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[zimluura]

all of the buildings inside towns are just little square hovels or shops.  i think it would be cool if house designs were mod-able.  and then lots of the creative people here could make building designs, sign them creative commons or public domain (or just sign away their rights to them), and then maybe toady and threetoe could judge which ones go into the main game.

[Capntastic]

You could suggest this for any aspect of DF, but the point remains that Toady wants to do all of the work himself, more or less.

[zimluura]

i figured he had other things he'd rather work on than designing 300 different houses.

[Sowelu]

Well, presumably they'll wind up procedurally generated after a while, and that's not something the community could really contribute to.

[Jeoshua]

I've played plenty of roguelikes (Kangband comes to mind) that used text files with pregenerated modular pieces of the world that were then placed procedurally.  That way you could come across a vault filled with traps and monsters and loot that actually was laid out somewhat realistically.  These modular pieces could be used to represent anything form a cave to a tower to a town.  If Toady were to put something like this is, with pieces for, say "Human Butcher Shop", and "Dwarf Cave Entrance", the worldgen would go alot smoother and, presumably, modders could add their own little pieces for different races.  This system doesn't make it so that Toady wouldn't have to do all the work... rather it makes it easier for him to do it AND easier for modders to add their own content.

[NW_Kohaku]

Funny, I've gotten to post this three times in the past few days, now...  Inspiration seems to really strike in clusters.

Raw-Editable Procedural Worldgen Cities

A way to construct "pieces" of a building or ruin or landmark or the like, and then have the game sew them together procedurally and create cities that can have a greater variety than what Toady's hardcoding alone will be able to do, provided there are enough fan-contributed floorplans put together in a single file for download.

That's the sort of thing you were talking about, Jeoshua, and it's the closest you're going to get, zimluura.

The thing is, Toady has made a comment on this specific idea before...

Will you code in the ability to create our own raw-defined building types for worldgen?  Using the Arena Mode and Custom Workshops as a model, we already have most of the pieces to create both custom buildings and define functions for them.

I'm not eager to get into this right now, since I'm not sure what the overall specs need to be and I don't want to tie myself to a raw format early.  One of the main things is that I'm not sure I'd be satisfied with static maps of buildings, rather than buildings that are a bit more adaptable.  For instance, I'm not sure what raws would look like for the existing temples, which adapt portions of their architecture to the spheres associated to their deities.  The raw format would inevitable restrict my ability to do things like that, unless it were really complicated.  At the same time, I can see how a modder would want to be able to deviate wildly from what is currently available.  It might be most simple to allow static building maps to be used by custom races, but since I won't be using that in vanilla it's difficult to prioritize.

Follow-up questions about trying to make ways to make only pieces of buildings rather than whole static buildings were not answered.

So, basically, Toady isn't opposed to the idea, but it's probably going to be coming after things that he does consider pressing priorities come... which probably means a few years of work...

[de5me7]

according to dev page some works been done on this in the comming month. with out retreading to much ground http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63054.0

is it worth posting source material and building designs from different cultures etc? Is toady likley to benefit from such posts, or will they simply be flamed by others?

it wouldnt be to hard to throw floor plans / links to photos for:

Zigorats, temples, flat top houses (like the middle eastern ones), long houses (like viking and saxon ones), or things like the round towers of corsica etc

[NW_Kohaku]

I've seen several threads that have shown things like floorplans for various common buildings like multi-story residential homes. 

Around the time I did that raw-editable procedural worldgen city thread, someone else was drawing out a couple dozen different generic buildings over in the Fortress Mode Forum.  Someone did a "elf tree" thread about a month ago, and it was only "flamed" (term used very lightly) because the guy had the elves using forges "because Tolkein did it".

(As a total side note, you don't really need a floor plan for a ziggurat - a ziggurat was just a raised platform like a pyramid with the top half of it cut off, and other buildings like the marketplace and temples built on top of the artificial hill.  Ziggurats aren't what they are in the common misconception.)

Anyway, if you want to take a shot at some types of buildings you want to make that are odd enough to be something Toady possibly hasn't thought of yet, then go ahead and take a crack at it.  Just keep in mind that he's probably thought of the basic stuff, and you'd probably do better to come up with good reasons to come up with unusual types of buildings. 

So basically, look at the stuff he already has for humans, for example, and try to come up with buldings that should be there, which should be shaped differently, and try to go for why, or at least why some sort of cultural trait should make it look different in another culture.

Hell, I haven't seen much of anything on goblins - you could probably do something on dark towers to make them more livable, or make their functioning make more sense fairly easily.

[de5me7]

i suggest we have some structures similar to Sardinian Nuraghe.

basically a tower would be built at the centre of some smaller towns and villages (perhaps only some civs would build these structures). They would only be built in the early periods in world gen (as are real Nuraghe), and their purpose is basically defense for sites without castles or walls. When small villages and towns are attacked the residents could retreat to their tower.

In terms of structure it would be a one or two level base tower, with another two or three level turret at the centre. The structure would be roughly cylindrical.