Shamus wrote some impressive procedural city software in OpenGL and posted this simple summary of how the process works –
- The project is bound to Windows right now. Several people made great suggestions yesterday for wxWidgets, Qt or SDL. I don’t have time to examine those now (the interface is already done and I’m anxious to move forward) but I am making a note to make sure my next project is written on something portable.
- I’m using OpenGL for rendering. The API seems more quaint every year, but it still gets the job done without getting in the way.
- The look I’m going for is a helicopter-level view of a city, not a street-level view.
- The city is going to be pretty basic. 30 hours is not much time, and I’m aiming for simple-yet-effective as opposed to profound and feature-rich. While a lot can be done with a procedural city, I’m not going to take this idea very far to begin with. I just want something that’s fun to view for a couple of minutes.
Not much in the way of specifics, but much more info can be found on the Twenty Sided blog – p1, p2, & p3 [via Create Digital Motion]
6 thoughts on “Building a dynamically generated city”
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Pretty cool, I look forward to seeing this in a future version of Dwarf Fortress.
Very nice. I see the city is based on the grid system used in most american cities. Could you generate a city based on ancient pathways/semi-randon pathways which most european cities are based on?
I love that spirit:
“I just want something that’s fun to view for a couple of minutes.”
Great job!