Lately in Mythruna I’ve been playing with randomly generated buildings to start working on the random towns and cities. Things have progress pretty nicely this weekend and I have some screen shots to show off. (Also posted here: Pics of Generated Buildings and on Facebook… and there are some older early-progress shots and some descriptions on how the algorithm works here: Rotation...)
Random generation of “stuff” comes up here often among us monkeys so I thought I’d post some pics here also.
These pictures are of buildings generated with one simple template and just about a dozen parts, most of them the first floor pieces. The real town generator will have a bunch of templates and hundreds of parts but even with this small number the variation is very inspiring.
Here is a bunch of random buildings after I added a “gable” part. It was the third roof piece I added (there are only three different roof parts) This is my flat test area where I can easily clear the buildings off and regenerate a few as needed with some admin tools in the game.
For fun and to test out some ground placement ideas I’m working on, I plopped a bunch of random buildings into the woods and connected them by some hand built dirt roads. For good measure, I plopped down a few street lights. A real forest village would probably be mostly limited to two story tall buildings and they’d probably have removed more trees inside the village itself. I probably should have removed more trees as it would have been easier to get good pics but removing trees is a pain.
Same town, similar vantage point with a nearly full moon rising in the background. The moon goes through a 28 day cycle which directly corresponds to the length of the months in Mythruna. You can always be guaranteed a full moon around the beginning of each month.
@iamcreasy said:
What means 'template' or 'simple template'?
In this case, it's the organization of tiles that are randomized to produce a building. All of these buildings were generated with a "square" template. Think if it like a 2x2 grid of corners that are randomly selected. The grid has a description of the kind of tile that can go in a particular square... in this case all "corners"... and for the roof, only "corner ends". Each level of the template can have different types of tiles (like in the case of "any corner" versus "only corner ends").
There will be other templates, too... like rectangular ones, L shaped ones, H shaped ones, T shaped ones, etc..
It's slightly more complicated than that but that should give a sense of what I'm doing.
In this post: http://mythruna.com/forum/index.php?topic=707.msg3945#msg3945
I show pictures of 10 of the 11 tiles used to make those buildings. I hadn't added the gabled roof piece yet when those pics were taken.
@iamcreasy said:
Please add the brick crunching process. Make it more real. :)
It's not Minecraft. It's an engine in "test mode".
When there are items and combat there will also be block smashing... and it will take longer and require special tools to avoid going insane waiting for a block to smash. Until then, build mode will leave building easy... since that's the whole point in that case.
Looks great! Though I must admit, as a dedicated Minecrafter, my eyes are having trouble getting used to the hi-res textures, but I could get used to that.
I hope my own game will look as complete as yours some day.
@nihal said:
Looks great! Though I must admit, as a dedicated Minecrafter, my eyes are having trouble getting used to the hi-res textures, but I could get used to that. :)
I hope my own game will look as complete as yours some day.
Thanks. I'm going for a specific look and feel and "Nintendo" isn't it. :)
When I'm done, I'd like screen shots to look like they came out of a D&D picture book... well, if the world was forced into blocks at least. But that's the resolution and palette I'm going towards. So I tend to use hand painted or stylized over photographic textures, etc... but hi-res and not 8-bit blocky is a must.
