Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

diverting to the land of nonsense.

Hyperbole much?

Yeah it isn't like he is driving the car of good intentions down delusion drive and striking the wall of insanity without the helmet of common sense.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

that's more of a metaphor than an hyperbole

[tfaal]

They're both metaphors, and hyperboles; the latter is simply an extended metaphor to boot.

[Narmio]

interresting city you have there, would be cool if it weas built on a hill.

Sounds like Ba Sing Se.

Heh.  But not even dwarves are *that* good at moving earth and stone!

[Xombie]

Now where is that Caius Cosades' house?

[King_of_the_weasels]

Now where is that Caius Cosades' house?

Morrowind didn't have random generated towns..

[atomfullerene]

Jiri, sounds like he could go a long way by simply trimming out unused roads, which should be trivial.  This would get rid of the circular shape as a side effect.

[eux0r]

to kohaku: its le havre, not le harve btw(yeah thats usually a typo, but you made it every time you typed it, so i figured you might have read it wrong) but thats just a minor thing,  totally concur with what you say, really, like all the time

for the towns: they do really look good when not thinking about details too much but like many people have already pointed out, you can see they arent built over time and expanding from a small starting point, but placed to be _as_if_ they developed. so i guess all problems will solve themselves once toady makes them actually grow in steps during worldgen. all complaints should solve themselves through that but i think that wont be until the army arc is completely done.

[Jiri Petru]

I don't think the maps will ever be established during world-gen, because that would presumably consume too much resources. The way I see it, worldgen only counts population and the number of buildings to keep it simple. Sites like roads, castles etc. get localised to a map square, but the detailed map isn't actually generated until you visit them in-game for the first time. What I think happens with the cities is that once an adventurer travels there, the game looks at the population, looks at special sites that should be present and the number of buildings and somehow produces a map out of it.

But this shouldn't be a problem, hopefully. Even this retrospective generation can IMHO be fauxed to produce results that look as if they had developed over time.

This post is a big IMHO, obviously.

[eux0r]

well, yeah, building every town map during world gen obviously is too much, except for those guys at nasa playing df on super-computer-clusters. but it would be possible to make this gradual development the moment the town is generated(although the game would be stuck for some seconds, 'loading' the town as it gets generated for the first time). once the complete history of the town, including not only stuff like fires or battles but also more regular 'expansion-phases' is there(what is what happens at worldgen), the generator can actually create the city for each event anew, always starting where it was in the last cycle, when you get there in adv-mode.

Spoiler: it could then look like this: (click to show/hide)

city in worldgen:
-small woodcutting and fishing village on a riverside
-expanding to more agriculture and clothing
-establishment of market due to central location(compared to surrounding villages)
-first wall
-city fire
-further expansion due to importance in worldgen
-construction of keep
-further city growth
-fending of goblin-siege
-second wall
...

what happens when the city gets created as an adventurer enters the region:
-placing the fishing village
-placing additional set of buildings and fields
-placing of market-place
-placing additional buildings and wall/pallisade around the complete village(cutting into the fields)
-destruction of a cluster of buildings and replacement with new buildings, maybe out of stone this time
-placement of buildings around the wall(and filling empty spaces inside the walled area)
-placement of a fortress, maybe replacing some part of the wall and/or some buildings
-placement of buildings around the wall(and filling empty spaces inside the walled area)
-destruction of randomly picked buildings outside the wall, maybe destruction and reconstruction of parts of the wall/keep
-placement of new wall
...

so what im trying to say is right now the city gets placed in its finished state in one go. but once all worldgen events are in, cities can be placed as villages first, and then multiple cycles of different types of city-generation get applied to what is already placed.

[hermes]

If were're still taking 1400 like the norm, then there are basically two types of villages,

Googling "Medieval farm layout" gives...

http://www.boisestate.edu/courses/westciv/medsoc/17.shtml

"Two types of villages dominated the European countryside: nucleated and dispersed. The former was found in the most fertile areas such as river valleys, and were mainly in northern Europe. A nucleated village was what you probably think of when you picture a village: houses clustered about a village green, with farms surrounding the village and a road running through it, while nearby stands the manor where the lord lives.

The other type of village was also characterized by its physical layout and was determined by the type of soil. Dispersed villages were more common in southern Europe, and any place where the soil was light and sandy.

....

Dispersed settlements were found in regions of poor soil, such as Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and the central highlands of France. In these settlements, each household had a small plot of land close by, the "in-field". They grew garden crops, fertilized with manure, and these fields were the more heavily cultivated. They also had open land, the "out-field", which they farmed for a year or two and then abandoned for another patch. The surrounding wasteland was used for grazing."

I think you have some great points about how the towns could evolve through time, but just saying I don't think Toady's pics are as flawed as you're claiming.  I've been to plenty of places in Europe (mainly England and France) where there really are solitary (farm) houses every few hundred yards, outlying a nucleated village such as you describe.  I could speculate at the logic for that layout, but would rather defer to the more educated, quoted above!

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't think the maps will ever be established during world-gen, because that would presumably consume too much resources. The way I see it, worldgen only counts population and the number of buildings to keep it simple. Sites like roads, castles etc. get localised to a map square, but the detailed map isn't actually generated until you visit them in-game for the first time. What I think happens with the cities is that once an adventurer travels there, the game looks at the population, looks at special sites that should be present and the number of buildings and somehow produces a map out of it.

But this shouldn't be a problem, hopefully. Even this retrospective generation can IMHO be fauxed to produce results that look as if they had developed over time.

