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[devek]

They are fed by your hatred of elves.

If you find it in yourself to love elves, they will all starve and die.

[Urist Imiknorris]

They are fed by your hatred of elves.

If you find it in yourself to love elves, they will all starve and die.

And dry up our goblinite mines.

[monk12]

They are fed by your hatred of elves.

If you find it in yourself to love elves, they will all starve and die.

And dry up our goblinite mines.

Crashing the world's economy. Save the world. Hate an elf.

[veok]

Do the food production/starvation routines during worldgen factor in any of the actual plant tokens (such as seasons, growdur, etc.)?

It may have some correlation with the number of plants available. Running 31.25, I had much larger civs (judged by number of blue "mountainhomes" symbols on the civ select sub-menu of the embark screen after running Sphalerite's procedurally generated plants and adding 20 or so new food etc. plants.

Extremely small sample size, so take it as you will.

[Cruxador]

How long have Toady and Three Toe's portraits on the dev log been on the right? Did that just happen? Because I just now noticed it.
It looks a good bit better this way, I think.

[Mel_Vixen]

I think for the last 3 or 4 posts. Its nice actually.

edit: Any guesses how the city-generation code works? I would like to understand it. I mean i get 90% of the systems behind the simulation more or less But i hadnt time to get into this thing yet. Toady can you help out here?

[Newbunkle]

I can't wait to get lost in those cities.  Way back when I remember Toady saying that he wants you to be able to have a full adventurer without ever having to leave a major city.  Wonder what kind of quests will be available... Muggers? Fugitive hunting? Monsters causing trouble in the sewers? Haunted manors need clearing? Pizza delivery?

That's what I loved about Daggerfall. I loved exploring and raiding dungeons, but the cities were much more vibrant and alive, even if my imagination was filling in a lot of the blanks. It's a pity the towns got smaller as the series went on.

It was awesome arriving in town and reading those notice boards by the gate that gave news of disease outbreaks and wars. I loved leaving my inn in the night to go and burgle some store, and then getting attacked by muggers who were hiding in alleys. And in the city of Daggerfall itself, you'd hear that ghostly voice shouting "vengeance!" and be attacked by ghosts.

The new cities might be what encourages me to give adventure mode a serious try. I for one am very excited.

[Ethicalfive]

Have to agree with everyone here. I really hope Toady runs with some of these in depth interactions with cities. Would be a shame having it as a place to go and buy items at, collect followers and genocide the population only. So much potential, would make adventure mode amazing. Though toady could be stuck on such new features for ever potentially.

Toady, could not some of these immersive city ideas be delegated through raws? This way, you only need to lay the basics, then add in new content from raw mods that you like at a later date. Seems like a lifetime worth of content for one person to add just inside a city alone.

[cephalo]

Ok, I just want to amend my algorithm suggestion a bit, according to the suggestions of some:

growth loop:
Pick a spot for the city.
Draw roads from city center to all other neighboring cities that exist at that time.
Expand the city from the center, without covering the initial roads, according to immigration, births.
When a new neighbor town is founded and can't easily use the existing road system, bring a road towards the current growth center but stop when it hits buildings.
Create plazas at the end of these new roads to serve as alternative town centers.
When the city is attacked, evaluate whether its wealthy and important enough to encase within a wall.
Place the gates of the city near the initial roads, and also the ones from new neighbors.
If the city has a wall, only create a new one if 60% of the town has grown beyond the gates.
Grow the town further centered around the existing gates as if it were a new town, starting the whole process again.^^

maintenance loop:
Attemp to destroy houses near the city center to make way for important new buildings and intercity roads.
Some random houses should be protected as if they were the homes of important, influential people. This is to break up the homogeny of the important public buildings near the center.
When new town centers emerge, try to create direct avenues between them by knocking down houses.

This should lead to some interesting, sensible cities.

[finka]

edit: Any guesses how the city-generation code works? I would like to understand it. I mean i get 90% of the systems behind the simulation more or less But i hadnt time to get into this thing yet. Toady can you help out here?

