Procedural City Generation

[frumbert]

Some interesting looking ideas here on road and town generation:

http://www.gamesitb.com/proceduralcity.html

Also check out http://citygen.net/

[Lenn]

Very interesting stuff. Are you into coding something similar?

Like I said before, I think the future of gaming is in proceduraly created gigantic worlds, each being unique.

[micmanos]

I know this site from some months now.
I wanted to use such a method for my air city chase but i had problems implementing a fast collision check so i've abandoned it.

Their concept however is very interested and relatively easy to implement when it comes to terrain lot partitioning. The automatic building generation thing though is very hard.

[frumbert]

That's funny, I find the automatic building maker the easiest bit and the space partitioning is the bit that confuses the heck out of me...

[micmanos]

I'm having trouble creating the buildings because i don't know how to texture and create surfaces on the fly. I tried using premodelled floors and stack them on top of each other but the result is not satisfactory and the collision that has to be performed get much to complicated.

Lotting on the other hand is much simpler as it's done using progressive splitting of closed shapes based on criteria that anyone can define. I'm making my lots a bit squareish by using multiple resolution grids for my terrain ..... ex.

Grid resolution of 250x250 (thinner) is used to place the city centers.
Resolution 50x50 (medium) is used to place major roads that connect the city centers.
Resolution 5x5 (Thick) is used to place minor roads.
Resolution 1x1 (Ultra) is used to plot the building sides.

Not sure if it made sense, but that's what i'm doing.