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Prefab Seed-based Procedural Generation (Picture Inclu.)
Hello everyone, hope you're having a wonderful day. In short, I have a project I need to start prototyping, and no way to start this from scratch myself. (I wouldn't even know where to begin.) Hang on! That doesn't mean I want any of you to do any work for me.
Most preferably, there is a store asset out there right now at this very moment; that I just haven't been-able to find on my own. Considering this isn't newly ventured grounds, I'm more than sure there's a couple free pre-existing projects out there too.
Prefabricated, seed-based procedural generation. What do I mean by this? Hopefully the below picture will help me explain a little, if any.
Prefabricated, just meaning it's made out of prefabs. Seed-based, meaning we just plug in a seed and it generates. Procedural; imagine if we were to generate a city. It wouldn't make sense to have a building, a single slice of road, and then an empty plot in a row. We need to be smart about it, and have predefined rules to tell the generator what-prefabs can go where and still make sense. I'd reference something popular like Minecraft, except that uses voxels for it's chunks. We do not want voxels, we want prefabs to make up these 'chunks'. (I'm using 'we' here, as in us; me and anyone else who needs to accomplish this.) Generation, seeming relatively obvious. Continuously generating this chunks (bi-infinitely, though of course we wouldn't generate chunks we aren't near/can't see. That's more optimization than anything, though.), one next to another with these rules to help it all make sense.
There might be something out there suited for this, I'm not sure. Who's to say I can google any better than the next guy, ya know?
But frankly, what you're asking for isn't that hard. I put together a "city generator" kind of system which accomplished all four points you've mentioned (also entity integration, pathfinding, etc) in a couple of weeks last winter. It's not nearly as hard as you might think.
Oh definitely, but with life (a job, friends, family, close-one's, practically a second job, other projects, etc..) I don't have a couple of weeks to put into it, just to get a brief demo/prototype going. (As I'm sure others can relate to.) Especially when said end-product, would only result in rather or not the project would be continued. Which makes a store asset ideal, for a quick (though possibly expensive) quick solution.
You very well may be-able to Google better than I, but I've spent half of the day researching this and found nothing of aid. Nonetheless, thank you for your support!
Answer by MrSoad · Nov 07, 2014 at 12:52 AM
I just did a quick google and found these, can't be certain any will be quite right but thought you might like a look, so in order of potential :
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-cityscaper-procedural-city-generator.247856/
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21486
Hope you find something of use :)
Thanks a lot for your input! Sadly, neither of these seem to achieve exactly what we're looking for here. CityScraper seems like a very nice candidate, but is only able to generate a limited amount. Of course you can set this very high, but it will endlessly generate to that amount; and you can not cap it without rewriting the core. It also seems to lack the ability to define rules for what should be placed where, meaning clusters of buildings are just robotically spammed down in any order. The second asset doesn't seem to contain anything to help with this specifically, but may be of use to people searching for procedurally generated items in their games.
Oh no, hahah. Don't be sorry. Thanks for your contribution! I'm sure it will help some others along the way, for what they're looking for.
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