Procedural Playgrounds
I’ve been fascinated recently with the technology behind procedurally generated cities. For open-world games, being able to generate believable—but more importantly, engaging—cities opens up lots of gameplay possibilities. A particular gameplay possibility has my brain on fire right now.
I found these resources so far:
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Procedural Modeling of Cities. Yoav Parish and Pascal Müller.
Müller is CEO of Procedural Inc, makers of the $3,450 CityEngine middleware. Procedural posts lots of CityEngine videos to YouTube in its CityEngineTV channel. - The Role of Architecture in Video Games. Ernest Adams. Gamasutra. October 2002.
Humans construct buildings for shelter and function. Game designers make buildings to be played in. -
Towards the Procedural Generation of Urban Building Interiors (PDF). Benjamin Bradley. August 2005.
Discusses in detail an approach to fleshing out the inside of a building using procedural algorithms. The abstract has a gem of a sentence that speaks to a long-standing frustration I’ve had with games like Grand Theft Auto: “…the buildings in these cities usually exist only as impenetrable external facades.” - Citygen: An Interactive System for Procedural City Generation (Flash). George Kelly, Hugh McCabe. Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Ireland.
A cool animated slideshow that demonstrates some of the principles behind generating procedural road networks. Citygen appears to have been an academic project; http://citygen.net/ includes some of the blog posts that surrounded it. Their complementary paper (PDF) by the same name goes into substantially more detail. - CityGen: The City Generator for Google SketchUp on Google Code.
Haven’t tried this yet to see if it still works; last real updates seem to have been in June 2009. But a street generator video hints at an interesting approach: the user defines a simple road graph as connected lines, then lets the SketchUp plugin build geometry that makes that graph look more like actual roads. - Procedural Modeling of Land Use in Cities (PDF). Thomas Lechner et al.
Describes an enhancement to other city generation approaches wherein the system models land use (e.g. commercial, industrial, residential) and uses that model as input to the city generation process.
This year my university dissertation was on city zoning with a procedural city generator.
Because its with Blender, you may be interested:
http://www.blendernation.com/city-zoning-modification-for-blended-cities-script/
Download the current script here:
http://jerome.le.chat.free.fr/index.php/en/city-engine/news/
Hope you like it!
Very nice! Thanks for sharing. I need to refamiliarize myself with Blender; I find it terribly difficult to use having grown up with 3D Studio and then 3DS MAX.
What inspired you to work on procedural city generation? Have you investigated procedurally-generated interiors?
“what inspired you to work on procedural city generation?”
Before choosing a dissertation, I had always been interested in how tree generators work:
http://lsystem.liquidweb.co.nz/
http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/
I like how they can be programmed mathematically whilst giving the artist control. However it is hard to give an artist a level of control which is easy to understand.. ie a lot of parameters to tweak etc.
So I decided to do my dissertation on city zoning where the user can paint the different zones on a map which tells the script where to place certain types of buildings.
I feel that by using such a method it is easier to use and understand as an artist..
“Have you investigated procedurally-generated interiors?”
When I looked at procedural buildings I read a few papers on interiors. There are a few on computer created interior designs that perhaps you may be interested in but these are more general with regards to how close a program can design to a human.
Slightly related, this may interest you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtC0lpKKE38
That video for Structure was VERY impressive. It represents exactly the kind of procedural interiors I’d need to pull off a particular kind of game I’ve been thinking about lately.
Of course, now that I’ve seen it, it’s likely patented and inaccessible. :)
I wonder if those environments persist indefinitely; that is, does a destroyed interior remain destroyed (and the pieces remain strewn about the floor) even if I move miles away and then return? (Does The Matrix have garbage collection? :)
I think it’s curious that all of the research in procedurally generated cities seems to focus so much on what we’d consider typical, modern-day urban environments. Why aren’t the demos a bit more whimsical? I desperately want to see tech like this applied to cities more akin to what we see in the Thief or Fable games. Interiors are a must, though, and the trick, especially with the likes of Thief, is making interiors compelling enough to play.
Hi!
Just in case, here is another procedural generator for cities and buildings. It developed on top of SideFX’s Houdini:
http://iiia.udg.edu/GGG/skylineEngine/
I really hope you’ll find it useful!
cheers
dagush.-