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Author Topic: A few thoughts for the new city maps  (Read 10694 times)

Jeoshua

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A few thoughts for the new city maps
« on: April 05, 2011, 05:10:33 am »

I love them, first off, but there are a few things that would make them much better.

Take Terrain into account: Organically grown cities grow up with the terrain underneath them greatly affecting the outcome of their street plan.  Roads encountering hills should do one of two things: Go up the hill, or go around it.  No middle ground.  Same with rivers (bridge or parallel).

Named features:  King's road or The Silk Gate.  Generate names for different things in town, people give you directions based on that.

Districts: It would be nice if there were ways for cities to grow larger during worldgen and "swallow up" neighbooring towns.  They would become a district (like how Brooklyn was once it's own town).

And some things this thread has brought to light for me:

Starvation causes exodus: Instead of people waiting around for their inevitable deaths, inhabitants of a town that has no food should have a choice to move on to another, already established town, or stay.  The chances for each person should be based on their personalities, maybe Adventurousness making them leave more often and Dutifulness making them more likely to stay.

Pets become food to hungry people: Speaks for itself.  When you have 1000 useless canine meatbags wandering around a city that starved to death, it's hard to imagine nobody looked at those dogs and thought "hmm, I could eat that".  Elves may have an exception to that.

Pets of fallen cities go feral: I really believe this is what is happening with all those forts which have 1000 dogs in them, but no people.  Pets should go walkabout once their owners are gone for any substantial length of time.
« Last Edit: April 08, 2011, 07:49:27 am by Jeoshua »
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Lord Vetinari

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #1 on: April 05, 2011, 05:28:19 am »

I agree, especially about the terrain thing.

Also, it's true that european medieval towns had a messy street network (especially secondary streets were narrow and windy), but there were always a somewhat straight and somewhat wide main street between points of interest (which were in most cases the city gates and the squares).
« Last Edit: April 05, 2011, 07:10:55 am by Lord Vetinari »
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de5me7

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #2 on: April 05, 2011, 05:55:21 am »

This may already be in but it isnt obvious from the maps but id suggest some central or focal features within the cities, such as a central square, or a major forum, or a central tower (or some other impressive and tall piece of architecture). May i also suggest that one gate, it doesnt matter which, be the main gate and slightly larger and have a larger square or court yard behind it.

There are several reasons for this

1. focal points will make navigation easier, i.e. certain things you might go into a city for could always be in these places, such as the city ruler etc.

2. i guess added to the suggestion for districts above, focal points could be areas you go for specific quests. e.g. assassinate a merchant as he passes through the main gate.

3. most real cities had major land marks; forum in rome, or the coliseum (could we get coliseums?), or the temple in jerusalem
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Jeoshua

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2011, 08:12:02 am »

God, this is true and I didn't even think of it.

Cities do not grow up because people live there.  Rather, They grow ABOUND something, like a church or market or temple.  Maybe we even get small towns growing around Inns and Mead halls.

If there were multiple centers of growth in a town, it would adequately simulate the "district" idea above.

Possibly the relative "density" of the town could be simulated like the caverns are now, with varying "alley density" and "market square openness".  And if two towns were nearby, a sort of "metablob" effect could occur.

A mockup of what I mean:



This "Border wall map" was generated simply with overlaying gradients, then taking a threshold.  The black is the city area.  White is the countryside.  Blue dots are centers of interest, and brown are main roads, connecting between points of interest at the smallest distance each time.  See how the smaller centers of interest outside the town are connected with big roads.  When entering or exiting the "wall zone" there would be gates.


Just something I whipped up in 10 minutes that a computer could do in 3 seconds.

edit:

Possibly we could have pre-defined objects, defined much like custom workshops, as points of interest that the procedural city could grow around.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2011, 08:16:13 am by Jeoshua »
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krbrowning

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #4 on: April 05, 2011, 12:05:00 pm »

Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History has a great section on the growth and calcification of cities.
Remember that cities form from dynamic flows of energy. They are smoothed out by centralized authority and striated by chaotic fractal growth.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #5 on: April 05, 2011, 01:25:35 pm »

God, this is true and I didn't even think of it.

