DiverCity

[Wahazar]

I started my new project: DiverCity.

Main purpose is to make more unique look for the cities, which currently are rather homogenous concentric blob,
if not controlled by obstacles or player's roads.
Even if multiple newgrf's houses are added, all cities are still similar, just more different houses but same mixture of them.

My idea is to integrate some existing newgrf's with houses, but houses from different sets will be not mixed within area of one town.
Thus, assuming 3 different building sets integrated, there will be 3 different town styles.

Some far-reaching goal is also to make unique blobs within one city, for example flat settlement, terraced house settlement, industrial area etc, where similar class of buildings is preferred while others are not.

But main goal is to make distinctive look for whole town. Also different sets have different drawing style, so it is better to keep one building set per town.

I started with utilizing base set graphics and created newgrf for testing purposes:

divercityzoom.png (106.16 KiB) Viewed 1780 times

So there are 3 different cities: with buildings from temperate climate set, from arctic and tropical style.
I defined 3 building classes, construction check for given class is valid if no other classes exist:

divercitytest1.png (695.8 KiB) Viewed 757 times

It works surprisingly well - no problems with city layout, despite of such constrains (1/3 of chance that randomly chosen house would spawn). I need still to check how speed of growth is affected by such constrains.

Any suggestions and permission for integration existing work into this project are welcome.
I prefer some abandoned projects, would be nice to revive them.
Huge sets such TTRS, Swedish Houses or Japan Houses are too big to cope with them for me now,
besides of houses Id limit (it is still 255 or better?)

[Erato]

This is a really cool concept

[odisseus]

How about selecting a single style per town zone instead of a single one per town? For example, one town could have temperate residential houses, tropical blocks and offices, and arctic towers; another one could have arctic residential houses and temperate towers, etc.

Also it would be nice if this idea were integrated with the Improved Town Layouts.

[Hyronymus]

How about building city buildings that are historically fitting to a period? Yes, that means additional buildings must be drawn but then you can "see" city development through the years. The trickery in this approach is making room for high-rise in city centers.

[Wahazar]

How about building city buildings that are historically fitting to a period? Yes, that means additional buildings must be drawn but then you can "see" city development through the years. The trickery in this approach is making room for high-rise in city centers.

Of course, even base set have some building era programmed.
Main problem with skyscrappers is, that they should be 2x2 or at least 1x2, otherwise city center is very congested visually
and player tend to use permanent transparency to see any bus stops. But multi-tile houses have poor chance to be spawned in city center.
If I understand source properly, there are two procedures for funding new buildings: TileLoop_Town where old houses are demolished and replaced by new ones, and GrowTownInTile, where new road and/or building are founded.
My idea is to make 1-tile houses not place-able at cleared land, so they can't replace existing houses. It should increase chance of making more space for multitile houses, but I didn't tested it yet.

EDIT: I see no variable allowing to check if tile is cleared or not. nearby_tile_terrain_type give same result for grass or cleared, right?

[Hyronymus]

With cleared land you mean cleared-from-an-earlier-building?

[Wahazar]

With cleared land you mean cleared-from-an-earlier-building?

Yes - it should something like bare land class, but I have no idea how to access such information using nml.
Both terrain_type and nearby_tile_class are too general.