[JGRPP] Generate more realistic Settlements

[BW89]

Hello!
Since there are now multiple amazing sets with longer train vehicles I want to start a new game with them.
Since even the stations for normal trains look gigantic in comparison to the size of even big cities I would like to generate way bigger villages, towns and cities.

I tried changing the values of the custom Town Zone setting, but neither in the World generation nor in the scenario editor i was able to get nice looking towns in different sizes.
I was able to create nice looking villages by setting the town zones to [30,1,0,0,0], but with this setting it is obviously not possible to get nice towns.
My problem is, that i cannot find a setting where villages AND towns look nice because as soon as i set zones 2,3,4 to 1 or higher even with 255 for zone 0 big buildings appear way to early.
Since i was not able to find a way to increase the size of generated towns i tried these settings in the scenario editor with generating many random towns and expanding them.
I am using the UK Town Set 2.2, but i was not able to achieve this without or with different town grfs.

Is there a way to change the size at which a town zone appears ( i.e. zone 2 only in towns bigger than 2500, zone 3 in ones bigger than 5000 ...) either with different settings, a GRF or a GS?
And is it possible to change the size of the towns generated when starting a new game?

[Eddi]

i think we need to go a step backwards and look how the current towns work, in order to decide which values to tweak.

part 1: what is size?

there are two important measures of town size:

• the number of inhabitants
• the number of houses

the two correlate, but are not necessarily the same. to most internal processes, the second one is the actually deciding factor.

part 2: what are zones
zones are concentric rings around the town center, as the town grows, their radius continuously gets bigger.

there are 5 zones, internally numbered 0 to 4. but not all 5 appear in the same town. smaller towns have zones 0,1 and 2, bigger towns have 0,1 and 3,4.

(in my opinion, zone 4 tends to get waaaay too big.)

part 3: what is realistic
that heavily depends on when, where and how detailed you are looking.

like, many american cities were planned in an early industrial age, growing from a port or other "seed" along a predefined grid. then in a late industrial age crazy amounts of areas were covered with suburbs, whereas inner city areas were bulldozed for highways and/or parking lots.

many european cities have a medieval core, then a huge growth spurt in early industrial age. the late industrial suburb movement is way less pronounced. and grids also exist, but are often stitched together in smaller patches and with more variation in geometric patterns. preexisting infrastructure plays a much bigger role.

part 4: what can be done
many house properties can be changed by NewGRFs, like

• number of tiles per house (1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2)
• chance that a house disappears
• population per house
• passenger/mail generation per house
• town zone(s) each house type can appear in

some other values can be affected by game scripts, most notably the growth speed (rate at which new houses get built)

overall, an equilibrium will be reached when the number of new houses and the number of disappearing houses cancel out.

you can tweak the radius of the town zones a bit in the code, but the whole concept is probably too rigid to find meaningful values giving adequate results in all situations. a different approach might be to divide a city into "quarters" (like some kind of super-grid), and each quarter as a whole gets assigned a zone. and upgrading a quarter's zone might be randomized, so the center doesn't necessarily need to be the most dense zone. (think maybe "la defense" in paris)

[BW89]

Thank you for the extensive reply!
I probably did not make it entirely clear what i meant, sorry for that!

Basically i would like to scale up towns by a factor of 5-10. So that a 20000 resident town has the ratio (and types) of zones like a 2000 resident one in a standard game.

Realistic is probably not the right word, proportional would be better fitting ie. a 6 Track station should not be bigger than a city with many skyscrapers.
With standard sized carriges (0,5) it is in my opinion barely acceptable, since there are only a few towns with scyscrapers, that are not much bigger than a station for 9 car long distance trains
But if i need stations that are about twice as big, many towns just looks wierd compared to their train stations

[jfs]

For that, you might also want the stations to have a larger catchment area.

[JGR]

Hello!
Since there are now multiple amazing sets with longer train vehicles I want to start a new game with them.
Since even the stations for normal trains look gigantic in comparison to the size of even big cities I would like to generate way bigger villages, towns and cities.

I tried changing the values of the custom Town Zone setting, but neither in the World generation nor in the scenario editor i was able to get nice looking towns in different sizes.
I was able to create nice looking villages by setting the town zones to [30,1,0,0,0], but with this setting it is obviously not possible to get nice towns.
My problem is, that i cannot find a setting where villages AND towns look nice because as soon as i set zones 2,3,4 to 1 or higher even with 255 for zone 0 big buildings appear way to early.
Since i was not able to find a way to increase the size of generated towns i tried these settings in the scenario editor with generating many random towns and expanding them.
I am using the UK Town Set 2.2, but i was not able to achieve this without or with different town grfs.

Is there a way to change the size at which a town zone appears ( i.e. zone 2 only in towns bigger than 2500, zone 3 in ones bigger than 5000 ...) either with different settings, a GRF or a GS?
And is it possible to change the size of the towns generated when starting a new game?

If you want to experiment with different ways of calculating the town zone radii you could look into trying this (NML) or this (NFO).

[BW89]

For that, you might also want the stations to have a larger catchment area.

This is already a setting in JGRPP.

If you want to experiment with different ways of calculating the town zone radii you could look into trying this (NML) or this (NFO).

Thank you! I will look into that if i find time to do so