morgajel

##Re-Imagining Government: Who is the Ruler?##

As I work on reformatting CityGenerator, I'm also reworking what data is generated and used. Originally, Government generation resulted in something like this:

Government

Davisstone Green is ruled by the respected clergy. Within the city there is an ex-blacksmith that quietly assists current leadership while secretly pulling strings with a trade adversary. The population approves of clergy policies in general. Freedom of religion is oppressed, and magic use is verboten.

Crime and Punishment >

morgajel

##CityGenerator is looking for Contributors!##

Do you like playing Role Playing Games but hate prepping a campaign? CityGenerator is an app that dynamically generates random campaign settings for roleplaying games, and it needs your help.

I like RPGs, but none of my friends want to DM because there's so much prepwork needed to create a campaign. Can CityGenerator help with that me?

Yes, it can! CityGenerator uses a seed ID to randomly select data from lists. Once these words and phrases are chosen, a madlib-like description of a city is created. The goal of CityGenerator is to provide a DwarfFortress-level of absurd detail to your campaign setting out of the box. Details currently range from number of suns and moons to endangered catnip fields to the number of people in the large upscale tavern named the "Broken Giant Saloon" to "Mickic VanBerson, a human who is known in that part of town as being a decent priest. He appears healthy."

**This sounds like a great idea that is totally relevant to my in

morgajel

This is intended to be a brief description of the mechanisms behind CityGenerator.

Building Blocks

Let's start with the basic building blocks of the project. Understanding the depth of how they work is not important, simply understanding their purpose will help understand what I'm trying to do.

Generators

You can think of a Generator as a plugin/module/class/discrete chunk of code that generates details about something. As of the time of this writing, I currently have the following generators:

AdventureGenerator, AstronomyGenerator, CityGenerator, ClimateGenerator, ConditionGenerator, ContinentGenerator, EventGenerator, FlagGenerator, GenericGenerator, GovtGenerator, MilitaryGenerator, MythGenerator, NPCGenerator, RegionGenerator, TavernGenerator, and WorldGenerator.

morgajel

I'm recording this with the Android via voice to text so we'll see if that works.

So part of this post is to discuss what it would take to replace pearl in city generator with another language.

My main limitation is the memory on the server- I only have a gig and it need's to be able to run my wife's site without issue, so that limits what I can actually use to half a gig, which may not be enough for a JVM.

One thing that one thing that I need to consider is what back and libraries that are available on any potential language. There a lot of libraries in Perl that I use- for example of lingua in city generator does a lot of text parsing; choosing a proper tense of verb or the proper article for a word.

The big challenge of finding a replacement language for Pearl would be trying to replace those packages.

morgajel

Here's a example city produced by CityGenerator:

#Welcome to Steelhall!#

##Summary##

Steelhall is a large town in the Treem District with a fairly normal population (with one monstrous race) of around 3660. Environment

morgajel

CityGenerator 2.0 now features several great new features:

New Look!

A new layout and display gives it a much better look.

Separate Generators

Major internal refactoring from a single package into several separate Generator packages, which now includes:

morgajel

I'd like to change how locations and landmarks are generated because frankly they don't mesh well with the new generators. Our best bet is to generate new Landmarks via a LandmarkGenerator. I am unsure how locations will factor in at this point.

What Landmarks do we want, and how will we break them up? Note these are natural landmarks only (for the time being) to prevent cross contamination with other generators.

What important features can we pass in? If there's a port nearby? coast? river?

Perhaps we can sort it by climate? i.e. landmarks for the tundra will be different than a jungle.

Do I use more than just the biome?

morgajel

CityGenerator v2.1 comes hot off the heels of v2.0, with a boatload of new features and fixes.

Returning Features

You asked for it, so they're back! Some features were removed to complete with the 2.0 release and were left off. They are now back with 2.1

City Map is back!###

The most requested feature. The 2.0 release saw the removal of the CityMap for refactoring, but it's back now. Expect to see it improve in subsequent releases.

Districts are back!

morgajel

<ni770664> I have to say, your city generator may have saved me a lot of time making filler cities for D&D.


<survivortype> where was this like 20 years ago when I played D&D?

morgajel

It's been two weeks since v2.1, so let's see what v2.2 has in store for us. The main push of this release was to knock out a few new generators, which I think we did pretty well.

##New Generators!##

New Generators include:

• LegendGenerator
• RumorGenerator
• ResourceGenerator
• WantedPosterGenerator