I've always loved your generators, but I noticed something while playing around with it today, that I thought might be neat for parameters. It would be nice if certain room types were also parameters to guarantee they're generated in a structure. I generated 4 houses in a row with nary a toilet in sight. It'd be nice to have bathrooms (and many other room types) be selectable, or for a parameter to be set for a time period, maybe? Like a "modern" home would have the expectation of indoor plumbing, while a "medieval" style might not (without additional params).
There are a couple of problems with guaranteeing specific rooms. The first one is technical: the method I use is not suitable for this. To generate a house I first create a floor plan (or plans if it's a multi-storey buildings), a set of rooms of varying sizes. Then I try to assign them "roles" - bathroom, kitchen etc. As a result, it may happen so that there is no suitable room to become a bathroom for example. There is a core set of "roles", which my algorithm kind of tries harder to assign, but...
Another problem is UI: creating a tag or a checkbox for each room type doesn't sound like an elegant solution :)
Hopefully, I'll find a way to resolve all this somehow, but I don't think it's a huge problem. After all, if you need a specific room to be present, you can any other room and rename it.
Excellent generator. I had been trying to program something similar myself and hadn't got anywhere near as far as this. I was still stuck at a single story! From playing around with this, I can see that you have had some of the same issues I had - namely illogical room layouts - particularly in larger structures, sometimes with redundant corridors, sometimes with bedrooms that lead to other bedrooms etc. Trying to wrap my head around the logic there was a nightmare, so I take my hat off to what you have achieved!
Some future features you might want to consider. 1) Additional external doors. Most houses have a front door and a back door - sometimes more than one. 2) User defined room labels 3) Grid size. Is it supposed to be a 5 foot grid? (i.e. usual D&D battlemap size!) Some of the rooms come across a bit small based on that size, but if it one considers it to be a 10 foot grid then that makes most of the corridors and rooms that should be small (I'm looking at you bathrooms), would be rather large. 4) Improvements to the "furniture" in the rooms from the bare outlines of rectangles and odd shapes. There are quite a few libraries of top-down graphics of furniture that could be dropped in - with suitable ones selected for genre/room type. 5) Export Options. Might be worth considering collaborating with a Foundry module developer to enable an export to Foundry. Especially the multi-floor views of a building. Also, maybe an export to a graphic format that will effectively save the building as a set of graphic files labelled appropriately, one for each floor/elevation view.
I can probably come up with further suggestions - but that might be more than enough to start with! Again, major Kudos for your efforts!
Yeah, I'd like the layouts to have more sense, but I don't think it's a huge problem - after all they're not plans for real world buildings. Some weirdness and "maziness" in the game doesn't hurt (much).
Agree.
If you mean renaming rooms, you can do this by clicking on an existing label.
To be honest, I don't know what scale this is, since I don't use these maps as battle maps (I don't use battle maps at all). It's difficult to keep proportions right on a fixed grid, so the goal wasn't to make the bathroom 10 times smaller than the bedroom and the bedroom 10 times smaller than the ballroom, but just to make the bathroom the smallest room and the ballroom the largest.
That was my initial plan. In the end I chose abstract shapes instead for two reasons: first, creating a meaningful layout of specific furniture items is a non-trivial task by itself, I can't just scatter beds and chairs randomly. Second, I want to keep the generator somewhat "setting-agnostic" and there is no such thing as a setting-agnostic table :)
None of my generators support any VTT export because VTT is another thing I personally don't use. But yes, that's on my list.
I think this could be used to create taverns, you just need to name rooms manually. In the future there will be an explicit option to generate taverns (and some other building types e.g. shops, watchtowers, etc.)
Why would you need a house with unconnected floors? But if you do need it, you can generate its floors as separate one-storey buildings with the same ground plan using the Blueprint editor.
if there is an elevator, there is no need for stairs! while i realize most irl building codes require both, i figure my ttrpg campaigns can have unbreakable magic elevators. thanks for the reply, i'll figure out how to adapt the floor plans for my needs 👍
Definitely a very cool application, I use it to get some ideas.
