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[Mel_Vixen]

Well the smaller citys having more then one bridge is a bit much. Ok these are Minor streams but still building a bridge of any size is a difficult thing. Apart from that i guess that scattered houses in the landscape are Farmhouses and the free space is farmplots respective pastures for herding. 

[TolyK]

yeah i thought that too.
although iirc there were many (very small) bridges and only 1-2 big ones in those days...

[Kogut]

It is still too visible that town in DF is just preplanned circular set of road filled with buildings.

Maybe instead of:

Code: [Select]

make_roads();
make_buildings();
It should be

Code: [Select]

for(int i=0; i<size_of_town; i++){
  grow_roads();
  grow_buildings();
}


[Jiri Petru]

Well, the main thing is that people lacked cars in those days (surprise, surprise), so their houses tended to huddle together - the village had a small core of buildings, then a large circle around with fields (this is a well know map). But the houses were not scattered randomly amongst the fields, hundreds of feet apart, with a nice road grid in between them. That's just silly.

The fun thing is that villages in previous versions of DF were done better - they formed a dense core, they even spread around the existing roads instead of creating their own suburban street networks. The new maps actually seem like a step backward in this regard.

[TolyK]

perhaps if Toady made this process go every year...

[Footkerchief]

Pardon if this was already asked, but:
Will there be many different city layouts? If so - how many?

This was covered in Toady's last post in this thread:

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.

And second question(not sure if it qualifies as a question or as a suggestion, but here we go):
Also, how many city 'features' will there be? (stuff like markets, wider streets, big manors, etc.)

EDIT:
As to more interesting things to do in cities, I would like to suggest sewers, graveyards(along with crypts and dungeons), cellars under houses, etc.
And maybe multi-store houses(especially the important ones)

This was also covered by many parts of that post:

Those city designs look crazy awesome! I have to ask though, will we have things like central keeps, inside a second wall?

Also, will the cities get divided into districts? Say a livestock/butchers/tanners section downwind of the city, or cramped and dingy slums/ghettos & more expensive and spacious rich districts?

I'm not sure when castles will be placed in the towns.  It can handle it map-wise, so it's just a matter of time -- world gen would need to respect city+fortress combinations.  The cities will have some division to them.  I'm not sure if there's going to be a rich/poor distinction until the manor release, and even then I guess it'll be up to the town -- it is my understanding that depending on how property acquisition worked etc., you might have highly integrated towns or towns with separated rich/poor areas.  Right now, we just have the division of labor that arises during world gen, which will allow us to divide up the town somewhat based on the workshop types.

Are all those orange rectangles ALL buildings?

Yeah -- I haven't done larger buildings or market squares or whatever else, so we just have lots of similar buildings (some of these will have internal walls).  It'll be a bit different by the release, but we aren't really going to get into it until taverns/manors/inns a few releases down the line.

For a city of the size presented, are shops going to be scattered throughout?  Is there going to be one great central market?  Or little clusters of shops serving different parts of the city?

In the maximal cities presented, there will be at least one giant market, and perhaps some smaller ones -- they'll probably be stalls grouped by type, some permanent.  Then there will be shops -- for now, perhaps the majority of the buildings depending on the most prevalent professions.

For the "explorer/archeologist" adventurer role type... what are the plans for generating ancient ruins and dungeons and so on? Is the ideal something like a random Legend of Zelda, with each room elaborately linked up by your great precursors? Are they going to be anything like the caverns we have today? Or should we expect them to meld into the rest of the world as easily as possible?

It's going to be based on what happened in world gen, but some strange things will be added to world gen to make them more interesting -- tombs and prisons, etc., and once a location can be used over time for different purposes, it should be interesting.  A given tomb might be sort of weird and Zelda-y in that way, since it can engage in arbitrary trap-and-interesting-thing placement under the guise of keeping out graverobbers and respecting the dead.  I think the last two DF Talks had some related Q&A with a bit more detail you can find in the transcripts.

[hermes]

I dunno, I'm pretty darn impressed with these maps.  Let's face it, a city generator is a bottomless sink and what Toady has seems like an awesome place holder.  When the townspeople actually start generating their own history I'm sure it'd be easier to come back and put in the meaningful changes people want.

But the houses were not scattered randomly amongst the fields, hundreds of feet apart, with a nice road grid in between them. That's just silly.

I don't really buy that houses were not scattered randomly around fields, if you go walking in England round old farming areas that haven't been significantly developed, you find homes and farms dotted about all over the place, with roads connecting them, within easy walking distance.   

[NW_Kohaku]

The towns in the new post are exciting!
But also a bit disappointing at the same time.

It's now clearly visible that all towns simply plop down a circular web of roads on the map and then start filling it up with buildings. All towns are perfectly circular and look all the same.

I wouldn't get disappointed just yet, as Toady is obviously still working on it.  It's only when something is (at least temporarily) finalized that it's time to get disappointed.  Rather, it's just time to point out the flaws or potential flaws you see, and try to give hints as to how to improve the system while he's still trying to build it up towards its final state.

It is fairly obvious when you see the one building with a grid road nearby that it doesn't look too attractive, especially compared to the major city-type that was displayed in the last update.  Maybe throwing some fields down near those buildings would look better, but, as Kogut said, it would look better if the roads weren't built before there were things to connect the roads to.  A single building with four roads the same size as the densely-crowded city roads crossing right at the front doorstep looks a little silly, like someone just went out and built the roads in that pattern, regardless of whether anyone lived there or not.

I don't think it would be too terrible to mark the entire region "city area", but then have portions of the landscape that is too far from the main town simply not have any roads (besides the major trade roads out of town) or buildings at all, which would help mask the notion that all cities take up the same space and are the same shape. 

