Cities

[FluffyFreak]

From IRC discussion:

<impaktor> fluffyfreak: that city link, at the face of it, looks like it might be OK with pioneer? I.e. square houses, just place them at different coordinates. Granted, would be good with some large and small road model as well, then? OH! Like elevated maglev! Nozmajner get on it!
<impaktor> ;)
<Nozmajner> :D
<Nozmajner> Roads and maglevs would still need to somehow follow the terrain
<fluffyfreak> we could loft and bend track sections along a spline
<Nozmajner> Maglev less so I guess, it could stay at the same elvation, if the height differences aren't too large
<impaktor> Nozmajner: if it's all on poles, elevated, we could handwaive it away?
<fluffyfreak> define junctions as node for a Bezier spline to follow and bend the tracks along it
<impaktor> well, by "maglev" I just mean = elevated, future, cool thingy hanging/gliding from some contraption.
<fluffyfreak> yeah, some kind of track
<Nozmajner> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn
<fluffyfreak> mind you i still haven't put windmills in the damned game so ...
<fluffyfreak> anyway, more interesting and coherent city layouts would be a visual improvement can probably be agreed
<Nozmajner> Yeah, that would be really nice
<impaktor> I'm thinking, what's the least amount of effort to achieve that.
<impaktor> Like: roads are just painted directly on the map, no model
<impaktor> hand waive: they're under ground, or that's the tracks where hover craft have scorched the earth, bla bla.
<fluffyfreak> some way to flatten the terrain https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/1476
<Nozmajner> Roads might be solved with a decal-like method maybe? Projecting a flat mesh to the terrain. But first prepare the terrain, so it makes some sense?

[Ga1aCt1Cz00]

I tried to come up with a Voronoi diagram based layout generator of a city years ago in Unity.
My basic idea was to use a connectivity graph of a Voronoi graph (can't recall how it was called). The code never really worked and was super ugly.

Best would be to not compute a graph from a Voronoi diagram and it's topology.

One algorithm may just try positions of buildings, check if they overlap with existing ones, check if the base of the building doesn't overlap with streets etc. The building can be placed if this all is fine.

Streets can be desfined as a SDF based on the distance from the edge of the Voronoi diagram.

[FluffyFreak]

City generation from OpenStreetMap
https://github.com/romanshuvalov/rsgeotools

[FluffyFreak]

The city generation from OSM reminds me of how Microsoft Flight Simulator does it, builds building geometry on the fly, along with a LARGE library of pre-built generic builds, and finally landmark builds like the Golden Gate Bridge, Westminster Palace, etc.

[Earthfall10]

A free Blender add on for modeling buildings. Includes presets for doors, windows, balconies, staircases, roofs etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFEIS26VOqk

[impaktor]

https://watabou.github.io/city-generator/

[nozmajner]

That's quite cool!
And open source too!