However, I have an observation when generating structures, most of the time the structures are generated with excessive corridors, to go from one room to another you have to go through more than one.
Another thing I would like to give you an opinion on is that in Bluprint, when we design and generate the structure, the main door is placed randomly, it would be interesting if it were possible to choose where the door will be generated, so we can create a more fluid structure according to the need.
This is a 'statue', one of three special symbols (the other two are 'altar' and 'tapestry'). I'll probably remove all of them in the next update in favour 'abstract furniture'.
Hello Watabou, I was wondering if you could consider adding a JSON export option. It would make it much easier to work with the generated data in other projects. Cheers :)
It's not too hard to implement, but it will make everything... conceptually messy. For example, if you remove a wall between two rooms, will they become one new room? This would affect labels, props (furniture), rooms connectivity.
Thank you for making such generators! Extremely convenient to use and play. I ran into a problem: with advanced exports of buildings with multiple floors, all floors except the last one are unloaded without walls. I hope you can fix this bug. Thanks again for your work, you're cool!
Fantastic generator. Once you switch to "Blueprint" mode it's not obvious how to get back to "Floor plan" or "Elevation". I'd keep these options in the drop-down menu. Also there's a typo ("Discrad").
There is currently no way to request a building strictly without a basement. But it doesn't always spawn a basement, for a single-storey building the probability is 50%.
My algorithm tends to produce very unrealistic plans for buildings larger than "large", and I wouldn't like to expose it by offering the "huge" option. However, using the blueprint editor, you can request a significantly larger building than those built with the "large" tag.
Simply put: You are my hero. The work you do is amazing, and to provide it for free is a great work of generosity. The fact that you would allow others to use your tools to create a salable item is beyond magnanimous. To those who would abuse it to mass produce maps just for financial gain — shame!
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I've always loved your generators, but I noticed something while playing around with it today, that I thought might be neat for parameters. It would be nice if certain room types were also parameters to guarantee they're generated in a structure. I generated 4 houses in a row with nary a toilet in sight. It'd be nice to have bathrooms (and many other room types) be selectable, or for a parameter to be set for a time period, maybe? Like a "modern" home would have the expectation of indoor plumbing, while a "medieval" style might not (without additional params).
There are a couple of problems with guaranteeing specific rooms. The first one is technical: the method I use is not suitable for this. To generate a house I first create a floor plan (or plans if it's a multi-storey buildings), a set of rooms of varying sizes. Then I try to assign them "roles" - bathroom, kitchen etc. As a result, it may happen so that there is no suitable room to become a bathroom for example. There is a core set of "roles", which my algorithm kind of tries harder to assign, but...
Another problem is UI: creating a tag or a checkbox for each room type doesn't sound like an elegant solution :)
Hopefully, I'll find a way to resolve all this somehow, but I don't think it's a huge problem. After all, if you need a specific room to be present, you can any other room and rename it.
Excellent generator. I had been trying to program something similar myself and hadn't got anywhere near as far as this. I was still stuck at a single story! From playing around with this, I can see that you have had some of the same issues I had - namely illogical room layouts - particularly in larger structures, sometimes with redundant corridors, sometimes with bedrooms that lead to other bedrooms etc. Trying to wrap my head around the logic there was a nightmare, so I take my hat off to what you have achieved!
Some future features you might want to consider.
1) Additional external doors. Most houses have a front door and a back door - sometimes more than one.
2) User defined room labels
3) Grid size. Is it supposed to be a 5 foot grid? (i.e. usual D&D battlemap size!) Some of the rooms come across a bit small based on that size, but if it one considers it to be a 10 foot grid then that makes most of the corridors and rooms that should be small (I'm looking at you bathrooms), would be rather large.
4) Improvements to the "furniture" in the rooms from the bare outlines of rectangles and odd shapes. There are quite a few libraries of top-down graphics of furniture that could be dropped in - with suitable ones selected for genre/room type.