You could still lay out the roads, but just make them disappear until the population density that would demand expansion and the building of the road is actually present before the roads are constructed.  Basically, predetermine where the road will be placed, but don't place it until there are buildings that would go alongside it.

Any outlying buildings, of course, would look much better if they had some fields to go with them, although I think that's already a given.


Also, while a brook is a step up from making a city out in some random field, you still don't build London on a creek - you build it on a natural harbor near the sea.  At the very least, you build Paris far upriver on a more major river.

(See: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/ARTH_214images/Paris/map.jpg and a page with more images: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth214_folder/paris_maps.htm )

They put the castle and Notre Dame on an island in the middle of the river.  That was a river large enough to float barges up and down the river as transport, to Le Harve (the port at the mouth of the River Seinne) if it were destined for foreign lands.  (Le Harve basically just means "The Harbor".)  (Technically, a little Wikisearching says Le Harve was a planned city built in the 16th century to replace the older towns of Harfleur and Honfleur, which didn't have shipyards capable of supplying the French navy any more, but the idea is still the same.)


I know we have yet to get the "large road" part in yet, and that will almost certainly help to make some roads seem larger and more important, but it still really strikes me that the "reason for the town" is now "castles" in this update. 

These are all castle towns, and the towns are built radiating from the major roads leading away from the castle - the brooks that divide the town is the major obstacle on population density, and they grow up first on the side with the castle, and then closest to the bridges to the castle.

I do hope we get cities built around other purposes, or better yet, multiple purposes and job centers.  I would really hope that cities with multiple purposes could morph out into different sized circles, the way Jeoshua was talking about it earlier.

Spoiler: The image again, for those who forgot (click to show/hide)

A city with multiple job centers/purposes, which grows outward based upon how many jobs its job centers provide, and bounded by both the considerations of natural terrain, and where they put their city walls, would make for a much more "realistic-looking" city.

Of course, Toady hasn't said anything one way or the other, so maybe that already is his plan. 

[Kogut]

By the way, it is nice to see fixed problem with giant courtyards.

[tfaal]

There's been a lot of discussion, but about this, but I don't think anyone's asked the question yet;

What's up with sparse outskirt sections of the cities? Is there farming going on out there, and if not, why all the empty space? Are cities ever smaller than a world tile?

[Untelligent]

There's been a lot of discussion, but about this, but I don't think anyone's asked the question yet;

What's   up with sparse outskirt sections of the cities? Is there farming going   on out there, and if not, why all the empty space? Are cities ever   smaller than a world tile?

The empty space looks like farmland/pastures to me.

[Jiri Petru]

I don't really buy that houses were not scattered randomly around fields, if you go walking in England round old farming areas that haven't been significantly developed, you find homes and farms dotted about all over the place, with roads connecting them, within easy walking distance.   

Bear in mind that probably none of the buildings and farms you see when strolling around England are older than two or three hundred years. But even disregarding that, it's OK to have a stray farmhouse for the occasional loner family, but in Toady's current cities, all the farmers are separatist loners.

If were're still taking 1400 like the norm, then there are basically two types of villages, and both of them cluster the buildings close to each other. A village type means not only the arrangement of houses, but even more importantly the arrangement of fields.

1) Dense villages clustered around one spot like the church, the village common or even crossroads, with farmland all around. This is the "standard" type of village, and the English manorial villages look just like that. Peasants live together on one place so valuable farmland isn't wasted, and each morning they travel to their fields outside the village.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2) Stretched villages arranged in a single long line along a road. Farmland insn't in a circle around but each field connects directly to a house. I know these villages as German "colonising" villages that have usually been built where woods have been cut, but I suppose they appeared elsewhere in different contexts (like river valleys).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And while it's very well possible to have a stray farm or two outside the "core", it's quite apparent the villages tend to be as dense as possible, the logic being (1) to save the valuable farmland and not waste it on roads; (2) to live close to each other because people are very social beings; (3) defense, because you can dig a ditch or erect a palisade around a closely-packed village.

Note that the villages don't have a street plan, and the only "street" present is always the trade road or two, if we're talking about crossroads. There's no point to have any streets aside of that, because farmers and farm animals don't use cars or carriages - they walk on foot    The only time farmers need wagons is when they gather crops after harvest... and you don't need roads for this, wagons can ride through the cut fields easily. There will be sparse tracks for easier access to the vicinity of your field, but nothing with the density of Toady's suburbia.

The logical way for towns to blend into landscape isn't to build a dense streetweb and fill it sparsely with buildings, but simply to build densely packed houses along the one or two main roads, thus resembling the linear village. Then build additional streets as needed but always pack them closely with buildings. Like here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Do an image search for Brown and Hogenberg for tons of inspiration.

I'm not saying all of this because I expect Toady to create ultra-real simulations, but because he's already done it right in previous versions but is now diverting away from it. I want to prevent this!  But I'm aware Toady is far from done, and is still working on it, so basically I'm just hoping to provide some valuable insights or inspiration.

[Footkerchief]

diverting to the land of nonsense.

Hyperbole much?

[Dante]

Well, I for one think the new towns are fantastic, even as they stand.

Also, those people who compared the first set of pictures to Ankh-Morpork must regret not waiting to see these!

[Jiri Petru]

diverting to the land of nonsense.

Hyperbole much?

Yes.

Sorry if I sounded too aggressive. I'm just passionate about Dwarf Fortress and want to help. 

EDIT: Fixed it in the post.

I still love what Toady is doing, otherwise I wouldn't be so damn excited about it.