
City Map Generator – Create procedural American-style cities in the browser - jsiepkes
https://maps.probabletrain.com/
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thdrdt
Oscar 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.

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rob2312
I 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.Proc...](http://peterwonka.net/Publications/pdfs/2006.SG.Mueller.ProceduralModelingOfBuildings.final.pdf)

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q_andrew
I 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
Nice! Those fake windows are a really cool idea

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totetsu
Following 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.

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acafourek
Broadway 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.

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Kaibeezy
I remember reading it was a deer trail from long before humans arrived.
Dilophosaurus trail before that, probably.

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Breza
Relevant: [https://poets.org/poem/calf-path](https://poets.org/poem/calf-path)

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gruez
In 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
Washington, DC?

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.9099853...](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)

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pwinnski
There 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.

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MrMetlHed
What about some of these retirement communities like Sun City, Arizona:
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sun+City,+AZ/@33.6291865,-...](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)

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moondev
Gotta say that design is pretty cool looking. I like how they put a golf
course on the perimeter!

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kevin_thibedeau
I'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.

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victoriasun
Oh 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?

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stjo
What have you done to deserve such torture?

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walrus01
Rather 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_
Taken 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.

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BorisTheBrave
Curious 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.pd...](http://www.sci.utah.edu/~chengu/street_sig08/street_sig08.pdf).

One should give credit where it is due.

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eat_veggies
It'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)

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DonHopkins
Distributed 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.pd...](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf)

>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.

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3g0st
if 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)

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benbristow
That's the new Grand Theft Auto sorted then!

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mark242
Nitpick: 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
What about the Great Highway separating Ocean Beach from homes in San
Francisco?

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Aperocky
love and RNGesus bless you!

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iworkfromhome
Quite 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.

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jordache
holy moly the white on black plus characters in the map's baselayer gave me
huge headaches, I had to leave the site ASAP

