Help making a randomly gernerated town?

Unity Engine
1

Hi, does anyone know how to make it so that unity generates a town with trees, lakes, buildings, etc. that’s different everything you load the game (for example Animal Crossing)?
All help is appreciated

Oh ya, I’ve only know unity basics, so please explain like your explaining to a complete newbie
Thanks in advance

2

Double-post.

That’s not the right question to ask. The answer to ‘does anyone know how to do it’ is, of course, ‘yes’. What you really mean to ask is, ‘How do I do it?’. So just ask that :slight_smile:

Unfortunately though, the question isn’t that easy to answer. The functionality you’re describing is both non-trivial and context-dependent, and you’ll likely need some programming skill to make it happen.

I’m somewhat familiar with Animal Crossing, but not enough to know what it is exactly that you have in mind. If you could post a more detailed description of how you want the system to work (and maybe post some screenshots showing what sort of environment you want to create), that would probably make it easier for people to help you.

3

Well, recently I’ve looked for an a port of animal crossing for the Iphone and windows pc, but didn’t find any. So I basically want to make a port of animal crossing to the iphone, or windows pc, same style, same general everything.

4

Oh. Well, if your intent is make an Animal Crossing-like game, that should be fine, but if your intent is basically to re-create Animal Crossing, make sure you’re aware of the implications and possible consequences of using someone else’s IP.

5

Ya, it would just be an animal crossing like game.

6

So , do you know how?

7

I imagine I could figure it out. However (to quote myself):

8

In Animal Crossing, everytime time you start a new file the town your in has a completely different layout and geography than your last file.

Review: http://cube.ign.com/articles/370/370203p1.html

Pictures: animal crossing gameplay - Google Search

I don’t want a step by step tutorial, just something to get me started.

9

There are a couple of city generator scripts for Blender written in Python that can be found through Google or the BlenderArtists forums. That might get you going (assuming you can read Python and then adapt it to Unity).

10

Ya, i’ve seen those, there are very cool and I plan to use them in a future project, but there not really what I’m looking for. I’m looking for more of a geographic details, house, rivers.

11

Hi,

This is trivial, once you know your way around Unity, a 3D software package like LightWave, and you’re pretty adept at texturing and surfacing.

I did all of this for Project Griffon (which is about to be re-released). The entire game area is procedurally generated.

Here’s what I did.

  1. Create a basic house and basic textures for the house, with a number of different versions of outer features.
  2. Create a number of basic objects to rest outside the house, like trees, shrubs, fences, etc.
  3. Create a series of streets that are geometrically perfect squares, so they’ll all line up neatly in a plane
  4. Randomly place the houses along the sides of the streets at predetermined spawn points.

If any of that is confusing, or you need more detail, please throw yourself into Unity programming, building design, and prefabs, and it’s all very easy.

-Chilton

12

What you need to lay out is your scope - EXACTLY what are you looking for, and only then can you start looking into how to get there.

Some pertinent questions would be:
What do you want to include?
How detailed/realistic (in terms of geographic features) do you want it to be?
What are trying to accomplish (in detail)?

With regards to the animal crossing remarks - it wasn’t truly procedural. It had a set of assets that were placed on the same map - which is the easier way to go about it if it fits your scope. Maybe you don’t need to get into being able to deform every vertex in the terrain to do what you want - or maybe you do. But keep in mind that it’s a harder road to travel (speaking from experience).

What this boils down to is…
If you want truly procedural terrain, you need to look at games like MineCraft and Dwarf Fortress - they do that. But the simpler approach is the Animal Crossing method.

-V

13

It seems like quite an undertaking with a lot of variables to go wrong with everything being randomly generated.
I would imagine just having a few key elements having 3 or 4 spawning options each would really make each town unique.

For example just give a river 2 different spawn options with 3 different bridge placement option. houses and trees could be placed based on one of those. Just those options alone could create tons of variation. Add in the fact the the type of trees and villagers can vary and you you have even more unique cities. You could have a pool of 30 villagers and 5 tree types. A simple array could randomly select 10 of those villagers and 2 of the tree types.

Also keep in mind that people can cut down and plant to make their town unique. SO a fairly similar starting palate may not be too bad anyways.

Just my opinion, but it seems like you can really make a lot of unique options with a small amount of variables and eliminate a ton of worm cans to be opened.

I played the heck out of animal crossing though. Great game.
When it first came out on game cube my wife and I missed holidays with extended family so we wouldn’t mess something in the game!!

14

Chilton and RobotsVsWizards have the exact idea of what I want my game to be like. So, do you guys have any tutorials or something to get me started. Also this would just be a learning experience, I have absolutely nointention of actually releasing this.

Thanks you guys for all your help