Cities do not grow up because people live there.  Rather, They grow ABOUND something, like a church or market or temple.  Maybe we even get small towns growing around Inns and Mead halls.

If there were multiple centers of growth in a town, it would adequately simulate the "district" idea above.

Possibly the relative "density" of the town could be simulated like the caverns are now, with varying "alley density" and "market square openness".  And if two towns were nearby, a sort of "metablob" effect could occur.

A mockup of what I mean:



This "Border wall map" was generated simply with overlaying gradients, then taking a threshold.  The black is the city area.  White is the countryside.  Blue dots are centers of interest, and brown are main roads, connecting between points of interest at the smallest distance each time.  See how the smaller centers of interest outside the town are connected with big roads.  When entering or exiting the "wall zone" there would be gates.


Just something I whipped up in 10 minutes that a computer could do in 3 seconds.

edit:

Possibly we could have pre-defined objects, defined much like custom workshops, as points of interest that the procedural city could grow around.

I already said something about this in the FotF thread, so I'll just quote it...

Anyway, as someone said before, many cities start out as a military outpost where the city grows as services to the military that is stuck in that one point.  Other cities, like London, grow around a port (See Jiri's map again) and then fan out from there.

There is a reason for this - many of the industries that grow a city are fairly flexible - you can set up a clothier's shop anywhere you can ship cloth or fabric.  The "seeds" of cities are typically things you can't move, but which attract people to live near them to perform industrial activities there.  Either it's because the government moved a military base there, and the people live near the military base, or because the river is there, and you can't move the river, or because some natural resource only occurs in regions like that one, and the industry based on that resource cannot be moved very far away from that sort of resource because it is difficult to ship properly. [...]

In a time before good transportation, cities developed packed together, even though it made for terrible living conditions, only because they had to live within walking distance of their jobs and all their services.  As soon as people had access to personal cars or public mass transit systems, people started spreading out from cities, and living in the suburbs around cities.

Hence, if you want to accurately model cities, you need to start with a city centered on some sort of industry that acts as a source of jobs that attract people to live there, preferably one that has to be in that one specific location for some reason (rivers, major iron foundries on sites where there is both iron ore and fuel for the iron industry, major military outposts, major trade crossroads, etc.).  All the first houses crowd around that job center, and then commercial districts and support industries pop up around the initial wave.  These smaller, more movable industries can be placed anywhere there is a market of people to support them.  (This is something like clothiers or leatherworkers or small-time blacksmiths or metalsmiths.  Things that can set up anywhere their market goes.)  These act as job centers on their own, creating a fractal effect as each smaller, minor job center pops up off of the outskirts of the other job centers, causing the city to spread out radially along more and more individual points. 

Rivers, especially the mouths of major rivers are historically THE place where cities formed, however - rivers are trade hubs, sources of water, destinations of sewage, and, with fishing fleets, even a source of food.  (It's your highway, sewer, drinking fountain, and sushi bar, all-in-one!)

As a trading crossroads, all the towns upriver of the mouth of a river could easily send goods down to the mouth of the river by river barge, but then had to change over to ocean-going vessels, where they had access to the rest of the world (and it was easier to ship large volumes of trade goods halfway around the world by ship than to the next town over by wagon), meaning that almost all the trade in the entire region had to take place at the ports at the mouths of the nearest major river.  This, in turn, is where the wealth of the nations gravitated. 

EDIT:
Oh, and shipyards - docks are their own job center, but so are shipyards, and if you have forests upriver from a city with a port, you're going to have a separate industry built around some sort of shipyard, as well.  And those are even more major industrial centers.

Basically, if you take that idea of multiple city centers, you could also put a "weight" on each of them, where each one claims greater areas around itself, depending upon how many jobs it creates, and how much people want to live clustered around them.

Then, you start building up your support centers based upon having a certain density of population around them - a social center like a local coffeehouse or bar or theater will only spring up around enough people to support them, as will other commercial entities, like food marketplaces or other stores offering goods and services that can thrive on dense population centers. 