Yes, "faking it" shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

Like people have said before, people "mine" old walls for materials for their homes - sometimes people build their homes into the city walls, and when the rest of the wall is mined out, a part of their home is still city wall standing tall. 

What you can do is create a city in worldgen, leave a marker for how large a ring the walls would have made (as in, "encompassing 26 blocks" as the recorded instruction), and just keep going with the simulation until you hit the population milestone that triggers wall expansion, and if you go far enough past the expansion point, people will mine out the old city walls, and expand through them. 

Then, you can even have worldgen wars that respect how much of the city is protected when raiders come.  Outlying areas might get pillaged and their people may be killed, but the rest of the population flees inside the walls.  Then you can have the siege with whatever food was stored inside the walls for the number of people who are inside the walls.  (Unless the commander of the city defenses actually shuts the gates or throws people out to ensure the rest don't starve...)

You can basically store all of this with population numbers and general radii of different features of the city.  Even something like the "job centers" I've been talking about can basically just be stored as a "how many people can get a job here" variable that simply guides worldgen in how big the radius of town clustering gets and how many people are going to move in.

I think you have some great points about how the towns could evolve through time, but just saying I don't think Toady's pics are as flawed as you're claiming.  I've been to plenty of places in Europe (mainly England and France) where there really are solitary (farm) houses every few hundred yards, outlying a nucleated village such as you describe.  I could speculate at the logic for that layout, but would rather defer to the more educated, quoted above!

If you look at the maps, though, you will see that there aren't just a few dispersed houses.  The houses aren't the real problem, if they had some fields with them (although there is no reason they wouldn't cluster closer to town if they were THAT close, anyway), the problem is the roads.

The roads are built in the same obvious grid pattern that the city *could* be built on.

That's the problem - the roads are layed out as if the city is already there, not as if they are servicing a rural farmland.  A rural farmland doesn't need a grid of roads, especially one that cross-hatches that densely so as to allow travel in every direction - the only direction you'd need to go is to the city proper. 

[scriver]

I agree. There's also the sharp cut-point from city to unused land. It should, as been said before, preferably be a more wide "waning" of houses/buildings before the settlement gives way to the land.
The other point I would like to bring up is the kind of development seen in, for example, this and this screenshot. Look at how the city has grown in those - only one side of the river is being settled (so far), but that side has been built on to it's limit. It looks a bit funny, seeming how people would want to be as close to "fresh" water as possible and should spread out along the river before they start "broadening" it away from the water. It doesn't really look like "natural" growth when it builds mostly on one side first, as it seems to do, judging from the majority of the shots provided.

Off course, it also have to be said (it can't really be said enough) that Toady has just begun writing the cities, so maybe it's not the time to complain about it yet, until we have seen more of what Toady intends for the cities. It should also be added, and I'd like to put emphasis on this, that this is the best cities I have ever seen in a game, hands down. It doesn't matter if all those buildings are mostly the same and "useless" (as of now), this is still more impressive to me than anything else, and I get really excited just thinking about experiencing them for myself. I can't wait until all the other stuff (of this release as well as those following) gets put in

[Jiri Petru]

"Two types of villages dominated the European countryside: nucleated and dispersed.

Thanks, that was enlightening. My knowledge is for the most part limited to central Europe so it's nice to see examples from other parts of the world. Some pictures would be nice, though, I'd really want to see how this dispersed farmland looked like (and I still don't like the idea of road grids in villages).

By the way, I like this kind of healthy argument and i think it might bring some new insights.

[NW_Kohaku]

The other point I would like to bring up is the kind of development seen in, for example, this and this screenshot. Look at how the city has grown in those - only one side of the river is being settled (so far), but that side has been built on to it's limit. It looks a bit funny, seeming how people would want to be as close to "fresh" water as possible and should spread out along the river before they start "broadening" it away from the water. It doesn't really look like "natural" growth when it builds mostly on one side first, as it seems to do, judging from the majority of the shots provided.

I can (partially) justify this in Toady's defense, actually.

The town is spreading out from the castle.  Look at where the concentrations are, especially in the first picture - they are not only clustering around the castle, but are clustering based upon the shortest "as the road winds" route to the central keep.

In fact, in the first picture you linked, you will see a sparse area right next to the keep's outer walls because it isn't close enough (by road) to one of the gates to access the keep.

They simply aren't choosing to build on the river at all.  Maybe they should, maybe they should build closer to some other "job center" besides the keep, but they are at least clustering according to some logic.

Now, the thing is, this seems to imply that everyone wants to live as close as possible to the keep.  If we are talking about it as a "job center", this means everyone works at the keep.  This, obviously, seems silly to have a population of thousands based solely upon keeping the keep running. I somehow doubt Toady will actually keep it that way for very long, and hopefully, we'll see more "forces" at play when determining where people choose to settle in a town before long.  That way, there could be more desirable locations (like near the river for fresh water or on top of the hill) where the people who have the most choice in where they live will want to congregate, and then the people who are just desperate to get as close to their job center as possible are going to be crammed up next to those.

It also does bring up another point about the density, however...

There appears to be some "packed" housing, where everything is crammed cheek-to-jowl, and then there's "sparse" housing where there is only one house per embark tile.  In between these, however, seems to be some strange "sparsely packed" areas, where all the buildings are crammed together, but not all the space is taken up.

Those houses where they share the walls of one house to the other are built because they literally can't find any space to build a house but filling up the spaces between two existing houses.

The better way to model that is to lay out where all the "crammed" houses would be, and then start deleting one or two houses after every house you leave there, so that you wind up with no houses that actually touch one another.