"You leave Tamara without ever having discovered it."

November 14, 2018 8:10 AM

There are interesting attempts to procedurally generate realistic cities, though it turns out to still be a hard problem, as all the most famous cities in games are built by hand. The exceptions are often interesting to play with, like Wave Function Collapse [PC only] which lets you walk through an infinite and beautiful Mediterranean-style city. If you prefer overhead maps, here is an interactive in-browser fantasy generator or this approach, which generates random navigable cities. Developers keep teasing new approaches to city building however, you can see some animated GIFs generated by another interesting approach to creating a cyberpunk city, along with some procedural brutalism.
posted by blahblahblah (12 comments total)

Ah the Wave Function Collapse started to stress me out as I watched the video, my brain has been trained to automatically try and build a mental map of 2D and 3D computer spaces, trusting that there is a map to be made, and and end to that map. Watching that video, knowing it would just go on forever, was like some kind of Borgesian bad dream. Always trying to make a map, but never being able to. . .
posted by os tuberoes at 8:24 AM on November 14, 2018 [5 favorites]

That wave function collapse algorithm is some voodoo magic. Scroll down to see some other examples besides cities.
posted by smcameron at 8:37 AM on November 14, 2018 [5 favorites]

Wave function collapse is super interesting; it manages to capture negative space in a way that a lot of existing procedural algorithms miss. Of course, it still doesn't get any sense of intention, as it's still random.

I love dungeon crawl stone soup's mix of procedural dungeons with randomly placed, hand built 'chambers' which can be anything from an altar room to a whole floor... Would love to see more of that kind of mix in 3d games; wave function collapse seems like a good candidate since it should be able to include boundaries and relatively complex constraints (e.g., here's a hand built castle in the middle of the procedural city, and the entry road has better be connected to a city road.)
posted by kaibutsu at 8:38 AM on November 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

For procedural text-based descriptions of cities, there's inflorescence.city, discussed previously.
posted by Nossidge at 8:55 AM on November 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wave Function Collapse in Bad North talk from the "Everything Procedural" conference. They are building smaller maps rather than huge cities, but it is another good intro to Wave Function Collapse.
posted by Gary at 11:52 AM on November 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

I love the idea of procedural content generation. Both as a viewer and as a way to reduce download sizes of media. Each new advance gets me a little more pumped.
posted by Samizdata at 12:19 PM on November 14, 2018

That's a pretty big city, but it's gonna take a few days for me to confirm it is actually bigger than Athens in Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
posted by straight at 3:09 PM on November 14, 2018

Mostly just here to appreciate the post title.
posted by eponym at 4:04 PM on November 14, 2018

procedural brutalism

I'll be in my bunk.
posted by krisjohn at 5:50 PM on November 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

People are also working on mods to No Man's Sky that adds procedural cities (though they're more like abandoned shopping malls ATM)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:30 AM on November 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

(though they're more like abandoned shopping malls ATM)

Even videogames can't escape the Dead Mall phenomenon. Eagerly awaiting Dan Bell to start making Lets Play videos.
posted by radwolf76 at 8:32 AM on November 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

And here I was, thinking this was about Tamara the play.

(I saw it twice in LA, back in the day.)
posted by aurelian at 12:32 AM on November 16, 2018