Zephyris' Procedural Buildings Tool

[blitzkrieg]

Just so you call know I am still fiddling with the generator trying to get the results as good as possible... It is, unfortunately, a classic 80%/20% thing; 20% effort to get 80% finished, 80% effort to get the last 20% sorted! Hopefully I can get it finished at some point though

I've also done some stuff on a procedural tree generator... Any thoughts? It makes growth stages dead easy to generate, it would also make creating season variations (if OpenTTD ever supports that, hint hint) of the trees very simple.

images.jpg (6.61 KiB) Viewed 2405 times

[ZxBiohazardZx]

reminds me A LOT of this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y

Pixel City - Procedurally Generated City

even the outcomes are damn similar

[Zephyris]

And here is "version 1" of the building generator tool. To use it download and install ImageJ and open the text file "ImageJMacro_DrawBuildingCombined3.txt". To run it press Ctrl+R or select run macro from the drop down menu. This will run the macro and (by default) produce 4 sets of sprites along with a tab delimited text file with the sprite x/y offsets, width/height and rotation/construction stage. It's not the most user friendly thing, you will have to set up an output path string in the code (use "//" rather than "/" to define folder levels) and to generate buildings other than the boring default house you have to modify the generateBuildingDefinitions() function. If you copy/paste the content of either of the two extra files I have attached ("ImageJMacro_Accessory_BuildingGen_StepBackSkyscraperDefinition2.txt" and " ImageJMacro_Accessory_BuildingGen_TerraceDefinition2.txt") to replace the content of the generateBuildingDefinitions() function you will get some slightly more interesting outputs...

[Zephyris]

... and the contents of the building generator function for a detatched house.

[Yexo]

Amazing work Zephyris!

Little bash script and nml file to create a house grf to view those houses in game

Install ImageJ, install NML, extract the zip file and run the script "run". It'll create macrobuildings.grf containing a few houses. These houses will be available in all climates in all town zones to ease testing. You can change the amount and height (in number of stories) of houses the script generates in the run script (line 19+20).

I've slightly altered Zephyris ImageJ script so it accepts a few parameters when started via the commandline, so avoid running the macro manually every time you want to generate new houses.

[planetmaker]

The run script uses some syntax which does not work in my bash. I modified it slightly so that it works here, too. Version attached. And I have to say: amazing results ... 10 minutes of playing and the screenshot shows what is already there. I know there are some clipping issues and others as well. But without actually doing *anything*, it's quite neat

[Zephyris]

Lookin' good I should really get round to actually trying to make a town set using this...

[planetmaker]

what needs adding IMHO is for each house a ground tile which has a black area covering the base of the house. It's probably not much work, but would greatly add to a good overall impression of such houses.

[Zephyris]

Mmm, I meant to write a basic garden generator too, then totally ran out of time! Maybe some day...

[kamnet]

The run script uses some syntax which does not work in my bash. I modified it slightly so that it works here, too. Version attached. And I have to say: amazing results ... 10 minutes of playing and the screenshot shows what is already there. I know there are some clipping issues and others as well. But without actually doing *anything*, it's quite neat

Are the circled items part of the clipping issues, or just mis-drawn sprites?

[Zephyris]

Clipping during missdrawing... The peaks of those buildings are falling off the top of the rectangular area available for drawing.

[Yexo]

That is only a small problem with the script generating the grf, not a problem with the graphics themselfs. Houses with this size are supported by the game. It's just that the bounding box (as defined in the grf) is too small.

[kamnet]

Good to know! Just wanted to make sure Zephyris wasn't falling asleep drawing them and started doodling sideways