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It's 2014, why do we have grid based towns?

Discussion in 'Release 2 Feedback' started by eobet, Jan 26, 2014.

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  1. LordEnglish

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    We were told in one of the chat sessions that each region would have a distinct feel to it. This will hopefully start to be reflected in town layouts as well (especially now this thread exists so they are aware players are concerned)
     
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  2. Maka

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    As someone who got lost driving through the big dig, I can't stop laughing at this. Well played.
     
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  3. deadq

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    Some of the early eastern cities like Boston don't fit this mold.
     
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  4. Jamet

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    European citys, towns, villages ... houses are all over the place. Look at Diagon-Alley from Harry Potter and then stop thinking it's fantasy. Because no - it's not Harry Potter, it is actually pretty typical for old town centres. Only much less busy I guess.

    It should be possible to pretty much rotate any building completely freely, and also ontop of slopes! You can put them on a foundation to reach the bottom half and have the entrance stairs go all the way up. Some houses shouldn't even be standing 100% upright. It's chaotic! ;)

    There should be -BACK-alleys. :) Really narrow spaces with perhaps a few grates on cobble or just dirt. The biggest building, the town hall, should have a huge wall and also be surrounded by richer people's houses. There should be a rough organisation of buildings, circular, around that center, but do not go by math -- be sloppy. Be very sloppy. Have an outside ring with main city folks and their houses, all over the place, and a second town center here, the market district, and church, and maybe school or orphanage - because they go hand in hand, always. Further outwards, sprawling, you'll have farms.
     
  5. Isaiah

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    It wasn't built around the automobile. However since we were still a young country when the automobile was invented it helped for city planning.


    Here's the info about the Public Land Survey System:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
     
  6. Mishri

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    I'll support your suggestion if you can come up with the technical how to deliver it. There are a lot of considerations to put into place, like the smallest possible house can fit on the largest possible lot, and the lot sizes are different, and the biggest possible building for the smallest lot is the knights keep. Another issue is designing these houses to allow for different surfaces, hills vs flat, I have no idea how they could possibly design every house to allow for various elevation differences.

    The only thing I can think of is this: If players drop their fences (which we heard is an option) you'll see a lot of back alleys open up. Personally I think that should be the default and players should have to buy fences, and moving your house within your lot limits would also help create some squished housing, atleast 4 corners could be squired together, then larger gaps will exist on the other sides.
     
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  7. Isaiah

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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System

    We were still using old school methods when we began building these earlier states. We use to use landmarks like trees and rivers to mark everything. Problem is that trees die etc. The grid-like system we have in the US today is mostly a man made system. If you fly over our the large farm lands in a jet you can see the square like features. In other countries it isn't like that.

    That's what's so cool when traveling the world, and visiting old cities. You can see history built into the city. Every culture has some kind of special uniqueness to it.

    City Planning, architecture, art, and even communication... We humans are all very similar, but we have such diversity in culture, and it changes how we think and interpret the world.

    Somebody born and raised in Hawaii literally interprets the world much differently than a person born and raised in Germany. If you told people from both cultures that we are meeting up at 10AM to meet up and play a game of D&D. Germans are generally very strict when it comes to being on time, but somebody from Hawaii would view being on time as showing up some time in the mid moring as oppose to a German who might show up about 5 minutes before 10 o'clock for the meeting. The German might think the Hawaiian is rude for showing up 15 to 20 minutes late, and the Hawaiian wouldn't even know they offended them.

    The world is an interesting place. Different views on time, and how direct or indirect a person's communication skills are can cause a lot of miscommunication. Even people's views on art are influenced by culture. I believe our culture is partially responsible for influencing us to develop our land survey system the way we did. Even wars have even broken out because of miscommunication. Intercultural communication is one of the best classes I've ever taken. I recommend it to anybody still in college.

    There is definitely more than one way to view things. That's why we can disagree strongly and with good reason, but in the end it's better to accept each other.
     
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  8. Jamet

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    I agree. Fences are nice for farms, but not so much here, in towns and villages. Have some room to tilt, rotate and lean buildings ever so slightly, sometimes almost even touch each other.

    I'm no technician, but maybe I can come up with suggestions. First thing: don't drop squares, but start with triangles and combinations you can make with them. Like a basic web made by a spider. One that grows more complex the further you zoom out, like these older 8-bit fractales.

    So, picture two spider webs, intertwined. If you can, in your mind, try picturing what this would look like after we first twist it around a little at random and fold it back to one? Then apply light edge detection (strengthening the points with most intersections for placement of lanthers and what not, but setting a limit so it's not a big fat blob in the middle) and then break the oder further with cubism filtering (reducing the density of intersections and look less cluttered; have angles changed. It still retains some order, but shows variation). Now, for the remaining intersections, play "connect the dots" with lines that'll later become roads. It's important to remember that we do not need an intersection for each and every house. I think each lot should actually be a group of houses, or rows of houses, each different in some way, having a back row and front row, opposing each other, or even a house on all four or three sides, with an empty center that could be a yard, some trees, cobble and a statue, what have you.

    One could for better pathways apply a noise generator for a height map, and curve the lines so that heights and lows of extremity will be avoided. Heights can later be used as bases for larger constructions, lower points perhaps connected for a river. Now we have a webbing of squares, triangles, some intersections, straights and curves. Would probably look weird, but if you imagine trees, shrubberies and other kinds of things filling in the blanks, after you place houses in empty spaces, this might work out. The center could be a big circle with church or town hall, surrounded by a marketplace, typically.

