Imagine just clicking a button and bam! a randomized city is constructed from start to finish right before your eyes. Fiddle with some preset information such as city centers and population density and your city is born. No longer any need for expensive artist to conjure up hours of detailed work if the algorithms and math can do it in fractions of the cost and time!
Procedural cities bascially use existing data about expansions of cities and roads and apply it into an existing plane. Then they calculate where residential, commercial, and industrial zones would most likely be or fit. Skyscrapers are fitted in down town areas with lots of room and small suburban housing on the fringes.
Imagine the capabilities with this technology! Soon the tech will support different styles of cities with just an adjustment of a few parameters. Want a metropolis with rome style buildings? Sure thing! You can find more information here
Applying this to a game seems almost obvious. Next step is to make each building accessible and destructible.
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Instead of randomly generated dungeons in Diablo, it'd be randomly generated cities in GTA: Thats just about the most amazing thing EVAR, imagine the possibilities :O
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I have an idea for a game that I would've left ignored in the corner because of this "city" problem. RISE GAME! GO FORTH AND CONQUER! BUHAHAHAHAHAH.
I've actually been doing a bit of research into procedural content generation lately and came across this wiki that might be helpful: http://pcg.wikidot.com It's maintained by someone who maintains a rogue-like, but there's information about other things there, too. Also: Perlin noise is awesome.
ReplyDeleteProcedural generation just makes sense, especially to gaming. I might just delve deeper into this and start my own research and projects. Are you working on anything now Cauldrath?
ReplyDeleteI was mostly looking around procedural texture generation and when I was doing that I stumbled onto that wiki and looked at all the procedural dungeon creation stuff, since one of the projects we're considering is a dungeon crawler.
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