8 ms·
City Map Generator – Create procedural American-style cities in the browser
- gruez 6y agoIn the demo pics there are radial/circular subdivisions. I find this odd, given that it's supposed to be an "American-style" generator. I've personally never seen any american city that has radial subdivisions.
- MrMetlHed 6y agoWashington, DC? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.9099853,-77.0450144,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!8m2!3d38.9071923!4d-77.0368707?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.9099853...
- ebg13 6y agoNot very similar. Those DC "circles" just crosscut a rectangular array. The area itself does not appear radial.
- MrMetlHed 6y agoGotcha. It was the only city that immediately came to my mind as at least having circles embedded in it.
- dylan604 6y agoDC is modeled after the square and compass symbols http://dcpages.com/gallery/Capitol-Square-Compass-Tour/WashDC-Square-Compass.jpg.html http://dcpages.com/gallery/Capitol-Square-Compass-Tour/WashD...
- pwinnski 6y agoThere are circles in cities, but not (to my knowledge) circular sub-divisions as depicted on the site. That's something I associate with Europe, not America. In most of America, including Washington D.C., the circles are very quickly ironed back out into grids.
- MrMetlHed 6y agoWhat about some of these retirement communities like Sun City, Arizona: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sun+City,+AZ/@33.6291865,-112.2934111,14z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b4255be4b0dad:0x2c2dfa70427a8a91!8m2!3d33.5975393!4d-112.2718239?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sun+City,+AZ/@33.6291865,-...
- kohtatsu 6y agoApple Maps link: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=33.6292+-112.2934&ia=web&iaxm=maps https://duckduckgo.com/?q=33.6292+-112.2934&ia=web&iaxm=maps These look pretty cosy.
- pwinnski 6y agoThis site claims to create American-style cities, but includes images with radial circles that extend about seven blocks, which is not at all something most people associate with American cities, but do associate with, say, Spain. https://maps.probabletrain.com/images/heightmap/map(66).png https://maps.probabletrain.com/images/heightmap/map(66).png The urban density in these images is also more commonly found in Europe than America. Which is fine! It's a generator for European-style cities, and it's neat! But so far, only low-density western desert cities have anything like 7-ringed wedges like this, and I suspect that most people, like me, didn't know those existed there before this thread.
- moondev 6y agoGotta say that design is pretty cool looking. I like how they put a golf course on the perimeter!
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoI'd chalk it up there with the "deigners" who draw swoopy lines for parking lots that look great on a map and are a nightmare to use.
- pwinnski 6y ago
- mc32 6y agoAlso the Woodward plan for Detroit: https://www.recivilization.net/AmericanCityBuilding/215woodwardsdetroit.php https://www.recivilization.net/AmericanCityBuilding/215woodw...
- Lammy 6y ago> What's it all about? No one knows what Woodward was really thinking, but with the geometrical mania that blossomed with the birth of the United States, it should not be surprising to find a backwoods judge thinking along the same lines as architects of the Italian Renaissance. Is this sarcasm? Am I being wooshed? The street plan is the same obvious Masonic imagery that's on the back of every Federal Reserve Note. Take a look at the incredibly beautiful Detroit Masonic Temple and imagine it as the "Eye" in the Eye of Providence that would have been the street layout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Masonic_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Masonic_Temple And look where it is in Detroit compared to the tiny bit of the street plan that was implemented: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Masonic+Temple/@42.3351973,-83.0561266,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x8824d2b52914640d:0x6b965658df8a8113!8m2!3d42.3416986!4d-83.0602968?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/Masonic+Temple/@42.3351973... Really cool; thanks for the link!
- crazygringo 6y agoThose are just traffic circles with some spokes. The generated maps show concentric circles, which is super-unusual in the US. I don't think I've seen it anywhere. I'm actually curious if it's a common pattern in some other country.
- ecopoesis 6y agoBoston (https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3591352,-71.06249,15.28z https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3591352,-71.06249,15.28z) is close to round. You don't get grids until you get out of the colonial era city.
- sieabahlpark 6y agoThese cities were originally part of the colonies of the British empire. So I would say they aren't necessarily completely "American". I'd look more central to western US cities to see how American style city planning is done.
- asveikau 6y agoWhat you have are different eras. Older is usually more chaotic. Look at New York below 14th St., then contrast with above which came later. You can draw another line when car culture became common. Before then, it was grids accessible by streetcars. After, the cul de sac style and similar becomes common.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- twic 6y agoIn my case, the peripheral road around a circular subdivision carries on into the river: https://imgur.com/a/173tCV3 https://imgur.com/a/173tCV3
- jordache 6y agoholy moly the white on black plus characters in the map's baselayer gave me huge headaches, I had to leave the site ASAP
- walrus01 6y agoRather than procedural, I wonder what it would look like if you wrote software to mash the vector data for several different randomly-chosen cities' openstreetmap data together.
- e_y_ 6y agoTaken a step further, train an AI on existing cities and have it imagine a new one. Ideally, you could sketch a basic outline (this part is waterfront, this part is the downtown, this is on a hillside) and it would fill in the details.
- BorisTheBrave 6y agoCurious that the author no longer credits the paper that a lot of the ideas are based on: InteractiveProceduralStreetModeling, Chen et Al 2008 http://www.sci.utah.edu/~chengu/street_sig08/street_sig08.pdf http://www.sci.utah.edu/~chengu/street_sig08/street_sig08.pd.... One should give credit where it is due.
