Procedurally generated city (night)

[JensAyton]

Since Rxke’s original post explicitly says “compatible with Oolite”, I feel I should clarify something:

While these are very nice, they don’t even come close to tackling the problem of generating complete planets with cities on them.

Generating a small (or even large) piece of homogenous terrain, or a few buildings representing a homogenous piece of city, is entirely trivial compared to generating a planet with varied terrain, climate zones, rivers, agriculture and industrial forest and so forth, or generating a complete city with varying types of habitation, road networks and so forth adapted to the terrain, connected to other cities, and placed in a way that looks vaguely sensible. On top of that, it would need to be done in such a way that you could seamlessly zoom out into space.

The Infinity project has spent years on developing some absolutely spectacular planets, but, as far as I’m aware, still hasn’t even started on the much harder problem of adding cities and other artefacts of technological life.

Procedurally generated demos are an interesting art form and well worth discussing, but if you’re digging them up in the hopes that they’ll nudge us into implementing something similar for Oolite, you’re barking up the wrong tree (which, on further inspection, turns out to merely be a blade of grass in a forest of sequoias).