Dec/Jan 2015 Lite Challenge: Foiled Getaway

[jbgibson]

So I poked around in the FilterForge library and found a couple of dozen that could be applied to mapping. The city maps I've made have been tedious and not detailed... what if I could make a city easily? The Suburbia filter creates all these detailed random city blocks, complete with shadows & traffic.... I bet that could be expanded on.

Indeed, using a common set of values and only varying the 'variation' slider is ALMOST good enough. Notice these two tiles:
suburb-downtown5.jpg suburb-downtown6.jpg

The variation jerks around the street layout a bit too much to make for plausible continual cityscape. But the block sizes aren't TOO many differences, so with a bit of cut and paste, I can get

### Latest WIP ###
Winchusia.jpg

The boulevard now stretches across both tiles, and I grafted in a park block up top center. Turns out if you leave all the other parameters the same and vary only the "building frequency" your city gets more and more open space - to a ridiculous degree. Like terrain generation that uses the same fractal degree across a whole world, one winds up with randomness that's too much the same. All park, or all buildings. But since the street layout stays the same in that case, I could make one tile all buildings and one all parks, and mix and match.

So what's this 'foiled getaway" title? I was puzzling how to do something interesting with a random-ish modern city. I don't roleplay game, so a scenario setting's out. Maybe a puzzle or game right in the map?

Here's the plan. On St. Lurbin's day the city of Winchusia hosted both a parade and a road race. Plenty of other celebrations too, but these two were downtown at the same time. An enterprising set of crooks had thought to use the activities as cover for a jewelry store robbery. They even had the wherewithall to cover their tracks - knowing that oodles of citizens would be filming the race and the parade from above with quadcopter dronelets (Winchusia is overrun with the things) they rigged jammers that would obliterate the video feeds, along their escape route. They then calmly and anonymously walked across town, across both routes, to some undiscovered hideout. Last man out picked up the jammers, and all was the perfect crime.

Or not?

Detectives Junios Cruces and Margheretta Blois were called in to investigate a suspicious package along the parade, and found a jammer. The same pair investigated the heist when the store was found burgled the next day. They put nine and three together and got twenty-six (skilled deducers, they) and now they need the help of the city's amateur aerial photographers.


Ya see, even without pix of the perps from above, they realized the *gaps* in photo coverage might tell where the crooks had travelled. Sort of an inverse tracking job. The quad drones don't typically have a very wide field of view though - nerdy little brother Louis after all was tasked by Momma to snap pix *specifically* of older bro Antoine.... times a hundred. Here's two Louis took in order:
TwoPhotos.jpg

Ugh. Fortunately the insurance company made sure our intrepid detectives had several cheap interns to foist off the job of placing photos along routes and time-matching them. Not to mention sweet-talking random citizens across town (and out of town!) into turning over basically amateur surveillance photos. That a set of pix is in order helps... a little. After all Louis (he's real by the way - Louis Blois - nephew of Margheretta. You think I would make this up?) isn't himself a runner - there's plenty of innocent gaps in his race coverage as he jockied for position to get some shots of Antoine, not to mention when he zoomed in on nice-looking race spectators, or stopped for a corn dog.

You, dear reader are an intern. The police department being really cheap, your pay is going to be mediocre for just pattern matching - there's one and only one bonus of 350 credits for whichever intern figures out the crooks' path first. If it's Junios or Margheretta, no bonus at all.

This could be made into a real game, with different race/parade paths, different escape routes, different hideouts. Me - I'm in a map contest, not a game contest - I'm gonna give you folks one and only one such set of clues :-). But first I need some more city... stay tuned for more Filter Forge citybuilding.

[Bogie]

I usually work in fantasy mapping, but that is cool you can make that detailed a city map without tedious hours of work. Nice work!

[ravells]

Very cool!!!

[Bogie]

The wrong image got picked up by the Thumbnail thingy. Make sure you post again with only the good map in the post.

[jbgibson]

### Winner ###

DronePhotoPlotA.jpg

OK, enough of the city to make it hard to find these crooks, yet a modest enough span that I won't have to capture oodles more city-chunks. It's easy to gen them, but if i want things to match up across edged, I have to edit a bunch. Still - better than hand-making that much city texture, by a factor of a hundred or two! The bulletin board our detectives have this pinned up on is a corkboard - nicely supplied by FilterForge in a seamless repeating texture. From "how about a corkboard?" to finished background - less than five minutes, including finding the filter in the library & downloading it. Sweet. The filter is called simply "corkboard".

If I have some time I'll make ending-curls to make it obvious the color lines are string or ribbon, and of course ideal would be to make a zillion of the circle-photo snippets. This would do though - nicely shows FF capability.