Procedural City Generation in Python

[eatonphil]

https://josauder.github.io/procedural_city_generation/

[mockery]

Awesome to see people excited about nontrivial proceduralism and willing to explain/open-source their code, but it's unfortunate they don't give any credit for their technique. It's a nearly direct implementation of the 2001 Siggraph paper "Procedural Modeling of Cities" by Parish and Müller. (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=383292 pdf easily available via google)

[josauder → mockery]

Hi, the author here:

While I admit to having skimmed over the paper above, this is NOT the main source of our information.

We looked a bit further into this one: http://tu-dresden.de/die_tu_dresden/fakultaeten/fakultaet_in...

As soon as I get home I will give credit where due, my bad.

[yogiparish → mockery]

it did look familiar :)

[mockery → yogiparish]

I recognized it quickly because I implemented a version of the paper as a project 10 years ago during college. (And made a very similar webpage as my final report.) Your username makes me suspect you might also have more than a passing familiarity with the paper - is that so?? :)

[yogiparish → mockery]

it's been a while, but, yes :) (parts of the paper - the texture generation part - were prototyped in python, but machines were sloooow)

[wilsonfiifi]

This comment is unrelated to the subject matter and that’s why i’ve made it separate from the parent comment [0] that triggered it.

I couldn’t help but notice the ‘.cfm’ extension in the acm.org link submitted by @mockery [1] so I thought i’d google a bit to see what tech infrastructure acm.org was running because i found it interesting they’d be using coldfusion. The search led me to a project on github [2] who’s file appeared in the results [3] and made me aware of ‘citeulike.org’. I did a quick search with algolia to check if citeulike.org hadn’t been submitted on hn already. This made me aware of user @sharpshoot and led me to research him a bit and bookmark his site so I can read about how he ‘made it’ (i’m an aspiring entrepreneur you see…).

Anyway all this made me wonder if there is a software that automatically does what I had to do manually, how efficient it would have to be and all the ethical issues surrounding it’s existence. Thin line between useful and scary…

  [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288365

  [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=383292

  [2] https://github.com/mikexstudios/citeulike-parser

  [3] https://github.com/mikexstudios/citeulike-parser/blob/fe31d0ba6c8203364676a83911942dd4fb09e494/python/acm.py#L93

[zatkin]

Now try and implement a structure such that the traffic is optimal for Cities: Skyline[1].

[1] http://www.skylineswiki.com/Traffic#Avoiding_traffic_problem...

[ju-st → zatkin]

My first thought: importing these roadmaps into Cities:Skylines

[numlocked]

Link to source: https://github.com/josauder/procedural_city_generation

[kawsper]

This reminds of Introversions city-generator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI5YOFR1Wus

I believe the source was released somewhere, but I don't seem to be able to find it right now.

[dk2 → kawsper]

I don't know about the source (would be interested to know if anyone has more information) but the app was releases as part of a humble bundle along with other games and a voxel tech demo: http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/13163342831/introducing-th...

I love the stuff Introversion does.

[ghostDancer → dk2]

From what i know , they released the source for Defcon , Darwinia/Multiwinia and Uplink with the bundle but the demos came without the source and only windows binaries unless they have released it in other place.

[josauder → kawsper]

That is indeed the video that made us chose this project. However I couldn't find any sources or Documentation either.

[nness → kawsper]

Real shame that game never eventuated, the execution so far looked really cool.

[Doobiedoo]

I've got to try hooking a minimal version of this up to Minecraft. I've just started getting my son into Python through Minecraft the Mcpipy library and Bukkit server on OSX. This would definitely take it to another level ;o)

[sycren]

Interesting, I'm glad that there is an updated city generator for Blender :)

Now you just need to add city zoning in (like I did for my dissertation) - http://www.blendernation.com/2010/04/26/city-zoning-modifica...

[yogiparish]

nice one!

[mkesper]

Strange that it still depends on Blender 2.69.

[josauder → mkesper]

I do believe that Blender 2.7+ are backwards compatible but the entire package was tested only on my machine and I run Linux with Blender 2.69 - If you have a higher Blender version/different OS and it works let me know (here or on Github), that would be great!