The map i'm working on for a while is just an other desert map but i found a theatre that seems to be overlooked mostly. Looking for some information about North Africa i was astonished how dense my area and whole North Afrika is populaded. There are big uncultivated areas of course and population quadrupled the last decades, but the desert war may not have been a war in an empty space as i allways thought. Even in the 40s there lived millions of people in thousends of cities and villages. So after finishing the basic structures of the map i startet the population. Here are the buildings templates:
Arabian quarter
European quarter
All objects are auto placed. The texture just visualizes the placing of the objects. From dark to bright: Street, variable space between objects, buildings, places, gardens, garden objects (mostly palms), special objects (industrial stuff), trees again (there are great palms in the game!), free space:
At the beginning i startet placing objects on a buildings template manually, but ten minutes later i knew: This work i will never finish. So i wrote a programm doing that for me. I just had to paint some streets and squares with room for some trees on them:
A garden painter programm added little gardens also with room for trees:
The city builder program then created a buildingsfile as a template ready to use for populating the map.
When populating the map with the autopop program i found the result not so convincingly. Tile size of a texture is 200 * 200 meter and so autopop produced towns with knife cut 200 meter long edges and the same at the borders of to templates. So i wrote a autopop with a resolution of only 25 meter/pixel instead the regular 200 meter/pixel. This allows to create and to populate cities like this one with an oriention along a street:
The textures size itself is nevertheless still 200 * 200 meter, of course, and so the textures do not meet exactly the city limits unfortunally. Population is dense, but the towns are quite small, only 1000 to 3000 inhabitants at the most and a few hundred buildings, so there are no performance problems.
Finishing the map will take its time. Weather is extremly fine for some time and is said to stay like this, so work made little progress the last two weeks. But there will be camels on the map.
Nowekat