Mythruna

Here I'm playing around with random street layouts for towns.  It's completely random right now and not sensible... ie: it doesn't make sure that related buildings have a convenient path between them when designing roads.

Still, I think the roads it plots are kind of interesting.  In the lower right quadrant I have a view of the last path example where the roads were carved with mortared rock.

(http://i.imgur.com/KpkX3.jpg)

Real link for easy zooming: http://i.imgur.com/KpkX3.jpg

And here is another example of a case where I have to avoid being too sensible and killing the random.

For example, the first (upper left) layout seems unlikely.  The smelted iron has to go all the way around to get to the blacksmith... and even back past the iron mine.  BUT, it is possible for a real town to have laid itself out this way for a variety of reasons.  Maybe the roads were more convenient this way and the smelter doesn't deliver iron to the smith very often... or maybe it always goes through a middle man.

At any rate, when adding intelligence to town layout I need to be thoughtful of the fact that "sensible" may also lead to "boring" if taken too far... with all towns predictably the same: "If I find the big giant smelter then the smith should be right over there..."  Lame.

On the other hand, any town of a reasonable size would have a decent road from the farm to town storage... so that's important.  These kinds of dominant paths will be something I'll work on next as I work out road size (width+material). 

Also, the buildings in this town were manually placed.  The randomly placed layouts will get more interesting still.  And technically some of the criteria that goes into street layout should go into building placement.  I wanted to get raw road layout working for existing buildings since it will be (eventually) possible for a player to make their own town with automatic streets for buildings they've manually placed around.  It's a necessary function and let me play with some ideas.

I never knew random road generators could seem so man-made looking. Great work! I love the progress :)

I like it, especially how you made sure the roads don't go straight. Also, maybe you should make for certain types of buildings like houses a road that is place a random number of blocks away so there is almost a road going next to the house and you must walk onto a smaller, less pronounced road to arrive at the house.

Anyway, great work so far. I'm interested to find out what new type of block you are going to use for streets (since within a town would require more taken care of blocks than intercity roads that might be half gravel, half dirt)

The streets/paths lay themselves out based on the terrain... so they pick the easiest path based on some costing criteria.  In the final version, material and size of the road will be based on the traffic.  So a house near main street might just have a dirt path connecting to the street or if it's close enough then a cobble path or something.  An inn with lots of traffic would have a more pronounced connection to the main street system. 

Also a lot will depend on the size and prosperity, etc. of the town, also.


Small towns and villages will have mostly dirt paths... like my current random town on the server.  The higher scale towns will use mortared rock for roads and still use dirt for avenues.  Cities will be mostly mortared rock roads.

Right now I'm working on town->town roads so that I can get an idea of what the main path through town might be.  Town to town roads will skew towards dirt paths.  Town to city and city to city will be more prominent roads... either wide dirt roads or wide mortared rock. 

Also the town->town roads leads me to random town placement which also helps me figure out what resources will potentially be imported and exported.  If I don't find a short cut to an interim state, this path (pun intended) leads to randomly generated towns and cities in a way pretty close to what the final version will be (minus about 40 building types or so).

Kind of a fun (for me at least) picture of the high level path cost data that I'm using to calculate roads and sea lanes for ship travel.  Raw link for zooming: http://i.imgur.com/RAJMT.png

(http://i.imgur.com/RAJMT.png)

Red indicates rough terrain, cyan indicates shallow water.

I've done some exploring using this map as a guide... what I really like is that the places where dark blue meets up with pure green are almost picture-perfect places for ports. Nice gradual slopes that meet deeper water.

And the place where "Normen Town" is on the server (roughly in the middle of this map) it's clear from this map that there are lots of good places for ships to dock with the land... but that to travel from anywhere beyond that would require bridges across little pools of water... which is exactly what normen built.

...now to plot some towns and roads.... and shipping routes.