5) Export Options. Might be worth considering collaborating with a Foundry module developer to enable an export to Foundry. Especially the multi-floor views of a building. Also, maybe an export to a graphic format that will effectively save the building as a set of graphic files labelled appropriately, one for each floor/elevation view.
I can probably come up with further suggestions - but that might be more than enough to start with! Again, major Kudos for your efforts!
Matthew
Yeah, I'd like the layouts to have more sense, but I don't think it's a huge problem - after all they're not plans for real world buildings. Some weirdness and "maziness" in the game doesn't hurt (much).
would love the option to have these display as svg skeletons to make it easier to convert to 3d objects
Do you possibly have something like this but for Taverns?
I think this could be used to create taverns, you just need to name rooms manually. In the future there will be an explicit option to generate taverns (and some other building types e.g. shops, watchtowers, etc.)
this is wonderful! thank you so much for creating it. would it be possible to add a no stairs/elevator option?
Why would you need a house with unconnected floors? But if you do need it, you can generate its floors as separate one-storey buildings with the same ground plan using the Blueprint editor.
if there is an elevator, there is no need for stairs! while i realize most irl building codes require both, i figure my ttrpg campaigns can have unbreakable magic elevators. thanks for the reply, i'll figure out how to adapt the floor plans for my needs 👍
Definitely a very cool application, I use it to get some ideas.
However, I have an observation when generating structures, most of the time the structures are generated with excessive corridors, to go from one room to another you have to go through more than one.
Another thing I would like to give you an opinion on is that in Bluprint, when we design and generate the structure, the main door is placed randomly, it would be interesting if it were possible to choose where the door will be generated, so we can create a more fluid structure according to the need.
That's it, thank you very much.
I don't think there are *too* many corridors, but I'll probably add a tag for preventing them from spawning entirely.
That's on my list👍
Very cool. I'm making a multiplayer top-down 2D fantasy RPG, and have been wondering about generating houses from scratch. This is inspiring.
Just wondering what that star symbol is supposed to represent. Thank you! Very cool generator.
This is a 'statue', one of three special symbols (the other two are 'altar' and 'tapestry'). I'll probably remove all of them in the next update in favour 'abstract furniture'.
Ah, thank you! I was figuring it was something like that since they popped up in galleries. Looking forward to the next update!
Hello Watabou, I was wondering if you could consider adding a JSON export option. It would make it much easier to work with the generated data in other projects. Cheers :)
I'll think about it, but with multiple floors and "thin" walls it's much less obvious how to export these plans (that is compared to dungeons).
Hello, do you have any updates regarding this idea? It would be amazing to have a JSON from that
I'll try to implement this in the next update of the generator.
I no longer have to look for floor plans!!! YUSS!!!
this is amazing
It would be cool to add/subtract walls/doors to existing plans.
It's not too hard to implement, but it will make everything... conceptually messy. For example, if you remove a wall between two rooms, will they become one new room? This would affect labels, props (furniture), rooms connectivity.
What if you added it to the blueprint editor mode in some way?
Regardless, thanks for continuing to produce amazing tools!
Thank you for making such generators! Extremely convenient to use and play. I ran into a problem: with advanced exports of buildings with multiple floors, all floors except the last one are unloaded without walls. I hope you can fix this bug. Thanks again for your work, you're cool!
Yeah, I'm going to release an update with a fix for this bug (among other changes) in a couple of days. Cheers!
Fantastic generator. Once you switch to "Blueprint" mode it's not obvious how to get back to "Floor plan" or "Elevation". I'd keep these options in the drop-down menu. Also there's a typo ("Discrad").
Astounding work! Two things:
I didn’t notice the blueprint editor, but yeah you’re right the algorithm sort of falls apart when it gets too big. Such an amazing tool though!
Simply put: You are my hero. The work you do is amazing, and to provide it for free is a great work of generosity. The fact that you would allow others to use your tools to create a salable item is beyond magnanimous. To those who would abuse it to mass produce maps just for financial gain — shame!
Cheers!