City Map Generator – Create procedural American-style cities in the browser

https://maps.probabletrain.com/

by jsiepkes • 6 years ago

231 46 6 years ago

maps.probabletrain.com

gruez• 6 years ago

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.

MrMetlHed3• 6 years ago

Washington, DC?

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.9099853...

ebg13• 6 years ago

Not very similar. Those DC "circles" just crosscut a rectangular array. The area itself does not appear radial.

pwinnski3• 6 years ago

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.

mc32• 6 years ago

Also the Woodward plan for Detroit: https://www.recivilization.net/AmericanCityBuilding/215woodw...

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

Those 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• 6 years ago

Boston (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• 6 years ago

These 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.

twic• 6 years ago

In my case, the peripheral road around a circular subdivision carries on into the river: https://imgur.com/a/173tCV3

jordache• 6 years ago

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

walrus01• 6 years ago

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_• 6 years ago

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.

BorisTheBrave• 6 years ago

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....

One should give credit where it is due.

eat_veggies• 6 years ago

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

rob23122• 6 years ago

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...

clairity• 6 years ago

amazing models, especially cool is the pompeii one based on real footprints.

q_andrew• 6 years ago

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/

rob23122• 6 years ago

Nice! Those fake windows are a really cool idea

mark242• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

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.

Galveston, Texas.

Seattle, until recently. Though that wasn't sand, it was piers.

_ah• 6 years ago

Hilly areas also often have railroads along the water since that is the flattest terrain.

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

Rockaway Beach in New York City is definitely like that:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rockaway+Peninsula/@40.582...

victoriasun• 6 years ago

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?

stjo• 6 years ago

What have you done to deserve such torture?

Aperocky• 6 years ago

love and RNGesus bless you!

3g0st• 6 years ago

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)

totetsu• 6 years ago

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.

acafourek• 6 years ago

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.

Kaibeezy• 6 years ago

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

iworkfromhome• 6 years ago

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.

thdrdt• 6 years ago

Oscar Stålberg created this 'game' 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/

What I like about his approach is that it looks very natural European instead of American.

benbristow• 6 years ago

That's the new Grand Theft Auto sorted then!

DonHopkins• 6 years ago

Distributed City Generation with Robust-First Computing and the Moveable Feast Machine:

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...

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

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.

City Map Generator – Create procedural American-style cities in the browser

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