(+1)

Watabou, I just stumbled across this thread and I've got to say... I think you should really reconsider the idea of City Painter, or how some of its features could be integrated into Generator.

In short, the ability to draw in some presets (like a coastline, roads, or the course of a river) and then let the procedural generation take over, would be an incredibly robust tool and really interesting procedural generation.

The longer version:

I have been using/evangelizing your generator for a while, and I want to just emphasize I think it is an absolutely genius piece of work and an amazing thing you've built for the community.

But as to why City Painter intrigues me... sometimes I have a particular area in mind (like a city that has a natural harbor, is on an isthmus, at the fork of a river, or is at a crossroads, etc.) that I want to roll a quick map for. City Generator isn't great for that kind of task, need to do either a lot of rerolling, Photoshopping, or fiddling with the warp. Usually, I stick to using your tools for cities and settlements that are geography agnostic as a result, and do this "specific geography" settlements by hand. However, playing around with City Painter for a few minutes, it is an absolutely amazing tool.

Being able to set the underlying geography, then "paint in" procedural buildings and blocks is awesome. All it is really missing is a way to do rivers (though perhaps I just haven't figured that out yet) and more intuitive means of export.

Gravy features would be new "brushes" for things like " shanty towns" (small buildings, high density), a "docks" that autogens docks in an adjacent water tile, and perhaps a mixed edifice-borough option for generating one large building, with smaller surrounding ones.

But really, even if if it were just somehow possible simply to predefine geography (land, water, rivers), and the options you have as path in City Painter, in City Gen, and then you let it fill in around that stuff that would make this suite the be-all-end-all as far as I'm concerned.

Again, thanks for all you do, amazing work.

watabouDeveloper4 years ago

Just to clarify: I am disappointed not in the idea of a tool for creating more customizable cities, but in the approach I tried with City Painter - "to get what you want take a mesh and draw what you want in its cells and on its edges".

Here is a quote from a my post:

Drawing over a mesh with large cells turned out to be not user friendly at all. Probably it may be mitigated with a good UI to some extent, but at this moment I'm not sure it's worth trying. I have a vague idea of a different approach, we'll see how it will work out.

As far as I can judge it is not my opinion only. I haven't see a single map created with the painter, I got very few feature requests. Overall it looks like most people agree with me that it's not a path worth pursuing. It really is not the only way to implement "painting" and I hope to come up with a better one. Or who knows, maybe an idea how to fix this one will dawn on me.

Just to let you know how some of the features you mentioned were initially planned:

Instead of a special "shanty towns" brush I was going to let users define borough parameters - average building size, average block size, average alley width etc. They would be like different paints used with the same brush.
Instead of a "docks" brush there would be "piers" edge brush similar to "road" and "wall". This way it would be possible create piers attached to a castle for example.
Instead of "road-like" rivers like in MFCG, I would suggest to draw rivers by filling cells with water. It is much more flexible way and I will probably try to implement it in MFCG.

Thanks for you detailed comment!

Kevil4 years ago

Well, City Painter is actually pretty cool. It's not good that one cell can contain only one building but it have potential.

Why not to unite painter with generator? I mean generate the city then edit it with painter?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining just suggesting. After all your city generator is the best among all others. It's just lack some customization tools to be perfect, imho.

IwanCho19994 years ago

Hello there! This is a great generator, but it lacks a few features. For example, use the arrow to zoom in or out of the map. I had a situation when the map just didn't fit on the screen and it was impossible to change the area of the city. By the way, about the districts. Some kind of highlighter is missing. For example, I need to move the castle away from poor areas, and this is not possible. After all, it is logical that the rich will not live next to the poor. And in conclusion, it is not enough to put your own point of view and delete the old one. I had a situation where the point just left its area. Or I wanted to put a dot for the name of the square, but this was not possible.

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Medieval Fantasy City Generator

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