Reply With QuoteNot too shabby.
Yet another Lazy City (using Roleplaying City Map Generator)
I was playing with the Roleplaying City Map Generator, and this thing really rocks when you autotrace the result into vector.
Here is an example I was playing with today. The only structure I added was the castle in the South, but if you wanted to customise the map it's pretty easy to do in vector (roads and buildings).
I guess this would be a map accompanying a scenario indicating important structures in the city to the GM. The Key is all gibberish stuff, but I wanted to see how much one could fit in before the map started to appear cluttered and unclear. Seems like you could get another 50 labels in there and it would still work (although I suppose after a certain number you'd be better off using a simple grid reference). I'm really pleased with this, and using the Generator you can spit them out pretty quickly. Exporting in .pdf gives the added bonus of using layers to indicate different information types (which I haven't done here).
There's a little bit of raster (the outer glow around the labels) in the map which will have pushed up the file size, but I was just being lazy. White vector circles around the numbers would work just as well.
Also attached is a colour version showing districts.
:: Edit :: actually looking at the size it should really be a Lazy Town rather than a Lazy city.
Last edited by ravells; 10-17-2010 at 03:56 PM.
Not too shabby.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
The main problem I have with raw Role Playing City Map Generator maps is that there are just too many roads. It's no sweat but to represent a logical layout I reckon up to 50% of the excess has to be removed for a more representative, logical kind of growth.
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"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man"
My Finished Stuff ............. Some of my 3D Stuff (POVRay)
That's pretty cool. I've never tried tracing it in vector. My main use of it so far is to bring it in and use Select-Color Range to separate the elements into layers. Agree that the layouts it outputs often don't make a lot of sense...some judicious editing is often needed. Still, it gives me some good layouts with minimal effort. I'm working on an orc village off and on, based on the African village setting.
Tracing with vectors seems like a good way to deal with the larger town sizes it outputs. There's no way I could put in the effort on a larger settlement that I do into villages like Hania and Sanly Bowitz. I like your results so far, Ravells!
M
BOriginally Posted by Crayons
But Crayons you can specify as many roads as you want. But if you want to clean up, you can can erase the ones which don't fit.
I'm still in early days trying to get something decent out of this, but I have high hopes. As Mearrin said, some good layouts with minimal effort.
The thing with editing road layouts like it produces is that at some point, it's quicker to draw the roads from scratch. I guess if I was doing a proper, well thought out city that is what I'd do, but for something that's needed quickly and which gives OK results, the generator used in the right way is hard to beat.
Yup. I found that it was better to have too many and delete extras than to have the right amount but not connected rationally! It's easier to delete the stupid ones. Mind you I wasn't producing output as a map. I cleaned up the whole thing to just make a node map, tagged all the junctions and then used it as a height field to import all the junction coordinates into POVray. Then it was the nightmare of trying to trace all the connections between my nodes. I kinda got close but couldn't really avoid the obvious conclusion that it sucked as a methodology!! It is quicker to start fom scatch manually if you want a realistic layout. As you say, for a quick and simple map, it's great. I'd love to have the source and be able to fiddle with it, but my skills don't go that way. Unless it was written in Basic or something nice and old like Algol !
Mind you, the tracing design in POV was fun while it lasted!
bf 1noderoad3.png
This was about as far as I got in POV.
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"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man"
My Finished Stuff ............. Some of my 3D Stuff (POVRay)
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