Procedural City Generation - Developer's Log

This is a great series. The guy can write (he's also funny) and he writes the series in a really accessible way. Definitely worth reading.

Also check out his "terrain" series, it's terrific. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=141

If you're heading off to google images to see how this compares to real and not overexposed cityscapes, then the below links will save you some time. Open the last picture up while you watch the video at 2:09, bottom left building.

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/12/00/de/t... http://abodenyc.com/images/New%20York%20City%20Images/New-Yo... http://edp.org/Travel/Chicago/ChicagoNight.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/arjunpurky/2507602603/ http://www.picturecorrect.com/wallpaper/japan/tokyo_1024x768... http://www.flickr.com/photos/yayatan/35736937/ http://www.postcardsfromhonshu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/0... http://www.markmyhsieh.com/Blog/files/page0_blog_entry78_15.... http://leejones-san.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilde...

Projects like these are great examples of hitting that 5% that gets you 95% of the way home. When he talks about avoiding simulations, that's precisely right. I wish he would talk more about how he's choosing the right things to focus on. Perhaps it's just luck? For example, I think that a few of his steps, like bloom, were detrimental. Irregular streets might have solved the streets problem by hiding them (cf. 1st pic). Brightening up buildings in the distance could also have made this look even better.

You can see the process and the end result in a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y

Also, if you are interested in procedural cities generation, there is a very cool Swiss startup:

http://www.procedural.com

It's a spin-off from ETHZ graphics research. You can find their SIGGRAPH papers here:

http://www.procedural.com/company/publications.html

Follow the "next" link under the title bar to go to the next parts. It's a blog so there isn't (currently) a unified page to submit.

Introversion, the UK games company that did Uplink, Defcon, and Darwinia, has been working on a game called Subversion that has procedurally generated cities, from terrain mapping to placing desk chairs in the offices of the buildings. http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/

Very cool - reminds me of a City Generator include for POV-Ray I used back in the day: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/citygen.ht...

I was always thought the game developers designed the whole city in 3D.

Nice article.

Why is the city's nighttime generated based on lights?

quite engrossing. i read and skimmed. lots of great pictures.

this is the opposite experience to blogs posts that run out of steam halfway and then end with some dumb conclusion. well done shamusyoung. wish there were more of these kind of project reports on hn.