I think I was mistaken earlier about the contours being incorrect - they're actually working fine and it was my brain that was not functioning....
So I'm basin filling at the end of the erosion(with a slight slope) then keeping those basins and calling them lakes. Then it runs the contour detection and creates a nice hierarchy of contours.
It's not really important that the lakes and contours are topologically correct - I just want the lakes, rivers and ocean for collision detection, like "don't build stuff here". The contours are for this "brilliant" scheme I have...probably not that brilliant.
Polypolygons, eh? That's one I haven't heard before...I was going to do it like, polygon with no parent = level zero, polygon with a parent with no parent = level one, polygon with a parent with a parent with no parent = level two....and then the even-level object are surfaces, and the odd are holes...maybe your suggestion would be easier to implement....
Well, "nice places for towns" is tomorrow's project. So far I have this:
1) is it flat?
2) Is it not on water?(But close enough to water?)
3) hooray, it's a great place to build stuff!!!
Got any good theories on where towns tend to spring up?
The juncture of two or more major travel routes is popular, as are points where cargo needs to change forms of transport such as water to road or places that control access to resource production areas such as mines or forests. One good thing to have is a distance metric to important things such as water, food, transport, and so on. A* pathfinding for roads can be fun when you have a distance surface for water and a solid steepness cost system.
Those things sound like pretty important factors. Probably more so than the flatness actually (I know some towns/settlements nearby that are build on some ridiculously steep slopes now I think about it...).
I'll probably come up with a better way of placing buildable locations later. I got my A* system up and running now (well,walking anyway), and it's actually churning out some entities which, with a bit of imagination, could be mistaken for the basic layout of towns...the brownish splats is where the buildings would be...
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I left out one factor in final town locations: defense. It's not too important these days, but back in the bad old days, you wanted the enemy attacking uphill (and against the wind, if possible) in every direction, which suggested that your make hill-top fortifications.
Peter Wonka is a good set of papers for urban synthesis, if you haven't seen it before. The references on many of those papers are also well worth examining.
Looks like some good stuff on that page. Haven't looked at any of it yet, but looks like there's some stuff on procedural buildings and stuff like that. I just started my building generator right now(I'm kind of rushing through to get most of the mechanics of it working first, then make it nicer later), scattering buildings along the roads, so that will come in handy. Thanks very much!
I remembered the search term that I needed this time: San Francisco Rule. http://graphics.ethz.ch/Downloads/Pu...01/p_Par01.pdf may be familiar if you haven't seen it. It's from 2001, but still a good one - it's one of the early descriptions of CityEngine.
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