Looks to me like it's more or less doing this:
- choose the footprint of the city
- fill it up with a grid of intersections at 48-tile spacing
- randomly perturb the locations of the intersections to nearby points
- for each two adjacent intersections in the grid, put a street between them with about 7/8 probability
- put the city walls in around the footprint, with one gate in each cardinal direction aligned with a street.  extend those streets to the gates
- for each connected block that this leaves, carve out the interior yard, and then try to fill the space between them with buildings all facing a street (it looks like sometimes the yard space gets close enough that it can't place any buildings, e.g. one of the tall blocks in the NE of city 1)
- do something similar around the outside (I'm not sure why there are funny whorl-shaped accesses to the space next to the wall)

[Untelligent]

How long have Toady and Three Toe's portraits on the dev log been on the right? Did that just happen? Because I just now noticed it.
It looks a good bit better this way, I think.

Sometime between 11/11/2010 and 11/14/2010.

[Mel_Vixen]

Nice idea Finka ^^ should be easy enough to whip up a demo in processing to see if it works. I was actually thinking (now that i had time) that the town started out in a single intersection running streets in every direction. In a predetermined but fuzzy distance, say between 30 to 50 tiles, the thing would branch in a more or less big angle near 90°. The street itself would also get a small chance to arc a bit. Naturally there would be some other tweaks to but i could see that the citys are growing out like a leave or a slime-mold. The parcels that are created by this are then filled with buildings atm at random.

Depending on the distance to markets, tempels and the mainstreets one could apply some sort of richness modifier that determines how big the houses are with the biggest and most prominent ones on the edge of the markets and plazas.       

@Untelligent the avatars of toady and threetoe were orignally on the left side of the post. That they turned to right side is a new development.

[NW_Kohaku]

Toady, could not some of these immersive city ideas be delegated through raws? This way, you only need to lay the basics, then add in new content from raw mods that you like at a later date. Seems like a lifetime worth of content for one person to add just inside a city alone.

There was a question I asked a while ago that was on a similar topic:

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.

Also, just recently:

Also, will there be variations of city layouts beetween different human civilizations? Like, if a civ makes more "organic" looking cities another may make them more rigid (larger roads, no curves, etc.)

Eventually.  First I need to get anything working, and then variety can start to arise, both in the overall layout and in the individual buildings.  The number and regularity of intersections, road width, building size etc. is all pretty easy to control now.

Basically, he responded to my previous question with a functional "not now" and a "I don't want to tie myself to a raw format early", both of which imply he's at least seriously considering doing it at some point down the road. (I still hold onto hope for a raw system that can stitch together various raw-defined pieces so as to create multiple permutations of buildings based upon the same handful of raws.)

Having variable numbers of intersections, road width, and the types of buildings seem like they are going to be much more likely to be shoved into the raws earlier.

[PTTG??]

It seems to me that a compromise may be to define large scale building types and uses and let the hard code fill the out. So one could say "this civ uses [BUILDING_PLAN:TEMPLE] buildings that have [BUILDING_SPHERE:METAL] and [BUILDING_SPHERE:BY_CIV_PREFRENCE], and it uses them to [BUILDING_USE:MEETING_AREA:ALL], [BUILDING_USE:WORKSHOP:METALWORKING], and [BUILDING_USE:RELIGION:ALL]. Perhaps you might also say [SELECT_CONSTRUCTION_MAT:FLOOR:LOCAL_STONE] and [SELECT_CONSTRUCTION_MAT:WALLS:ANY_METAL].

With enough basic Building plans- they could be anything from sphere-sensitive temples to generic hovels or a variety of workshop plans or castle designs. Then you're free to do anything from making a civ that builds everything with low, adobe buildings to a techie civ with everything made of metal and glass in shiny towers.

[Mephansteras]

Toady: Could you clairify a bit on the "Goblins don't need to eat" bit? Just curious how that's going to play out and what the reasoning behind it is (from a world lore perspective). Also, even if goblins don't eat what about any other future carnivorous civs? Wolfmen or the like? Do you see yourself adding in herding-based civilizations to accommodate that? Even in our history we have examples of very successful civilizations that did very little actual farming and mostly just herded animals around. The Mongols are probably the best example of that.