If enough clothiers move into town, a clothing industry might start up nearby to act as a support industry - New York near the turn of the century had a very famous clothing industry (leading up to the triangle shirtwaist factory fire) because it got so many immigrants that both needed clothes and had experience with working in the clothing industry (especially Jewish immigrants, which due to some specific social issues, were largely confined to cities and had experience with the clothing industry from the old world).  This can act as the next little dot on that map, the next job center that attracts its own labor force, and its own support industries to pull in more workers.

When making that, however, unless there's a reason to put the industry far away, the industry will probably spring up as close to the outskirts of the other job centers as possible - cities are clustered in tight bunches by their very nature, so there shouldn't be small areas that are flung away from the city unless there is a specific reason for that - either a fortress built up on a hill to overlook the city, or an industry that HAS to be separate from the rest of the city.  (Leatherworks were thrown far from city centers because it involved using urine and feces to treat the leather, which was obviously quite horrid to be near.)
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Silverionmox

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #6 on: April 05, 2011, 05:41:43 pm »

There are also different stages in the development of a city. For example, many European cities have a pre-Roman origin (some clustered houses), a Roman phase (straight grid, large city walls), medieval (organic growth, small city walls), neo-classic (making room for large central squares and large main roads into/out of the city centre, artillery forts), modern (breaking out of the city walls, highways, railroads, automobiles and suburbs). In between there can be random or targeted destruction due to economic shrinking, conquest, disasters etc.

Development in phases might be appropriate for DF, with all its ages (except modern of course). It would give different parts of the city a distinct feel.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #7 on: April 05, 2011, 09:44:22 pm »

There are also different stages in the development of a city. For example, many European cities have a pre-Roman origin (some clustered houses), a Roman phase (straight grid, large city walls), medieval (organic growth, small city walls), neo-classic (making room for large central squares and large main roads into/out of the city centre, artillery forts), modern (breaking out of the city walls, highways, railroads, automobiles and suburbs). In between there can be random or targeted destruction due to economic shrinking, conquest, disasters etc.

Development in phases might be appropriate for DF, with all its ages (except modern of course). It would give different parts of the city a distinct feel.

I don't see a reason that "The Age of Myths" would have a different architectural style than "The Age of Heroes".  That's something that seems like it would be better reflected by having different civs or procedural entity types, where their ethics and styles and culture change over time than something that should be tied to a "phase".

Especially since it seems more like you mean "era" or "culture" than you really mean "phase" in this case.

The Romans, for example, as a civilization, made a point of drawing out cities in planned communities along straight, right-angle lines, where everything was in the same spot, no matter what the local conditions were, it was the same in the deserts of Africa as it was in the forests of Germany. 

They tore up old roads and houses, and put down those right-angle paved roads and ordered houses to make the definitive declaration that the Romans Had Arrived, and that they were Bringing Order And Civilization To This Land.  It was a specific declaration of their values and their identity as a civilization to build in the way that they did.  They saw themselves as the only bringers of law and order in an otherwise barbarian world, and so they would be as "Civilized" as possible by being very orderly in their construction of arenas where they would send men to fight to the death for other people's entertainment.

That isn't a phase that every town goes through, that was an entirely different civilization moving in and putting up their architectural style while tearing down the old.  A city that was founded after the Roman Empire had crumbled would not have gone through that phase at all.

The best way to represent that would be to have humans building a city the human way, then some elves conquer it, and it starts to be built like elven cities, then the humans retake it, and maybe some of the elven architecture is still there, and it's just repuposed.
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Jeoshua

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #8 on: April 06, 2011, 04:13:10 am »

Oooooooh.  I like where you guys are going with that... truly I do.

The Age of Myth - Plenty of monsters abound.  Cities should be small, compact, defensible.  That beasty could come at any minute, so you need militia houses and giant city gates to keep the evils of the world out.

The Age of Legends - The powers of the world are fading.  Life is getting more and more safe for the average man.  Fewer walls generated at this time, but militia is still paramount.

The Age of Heroes - This happens when around 80% of the megabeasts are dead.  No longer are huge walls necessary for survival.  Cities would begin to spread outside of the walls at this point, but tennatively.

And there are a few other ages, less common to see:

The Age of Civilization - Many races, all doing well.  No wars.  Walls would probably be torn down and roads built to neighbooring civs.

