Procedural City Generators - The future of Urban Simulators?

[MontyCXL 0]

Hi everybody! I like to share with you some videos about very intersting software. This soft has the hability to generate Procedurally generated cities and I think this may be the future of the next generation city builders. Can you imagine te posibility of zoning complex street intersections or curved roads with totally seamless wall to wall buildings? or generate thousands of different buildings without compromising your PC specs? The advantage of procedural cities is that you don't need a set of textures for every kind of buildings. With a limited set of building part textures like windows, shops, doors, decorations and such the software can generate hundreds of different buildings with any lot size or shape following some rules like building age, height, lot size, etc, adpating perfectly the buildings to the street's layout. But to be more graphic and not to confuse you with my bad english here are the videos:

City Engine - Procedural City Generator

The buildings are not modelled one by one, they just modelled the main features and set the rules for them, then the sofware randomize them all, creating hundred of different buildings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9unXHC0WTR0

This one explains how you can create totally customized roads. I would love to see this features in a City Builder Game.

I can't post more videos here, I'll continue in the comments...

[MontyCXL 0]

Around the 0:40 mark time it shows how CityEngine can simulate the natural city growth

How the soft allows you to edit buildings and roads easely.

This one is long but it shows the true power of procedural city generators. Imagine a futuristic New York with 80 or 100 millons of inhabitants and don't have two copies of the same building!

THe other soft is GhostTown a free plugin to generate procedural cities for 3D Max.

What do you think? This is the future of city builders? We finally can say goodbye to square lots and repetitive buildings?

[jacksunny 741]

It is cool, unfortunately it is a lot of money...

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Familiar thread looks repetitive. I will look for threads acceptable to merge this with and notify a moderator.

Never mind, this thread looks like the subject is just the category of a few disparate threads. I find it more prudent to link to them.

City Engine

City Scape

Open Source in early development:

Synekism Interview

Synekism Thread

I am not a moderator here nor do I want to. I am just a senior member with a large post count and double digit reputation.

  Edited July 16, 2011 by OcramSeattle  

[MontyCXL 0]

It is cool, unfortunately it is a lot of money...

Probably yes, but maybe what make this sofware expensive is their low sales. How many copies of CityEngine can be sold? 5000, 10.000? The Indie version has a 495 dollars price tag so if you can sell about 100.000 copies of a city builder the price can be reduced to $49.50, at least $60 or $70. GhostTown is free but it runs under 3D max wich is a very expensive software, I think just one dude created this plugin so it means that programming something similar for a game is possible with a small group of talented programmers. Also traditional city simulators need several digital artist to create hundreds of buildings but with procedural method you just need to create a limited set of building parts, some textures and the rule files, resulting in hundreds of different buildings. You dont have to model a 5 stories building and then another with 10 or 30 stories, the different building densities are generated by the software and all the textures of the different version are the same, the game don't have to load one set of textures for a the small building and other for the tall.

I would really love to see this kind of technology implemented in a City Builder game!!!

[iuri99 48]

It is cool, unfortunately it is a lot of money...

I would really love to see this kind of technology implemented in a City Builder game!!!

I wanna see this sistem generating suburbs...

[Mark Waybill 242]

Very cool... I may as well give up with my stupid Virtucity project lol. I suck.

It would appear this is indeed the future because the one thing I'd never be able to simulate is curved roads which would require an immense knowledge of math.