Hey!
So I think the overall quality of the maps could be greatly improved by pimping a bit what's actually outside the cities. Putting some trees and forests, using gradients on "non-built" ground to make it feel like it's not 100% flat, and maybe dividing the farmed areas into actual plot of lands (this last one might come hard to make look good, but it's worth thinking about, and maybe prototyping).
Yes, the countryside is quite boring. That's because it's a city generator, not a general map generator which places a city in the center :) . So anything that concerns things inside the city has a higher priority for me than anything outside... And there are just too many things inside that need to be improved/fixed/implemented.
Also, as much as I want to generate good looking maps, drawing (not generating) is a bottleneck right now - it takes like 100ms to generate a large city and 1000ms to draw it (approximately). Obviously adding gradients would make things worse performance-wise. I hope to fix it somehow, but for now...
That is a pretty sick move to make it 3d :P
You have a good point about the unresponsiveness, but stating that in clear text to the user would be a quick fix for that tho. I mean, nobody likes to wait, but if you feel you know why you are waiting, most people are a lot more OK with it. Might be moot if the 3d method is that much better at drawing.
Hey, totally unrelated to this, but do you plan on adding rivers? Either through the cities or around the outskirts? With most cities in the real world springing up around them, I would think it a pretty good addition to this excellent generator.
I am considering it. I don't think regular maps really need it (it also raises a questions how to visualise terrain), but it's essential for 3d-view: https://imgur.com/a/JnDae
Im not sure if other people have mentioned this idea, but I think visualizing terrain and slopes could be handled similarly to topographic maps. Instead of using a line where there is a increase of height you could have that each elevation be one solid shade of a the background color. The lower the terrain is to sea level, the darker the shade, and lighter it gets the higher it gets. an additional idea would be to have a customization option for how many elevations changes there are on a map. example: 10 shades or 5, etc. Random would simply pick a number between 1-20.
Hi,
I wanna thank you for your amazing work! It is quite helpful and really efficient.
I think that an editor after the map generation may make your generator perfect. Yes, editing rivers and coastlines could be nice but being able to add other stuff like districts, moving the walls etc. shall be amazing . I know it is possible with a SVG editor but it is quite hard and it is only a workaround.
Well I know it may be very difficult but that's just an idea to improve your generator ;)