The Age of (Humans/Elves/Dwarves) - Same as above, only it's just one race.

The Age of Death - Everyone's dead... it's all ruins now!

The Age of Fairy Tales - Most everything magical is gone from the world, except a few pockets of stuff.  Never seen this one, but it's in the string dump and Toady swears one got generated one time.  Don't know what would happen here but I see no reason for any extra coding.  It's rare enough it should just take one of the above growth types.

Of course, certain events in the civ's history could alter the building types.  Getting into a war during The Age of Heroes would cause some people to move back in from outside the walls, and more military stuff to be generated.
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malvado

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #9 on: April 06, 2011, 06:17:43 am »

I'd say for the messy terrain aspect of it : Get them settlers to start flattening the area ;)
Same with roads , I've on occasions encountered roads that go up and down far more frequent than the average rollercoaster...
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Jeoshua

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #10 on: April 06, 2011, 06:22:21 am »

I'd say for the messy terrain aspect of it : Get them settlers to start flattening the area ;)
Same with roads , I've on occasions encountered roads that go up and down far more frequent than the average rollercoaster...


That's a good point.  Roads should probably "erode" terrain much like the rivers currently do.
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de5me7

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #11 on: April 06, 2011, 07:42:09 am »

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=3199.0

note quite nercing this thread (link above) but it discusses burial mounds and graveyards etc.

It would make sense if they went into the city maps sooner or later. Id suggest they be outside the city walls, and that ownly significant characters get recorded/proper graves. I prefer burial mounts or catacombs to simply stone slabs. If your hero dies near a city that likes him, he should get a mount.

the mounds wouldnt need to be too complex, just a 4x5 area raised by 1lv, with a trap door at one end to a 2x4 room with a slab and coffin in it
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Lord Vetinari

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #12 on: April 06, 2011, 11:16:30 am »

For that we should wait for religion and culture.

In real lfe, Romans forbid burial inside the city walls while medieval Christians buried important people right inside the churches.

Maybe it should depend on a civ tab, like the city structure?
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #13 on: April 06, 2011, 10:56:03 pm »

The Age of Legends - The powers of the world are fading.  Life is getting more and more safe for the average man.  Fewer walls generated at this time, but militia is still paramount.

The Age of Heroes - This happens when around 80% of the megabeasts are dead.  No longer are huge walls necessary for survival.  Cities would begin to spread outside of the walls at this point, but tennatively.

And there are a few other ages, less common to see:

The Age of Civilization - Many races, all doing well.  No wars.  Walls would probably be torn down and roads built to neighbooring civs.

You know, historically speaking, most wars were fought against, and most walls were built to keep out the armies of other humanoids, not dragons. 

Mysteriously, even in a world with nothing but humans in it to pose a serious threat against humanity, we still manage to have wars.
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Jeoshua

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Re: A few thoughts for the new city maps
« Reply #14 on: April 07, 2011, 05:54:29 am »

Yes, for want of dragons we make monsters out of our neighboors.

The same thing happens in DF too.  I'd love to go through this legends file I have here and pull out some hard data, but basically, there seems to be a pattern in the manner of death in DF.

First, Kobolds die at year 4.

From 50-200 (in this world), The main cause of death is from beast attack, whether mega or normal.  Some of the creatures die while attacking, lowering their number.

From 200-500, there is a lull in death as civs expand.  Wars begin breaking out, however, until..

500+, it's nearly all out war.  There are plenty of wars and more starting every day.  This is most likely due to the fact that when a civ truly wins a war, they often get stuck in a pillaging cycle, where they and their allies in the war raid a city fortnightly, even tho nobody lives there but some chickens.

So the KIND of threats end up shifting.  There are still some megas around when all the wars are happening, and they're MEAN suckers, too... battlehardened (does [CAN_LEARN] come into play for worldgen critters? cause they'd be really hearty by then)

Granted, most worlds would get stuck in the "Age of Myth" growth type since the beasts don't stop comming.  And I think night creatures would mess the whole "progression" up.  But you could have citites having periods of free growth outside the walls before the next attack.
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