- eat_veggies 6y agoIt's cited in the first sentence of the "Implementation details" section [1] of the website > Algorithm - Road Network > This generator is based on the paper ‘Interactive Procedural Street Modeling‘. [1] https://maps.probabletrain.com/#/algorithmoverview https://maps.probabletrain.com/#/algorithmoverview
- rob2312 6y agoI did an undergraduate project based on the same paper as this (not nearly the same quality, but similar enough if you squint). The procedural method used for this kind of generation is really powerful -- you usually see L-Systems being used to create basic sort of fractals but these sort of implementations can become pretty smart. For example, you can provide a height map of the terrain, and make it so that the roads find smooth paths down hills. And then that's before you realise that the buildings themselves can be generated via rules which describe how to make buildings. And then, the layout of rooms in a building, and the layout of furniture in each room. There's some really impressive potential here if a group of people were devoted enough. Another good paper is: http://peterwonka.net/Publications/pdfs/2006.SG.Mueller.ProceduralModelingOfBuildings.final.pdf http://peterwonka.net/Publications/pdfs/2006.SG.Mueller.Proc...
- clairity 6y agoamazing models, especially cool is the pompeii one based on real footprints.
- q_andrew 6y agoI made a project like this too! Except it's not finished yet. Basically trying to turn the procedural buildings into a roguelike or something similar. https://andrewmanq.github.io/2020-05-28-new-buildings/ https://andrewmanq.github.io/2020-05-28-new-buildings/
- rob2312 6y agoNice! Those fake windows are a really cool idea
- mark242 6y agoNitpick: I don't know of any American cities on the coast that have a road between housing and the sand. Certainly not a major road.
- brognob 6y agoWhat about the Great Highway separating Ocean Beach from homes in San Francisco?
- reaperducer 6y agoI don't know of any American cities on the coast that have a road between housing and the sand. Certainly not a major road. Galveston, Texas. Seattle, until recently. Though that wasn't sand, it was piers.
- _ah 6y agoHilly areas also often have railroads along the water since that is the flattest terrain.
- crazygringo 6y agoRockaway Beach in New York City is definitely like that: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rockaway+Peninsula/@40.5827596,-73.826446,2313m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c2682bcb8cedbd:0x9b3cdb329297db7f!8m2!3d40.592658!4d-73.7977928 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rockaway+Peninsula/@40.582...
- victoriasun 6y agoOh my goodness I love this. My husband once told me that when I died he would upload my brain into a machine that was constantly playing Cities Skylines. This looks to be focused mostly on urban grid design; have you given thought to what a suburban generator might look like?
- stjo 6y agoWhat have you done to deserve such torture?
- Aperocky 6y agolove and RNGesus bless you!
- 3g0st 6y agoif you are migraine-sensitive or have vision/neuro issues, proceed with caution. Contains high contrast overlapping patterns on a blank generator page (no immediate animations though fortunately)
- totetsu 6y agoFollowing the the BLM protests on the police scanner recently, I spent a day studying maps of Manhattan. What comes to mind here, is how some old roads remain like Broadway -> old postal road, that were laid in past times when the patterns of settlement were different from now. And also how parts of the grid have be repurposed into pedestrian only areas, as urban theory / demands has moved on from when the grid was made. It would be neat if something like this could generate patterns on top of patterns, to get these kind of historical layers.
- acafourek 6y agoBroadway is a great example of something having very long-lasting effects. It’s much older than a postal road, being originally formed as a footpath used by the local native tribes to travel up and down Manhattan. It roughly followed a ridge line that is not very evident in lower Manhattan today but becomes much more obvious when you get up to northern Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood.
- iworkfromhome 6y agoQuite difficult to use because there are no control buttons there. Specifically for zoom control, two options are required for that. Also there are no instructions on how to make a map for a particular location that we want. And there is no description (tooltip) on every feature, new users get confused.
- thdrdt 6y agoOscar Stålberg created this 'game' https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/ He also has some great talks on YouTube about generating city maps with cube marching and wave function collapse. His online map generator: http://oskarstalberg.com/game/CityGenerator/ http://oskarstalberg.com/game/CityGenerator/ What I like about his approach is that it looks very natural European instead of American.
- benbristow 6y agoThat's the new Grand Theft Auto sorted then!
- DonHopkins 6y agoDistributed City Generation with Robust-First Computing and the Moveable Feast Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc >Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: A rough video demo of Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast Machine simulator. Nere's a paper about how it works: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd... >Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture, by Trent Small. >Abstract: Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources. More info and links about David Ackley's work on Robust First Computing and the Moveable Feast Machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858577 >A "Moveable Feast Machine" is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Automata, but it different in several important ways, for the sake of "Robust First Computing". These differences give some insight into what CA really are, and what their limitations are. >Cellular Automata are synchronous and deterministic, and can only modify the current cell: all cells are evaluated at once (so the evaluation order doesn't matter), so it's necessary to double buffer the "before" and "after" cells, and the rule can only change the value of the current (center) cell. Moveable Feast Machines are like asynchronous non-deterministic cellular automata with large windows that can modify adjacent cells.