Distribution of towns

[gauthier]

Currently Simutrans spawns towns on random locations on the map.

A more realistic solution :
_ spawn big towns (obviously "big" is calculated according to the average citizen/town rate) at random locations but big town would keep far from each other.
_ spawn smaller towns around big ones in order to create suburbs.
_ spawn some medium towns without suburbs randomly on the map.

Thus there would be urban areas and rural areas instead of continuous distribution of towns.

[dom700]

_ spawn big towns (obviously "big" is calculated according to the average citizen/town rate) at random locations but big town would keep far from each other.

Why, its not even like that in reality, a lot of big towns are close to another one

_ spawn smaller towns around big ones in order to create suburbs.

Doesn't make too much sense to me, typically a growing town just creates its own suburbs

_ spawn some medium towns without suburbs randomly on the map.

Imho industries and stops where many lines connect should just affect city growth much more than they do now. If I have 5 towns with 1k inhabitans each at the beginning, with towns A-D all only connect to town E, there is no difference in growth at the moment. In reality, these transport hubs grew extremely.

[gauthier]

Why, its not even like that in reality, a lot of big towns are close to another one

By "big towns" I mean centers of urban areas and I don't agree with urban areas being close to others.
Anyway this model would make the game more interesting.

Doesn't make too much sense to me, typically a growing town just creates its own suburbs

In the game cities can't spawn smaller towns aroung themselves so it must be done during map generation.

[Zeno]

As gameplay and also aesthetycal improvement (at least for my gameplay style, which may or may not match others'), you got my vote.

[Ters]

In the game cities can't spawn smaller towns aroung themselves so it must be done during map generation.

Suburbs are not necessarily separate entities, so suburbs in Simutrans don't have their own town halls. They do reflect themselves to some degree in the automatically generated stop names.

There are also other threads at the moment dealing with city placement and growth, which seem to move in a slightly different direction from these suggestions.

[gauthier]

I think I haven't said it correctly : with "suburb" I don't mean pieces of urban areas sticked to a city but smaller towns around (not necessarily sticked but some tiles distant, a distance ranging from 0 to 100 tiles for example) the central city.

[Ters]

Satellite towns? I'm not sure to what extent these appear in modern times, rather than simple start growing from a humble starting point by the presence of a nearby booming city.

[kierongreen]

This thread is increasingly make me think that there should be a way of choosing between several methods of town placement. I can't see people being just satisfied with one.

[Zeno]

I can't see people being just satisfied with one

No matter how many options there are. (We) people will keep demanding yet another choice

Now more seriously, it's true there are several thoughts about city generation, and many of them differ a lot, some even exclude other options.
Are you suggesting to create several algorithms and let the use choose between them, or are you thinking in something more complex?

[kierongreen]

Either separate algoritms or one algoritm with enough parameters that it can produce a range of distributions. If there were one algoritm there would likely be maybe a few preset settings (e.g. random, scattered, clustered, ribbons, custom) so that players weren't faced with too many options - although you could still have access to the full range if you really wanted.

[Fabio]

It could be useful to have a few parameters in cityconf.tab to weight starting positions for cities.
- natural features (rivers, shores, plains, Valleys, hilltop), with 0 highest likeliness
- minimum distance between 2 town halls
- number of clusters (given in n/512 and applied to actual number of cities)
- number of unclustered Towns (given in n/512 of actual number of cities)

[prissi]

Have a look at experimetnal. There are different town generating algorithms in place with lots of parameters (3 or 4 ) and yet the created map in most cases were not too different from waht standard simutrans did.

However, with scripting their might be more sophisticated script also executed during map generation for town placement and the like.