New Watabou Generator - neighbourhoods

[Deleted User]

Watabou has refined a new generator, the Neighbourhood generator.

Neighbourhood Generator by watabou (itch.io)

Here is what he says about it.

Templates define the look and the "nature" of different types of neighbourhoods. Currently you can choose one of three templates, but I'm going to add more in the future (e.g. Junction, Park, River bank, Bridge, Port).

• Area. Area neighbourhoods are generic neighbourhoods like those in the previous versions of the generator.
• Street. Street neighbourhoods include a notable street and its immediate surroundings, usually no more than a couple of blocks away from it.
• Square. A square neighbourhood is defined by an open rectangular area at its center. In contrast with other empty areas created organically, this square is supposed to look like a planned urban feature.

Templates are chosen via the new Tags dialog.

Large buildings

Large buildings are supposed to be landmarks of neighbourhoods and their purpose is to break the monotony of regular small buildings. Some districts get more than one landmark and some get none. Large buildings tend to be at some distance from each other. A large building takes a whole block, but often fails to fill it all. In the future I'm planning to add trees (or something else) around it in such cases.

Occasionally large buildings happen to be not that large. To increase their visibility, they are drawn with additional details, most notably cupolas. This makes them look like temples more than I'd like. Also their shapes are not diverse enough and I am going to fix it in future updates.

If you think large buildings are too visible, you can tone them down by making the cupola colour the same as the roof colour. To generate a neighbourhood without large buildings use the tag "secular".

Other changes and additions

• Like my other generators, this one got the permalink feature. The non-itch version of the NG is available at https://watabou.github.io/neighbourhood.
• The size of a neighbourhood is specified by the "small", "medium" and "large" tags in the Tags dialog now.
• You can request more trees in your neighbourhood by adding the "leafy" tag.
• You can rotate the map using the mouse wheel.
• Ground is lit better when a night style (the preset or a random one) is selected.
• The roof hatching is made finer, the trees shading is made more pronounced.

Here is what I generated, asking for a large district, around a square which was very leafy. By altering the variability of colour of trees and roofs, I was able to get variation in the colours. It also gives the option of cobbled streets.

And here is a non-leafy district, without a specific square.

You can export it as a SVG, so I am going to try to apply the Watabou conversion to CC3 method to see how I go with this. Obviously, colour variance will be set at 0, and streets to plain.

JimP

Looks interesting.