    People have programmed mods for 3D engines like "speed tree". Why not find something or develop something like this for making different styles of towns.

    TL;DR, I'd probably enlist a series of fractale generators if there is not enough time to hand-edit a town. But I'd strong prefer a pull/push terrain editor, and neatly putting everything in place by hand. Just looking at pictures of older cities from way back will give a designer plenty of inspiration. :)
     
  9. Sir Niccoli

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    I think that quite a bit of organic design could be added to the in-between sections of housing. Right now, pure grid doesn't look very good. Put in some paths, public gardens, a well, etc. that break up the graph paper design. I know we'll have a lot of lots available, and some might be next to each other, but it definitely could be broken up more to look less like a neighborhood development project.

    Think of how a City grows from a small village, to a town, to a city. It's in stages, that growth will be very organic and at the heart of some cities, you might see a hint of that small village that was there before.

    I really think it could be done better, it works as it is, but it could be much better with just a bit more playing with the layout and adding some organic growth and thought to how the town might have come to be what it is 'today'.
     
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  10. NRaas

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    The dev team have also only publicly released two of the towns so far.

    Since I must presume there will be many village/town/city maps to come (to satisfy player house lots requirements), I suspect that future maps will have different feels to them (rather than being cookie cutters).

    Perhaps the devs should also provide some additional Unity challenges dealing with town maps: See if any budding third-party designers can come up with some innovative concepts. :)
     
  11. Akeashar

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    As a lot owner.... I really don't like the thought that when it comes time for me to choose, that I've only got a bunch of misformed tetrahedrons that the house doesn't fit properly into. >< I can just imagine the player angst, when they've finally saved enough gold up to buy a lot deed, and the only one available is this wibbly wobbly crooked man L shape on the back corner of a hairpin turn. Think of the exterior decorators!

    (And thats my purely self-absorbed post for the day!) :)
     
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  12. NRaas

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    Yes, if the lot sizes were different, I could totally see some user complaining about how they received less area on their lot than their next door neighbor. Especially since the lot prices for each level (village/town/city) must be the same in-game (as they are priced the same on the add-on store).

    For simplicity, most likely the system only handles rectangular lots anyways, which is why making curves and such is that much more difficult : Placing the same size rectangular lots adjacent to a curved road leaves a great deal of unused space between lots.
     
  13. Caliya

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    I was thinking the same thing about Venice. Good grief, it's impossible to know your way around there, which adds to the charm. You absolutely must have a map, otherwise you can get lost pretty easily. If you have visited there, you know what I'm talking about. If you've played Assassin's Creed II, you also know what I'm talking about (somewhat), but only if you stay on the ground in the streets. :)
     
  14. Caliya

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    Actually, the way European cities are with building codes, during medieval times especially (and it's even carried on til today), no building was allowed to be taller than, or more important than, a church. That's why when you're in Europe and wonder why there are no sky scrapers and there's a lot of sprawl instead, you will find a church easily because of the steeples. In modern times, there are some cities that have changed these building code laws. Frankfurt would be one of them. But amazingly, not much has changed with building height for centuries.

    Edit: All castles have chapels. The chapel, if inside the castle, always sticks outside the building, because nothing could tower above a chapel. Some castles also have free-standing chapels to bypass that design.
     
  15. Caliya

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    As an American, and having lived in Europe & Canada, I'd like to add some perspective.

    European cities were/are more "organic" in looks, not because they "didn't do it right," but because they used the natural landscape as a guide, along with likelihood of catastrophe. They didn't re-route rivers, blast away tunnels (though now the cars & trains have necessitated that) for example (think: Mississippi majorly re-routed for tourist dollars and keeping it by New Orleans, otherwise it would have long departed its route away from New Orleans organically-- now there are millions of dollars poured into maintaining levies to keep the river by the city). When you don't work with nature, you find these kind of catastrophes more frequently. So "doing it right" is all in perspective. :) But this is why European cities are organic in looks.

    Size of European streets: alleys, narrow streets, was because these ancient buildings existed when there were only horses and carriages. It adds to the charm, and they are quite pleasant to walk on without cars interfering with pedestrians.

    This game won't have cars. Nor power grids or telephones. There are some designs with power and windmills, but if they build in power lines.....ugh....lol
     
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  16. MogwaiX

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    Honestly, in that picture NY looks even more like a boring, gray place where concrete is all you see. Can't understand why someone would like to live in a city like that.

    Oh. Right. The Possibilities(TM).
     
  17. Dehmaun

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    a lot of cities eat surrounding towns/hamlets which may have different road layouts and house designs which are not in keeping with the city core. a lot have their own "mini town center". a lot of cities are like that the world over. some more obvious than others. but it adds to the atmosphere and immersion also.

    (edit: tried to make the sentences make sense!)
     
  18. Curt

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    They could develop a city like Budapest that really is the city of Buda and the city of Pest that growed together from each side of a river.
    think one of the sides is flat and the other way more hills, but is many years since i visited it.
     
  19. Mystic

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    As I posted in the other thread on the topic, it makes sense. In reality, most cities are grid based. The story in the game is that the characters all came from Earth, so they would naturally likely setup the towns in a familiar way.
     
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  20. Curt

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    If all characters from from earth i would be surprised when the guard calls me outlander (as everyone would be), i assume starting towns will have been formed by npcs not from earth
     
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