Building cities by generation – Introversion

A recent conversation reminded me that I had read something in edge magazine about city generation for games. The premise being that whilst real places or soon to be real places may need to be hand crafted, sprawling believable cities that are backdrops or scenery, like forests or mountains, just be able to be generated. Of course ‘just’ hides the complexity of what needs to be done. The guys at introversion seem to be on the case though.
This video shows some of the toolkit in action as it decides how and where to layout a sprawling city.

There is more from the developers on their forum
I had seen this in a number of places on the web too like kotaku and digital urban it is certainly of interest in gaming community but procedural generation has its place in all sorts of content and simulation arenas.

2 thoughts on “Building cities by generation – Introversion

  1. I’ve got code that spaws whole galaxies with trillions of planets. I haven’t pushed it down to the city level yet, but there’s no reason not to. Arena (Bethseda Games: The Elder Scrolls series) was the first I saw doing this sort of thing. Looks like more of the same, just an increase in complexity.

  2. If this type of generation tools could be fed from the RL urban design and planning data (existing buildings and road maps) the paraverse would come close pretty fast. Add timelines from the RL development history and you can actually see where it goes (went) wrong. And learn and educate about that.
    Planning of future development is a concept I have heard others think about too.

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