Great blog series of articles about procedurally generating cityscape at night. Perhaps it isn't loaded with technical gems you could take and use straight away in Simutrans, but... I really liked the narrative style and read through the whole series. And (imho) it's somewhere between extensively technical and "for dummies", readable by both groups.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940
I haven't checked the rest of the blog, but it seems more goodies hide inside :)
One the last page there is a download for the screensave, which even runs on this machine with no real 3D accelleration but the onboard chip ... very impressive.
That was rather an awesome read, especially for me as I continue down the path of becoming a programmer :) Thanks!
Very interesting.
PS: found through Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com). Give that a try, too, but the pace of adding (and disappearing) news is ruthless ;)
A video with the whole process and the final release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y&showinfo=0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y&showinfo=0)
This is a video of a dynamically generated city. It's quite nice, actually:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y)
We already talked about this method at this topic (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=2123.0), with a link to that video at the end of the thread... :)
I wonder how hard it'd be to make it look good in daytime, would likely be a lot more difficult since there's a lot more detail required. Could definitely be used as a basis for generating graphics for a game though, would save a lot on storage of graphics (especially if you used some kind of code to represent a particular building, so that it could be exactly duplicated when you reload the game...)
Ah, I searched for such a topic, but couldn't find it.. Let me merge this then. :)
Edit: perhaps that wasn't such a good idea, but awell.
In that case I guess it depends if the building generation algorithm is deterministic or not, I mean if you always get the same results from the same starting set of data.
Just so that you know: We already have something remotely similar in Simutrans - the number of map is seed for perlin noise prng that creates the whole map terrain from it. So it's also procedurally generated :)
I've found this amazing website about a next-gen modular and procedural system for city generation.The video at media section is even more incredible than the previous one posted. It shows that the engine also supports procedural destruccion and buildings with fully exploarable interiors (procedurally generated too, I guess)
The website is http://www.proceduralcity.com/ (http://www.proceduralcity.com/)
I don't know why, but the word "Matrix" came upon my mind.
(
>_>
<_<
hmmm...!)
Changing avatar....
That is truly amazing.
I so seriously want to play.....
One of my favorite things about GTA:SA was that you could just... explore.
WANT.
(and then let's talk Prissi into rewriting Simutrans using their engine... <g,d,r>)
Amazing. For an old project of mine I really would have needed that - space colonies rather than cities, but it's close enough. Ah well. Maybe when I retire from work and have time again for private projects ;D