Experimenting

Here I'd like to share the results of my recent experiments with a more traditional way of settlement generation. In contrast with MFCG's "block-centric" approach the traditional one is "road-centric", i.e a settlement is defined by its roads which are grown kind of organically like veins. If you interested in algorithms, check the "Publications" section here. My code is loosely based on Procedural Modeling of Cities by Parish and Müller with all the unnecessary L-systems stuff scrapped.

As you can see, these "grown" cities look quite differently comparing to the ones produced by MFCG (ignore the colours, I'm just tired of monochrome maps :)). The most noticeable distinction is the curvature of the streets, although the algorithm is perfectly capable of generating rigid grid layouts for example. Another nice thing is that because generation happens on the level of single roads, they can easily adapt to the terrain descending to the water, going around a hill etc.

And still, I'm not planning to switch to this new approach, at least not anytime soon. Many things are much harder to implement with it and I'm not event mentioning the performance. Merging these two techniques also seems problematic. For now I'm going to put this thing on hold (e.g. this direction of research), hopefully I'll find a way implement curvilinear roads in MFCG this way or another.

This couple of images is the latests result. Here are some links to earlier images and videos:

1. Simple growing roads network
2. Blocked areas (water) avoidance
3. Buildings along the streets
4. Following the terrain
5. The same in different colours
6. The same in hi-res
7. With city walls
8. Event weirder city walls
   

P.S. A new small update for MFCG is coming soon.