Procedural Generation and Autogen Thread - Vector Thrust

I remember that in a long past report, you mentioned trees were placed by defining areas where they could be generated, then having the points where they are generated saved to a file to save time when loading the game again. I was wondering whether the same could be done for a procedurally generated city, using autogen to create generic buildings to populate the cities.

My understanding on procedural generation of things is quite shallow, and I don't know how difficult such things are to use, but here is a general, "ideas" presentation of the thought.

From my reading, it seems that most generation starts with road generation. From a road, then lots are created from the enclosed block, and buildings are put on those lots, according to size. If autogen were to be used for such buildings, the building footprint could just be the scaled back shape of the lot, and given a randomized height value constrained by general location within the city (center, residential, suburb, industrial). The autogen then assigns textures based on the sizes of the faces and height of the buildings. The data values for each building (textures, height, footprint) are then saved to a text file for later retrieval. As the buildings should be relatively low geometry, being only a few polygons each, they should be a fairly manageable strain for most computers.

More important/detailed structures would be hand modeled and inserted into a cityscape at a later time as needed. Certain important assets like airports, government buildings (consulates, administrative buildings, etc.), and low value ground targets (factories, other buildings) could be spawned in at certain rates per city, taking up a predefined footprint and along certain preferred routes (ex. one airport per city, spawning along a major road, away from tall buildings).

I guess the main attractor for this method would be that it would probably take a lot of the menial labor out of creating cities, as one would not have to manually place or draw out the borders of every building, allowing for focus to be put on other things. Though probably unlikely to the extreme, a highly evolved version of this method could conceivably be incorporated into fully procedurally generated levels for the Quick Action gamemodes, providing for interesting, randomized scenarios, like destruction of key targets in a new city, or just different looking, randomly generated terrain maps, with enemies and buildings distributed across them, with different kinds of missions for each restart.

References:

City generation
Johnwhigham.blogspot.com
Johnwhigham.blogspot.com
Autogen
Msdn.microsoft.com

Edited by: IbizenThoth

Yes. This is good. We need something like this.

TimeSymmetry, I certainly hope you can integrate this into the game. We need urban maps.

I'd rather have these procedural generators in the mission editor than in the actual game, that way the city looks the same every time you play. The buildings would still be stored in the mission file but the editor would write that automatically. tHis would also allow the mission script to interact with any building on the map easily.

I always thought that one of the more jarring elements in Ace Combat was looking down at the 2D houses when flying at low level. Perhaps we could implement a "render distance"-type thing that spawns buildings in a circle around the aircraft, and despawn them when not visible.

I was under the impression that Vector Thrust's engine adjusted level of detail by distance automatically.

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Discovered another city generation project similar to Whigham's project, but it seems to use no texture or geometry assets. Based on the code of another, slightly simpler, gridded procedural city project by a man named Shamus Young. His blog also seems to feature a few other procedural landscape generator programs he built. One called Terrain (source code for this is released), another called Project Frontier (source released), and another called Project Octant. He did some really nice write-ups on his development process, which were pretty interesting reads, in of themselves.

Edited by: IbizenThoth

A Procedural Generation could have been a viable possibly. However random placed buildings don’t work so well as trees.

If the generator was built around a set of rules that resulted in a believable generation it still would have remained other problem. The placement location, and I don’t mead avoiding placing on top of roads or something else, to have a greater effect, a building should be placed above a matching outline in the texture. This kind of work must be done by the map maker, because even if there was a generator that worked perfectly, the map maker would probably had to input so much validation data that it would be better if made it by himself.

But yes, the game engine already controls the level of detail and create low polygon models on the fly.

From what I read, buildings were placed automatically based on the size of generated "lots" in the more advanced generators. The rule was that the building always had to be smaller than the outline, and did not seem to necessitate that the buildings match the lot outlines exactly, since buildings don't necessarily do that in reality either. If we ignore trying to implement autogen in combination with procedural generation and think of placing simple 10-20 poly buildings, it does not seem as if the problem is insurmountable, as the buildings do not need to match the outlines directly in that case, instead acting more like how a person chooses to build a certain way on a lot once it is purchased.