Just to clarify: I am disappointed not in the idea of a tool for creating more customizable cities, but in the approach I tried with City Painter - "to get what you want take a mesh and draw what you want in its cells and on its edges".
Here is a quote from a my post:
Drawing over a mesh with large cells turned out to be not user friendly at all. Probably it may be mitigated with a good UI to some extent, but at this moment I'm not sure it's worth trying. I have a vague idea of a different approach, we'll see how it will work out.
As far as I can judge it is not my opinion only. I haven't see a single map created with the painter, I got very few feature requests. Overall it looks like most people agree with me that it's not a path worth pursuing. It really is not the only way to implement "painting" and I hope to come up with a better one. Or who knows, maybe an idea how to fix this one will dawn on me.
Just to let you know how some of the features you mentioned were initially planned:
- Instead of a special "shanty towns" brush I was going to let users define borough parameters - average building size, average block size, average alley width etc. They would be like different paints used with the same brush.
- Instead of a "docks" brush there would be "piers" edge brush similar to "road" and "wall". This way it would be possible create piers attached to a castle for example.
- Instead of "road-like" rivers like in MFCG, I would suggest to draw rivers by filling cells with water. It is much more flexible way and I will probably try to implement it in MFCG.
Thanks for you detailed comment!