Master Mapper and developer L Lee Saunders has been working on a random city generator for City Designer 3 for a while now. It’s a tough nut to crack – it’s hard to make human(?) environments which look plausible. But we are ready to release the latest version, the first public beta of the Random City Generator. To get the generator, which requires City Designer 3
- Go to the ProFantasy registration area, and login in or register
- Register your CD3 if you need to
- Download the Random Generator and install as Adminstrator
- Launch CC3 and start a new map based on a city template
- Type CITY at the command prompt and press Enter
Please give us feedback and new feature suggestions.
[…] has been working with our beta testers to get the RCG ready for public consumption, and now here it is – ready for your […]
Love it! More options would be good, and something like this for CC3 main/DD3 would be awesome as well
Great tool.
The only real things I’d improve on are:
Option for more than 1 river, or coastal.
Option for what symbol set / type of houses/buildings.
Option for textured roads
Where to you go to download it? I can’t find it anywhere.
What a great add on. Did a whole town in a few minutes and was able to tailor it in less then 1 hour. Awesome.
Some documentation on some of the settings is needed, I sure would like to get roads like in your example but could not see how to do it.
@Bill, it’s available from the ProFantasy registered users’ area linked to in the post.
@Chris, we’ve never been able to find a good algorithm for random dungeons, but we are open to suggestion.
Oh, this is nifty. It’s going to take me a while to come to grips with the subtleties (took me a moment to figure out how to designate a building type), but this is going to be useful.
In addition to Tim’s suggestions, I’d love the ability to select an area of the map and have that filled in with random city elements. I often know the general character of a city (outline of the walls, locations of major landmarks) and just need something to quickly fill in neighborhoods.
I’ve got a problem with that tool:
I can’t create the buildings. When I tryed it first, it worked, but when I restartet my computer in the evening, it didn’t.
Help! I’ve followed the instructions exactly, but when I type “city” at the command prompt, it tells me that it does not understand the command “CITY”. I can only assume I’ve done something wrong, despite doing exactly what the directions indicate above. Can anyone assist me?
@Simon Rogers, I don’t see any link that leads to a download for a random city generator. The registered area has no such link as far as I can tell.
@Simon Rogers, never mind. thanks for the help. i was confused. problem solved.
here some sugestion. Maybe some of them are possible already, but I didn’t see it.
Instead of one house style, we could choose many form and style of house : a little like the random street tool.
Make sections of the city. The program ask the number of section section we want and generate random part of the city. For each section the program ask the question for the small street and for the house. That way you could have different part in the city, like a slum and a rich part. Also you could ask if there is wall around each section. That way we could have the rich part of the city to have a wall.
Like others have says, possibility to have river or a coast.
Make filling bitmap possible for the wall and the street. For the small street, maybe use the multipoly so that the filling doesn’t look bad.
The programs could add other thing like tree. The tree could be symbol or simply a multi poly fractal like in the fantasy city annual.
Possibility to add random farm land outside of the wall.
Possibility to have others form than the always almost round city.
The possibility to make before some of the element of the programs before we use it. For example, to make the big street or the wall before and the programs just ajust to make to make the rest. We could the way make more than one big street. This could be also the case also for the rivers or coast if you add it. To work, you would probably have to put each of the element in a predetermined sheet and layer.
There some bug I have found :
I have tried to make a big city and it’s work very well. But after that when I tried to make a smaller city, but it’s still create a big city that go beyond the limit of the map. A little like it’s still use the limit when I make the big city.
Sometime house are one over each other or over the wall.
@Dan, that probably means it hasn’t installed for some reason. You should have files CC3generator.dll, cc3actions.dll, citywizard.dll and cc3objects.dll in your CC3 folder.
@Scott, in the example the fill style of the roads was changed after the random city was generated. Just use Change Properties on the roads and set the fill style to an appropriate bitmap fill (e.g. Cobbles as in the examle).
How can the city be made larger. I tried it on the 5000 x 4000 template and it made a real small city in the corner.
@Scott, We are looking at this.
@Finarfin+, I haVe the same problem!!
@Simon Rogers, Cool, thanks! It is awesome add-on and this is feature gets the city process going. Thanks for all your hard work on this.
@Scott, Thanks but it’s all the work of Lee Saunders, the master mapper who has been working hard at this for a long time
@Simon Rogers, The NetHack engine produces reasonable dungeons. Might be a place to start. Or make the engine to use an option (which could become an annual item): Maze style, NetHack dungeon style, Keep On Boarderlands-esque, etc.
@PeterW, Same problem here…
This is a great addon and will save me hours of work. The additional features I’d like to see are:-
(1) Larger sizes of maps
(2) Rivers & coast – If its Medieval or earlier then river transport was the main method of travel for goods
(3) House type selection (or is it just I haven’t found it?)
The other suggestions above are great but I’d like this enhanced gradually, as I know (painful experiences) that too many changes at once can cause bugs.
Easy to change but would it be possible to make the roads, bitmap-symbol filled rather than black lines?
I like the idea of Annual distributed plug-ins for different city styles too.
Keep up the excellent work!
When I try to install this add-on under Windows 8, I get several error messages about files in the CC3 folder that cannot be opened. Is there a special procedure for doing this under Windows 8?
Eric, please submit a tech support request, and we’ll help. There is no special procedure for Windows 8, so the problem must be something else.
To install under Win 8 you need to run the install package as Administrator.