Chris wrote:The second Subversion prototype has been started, and this time it’s all about Buildings. Specifically, procedural generation of Office Buildings. The first thing that was obvious is how similar the algorithms are to the previous prototype – the same fundamental code that generated those large cities and street networks can be used to generate office layouts.
Hi Chris
Liking what you are doing with the future game (and that you are sharing the details with us), especially on the procedural generation front (definitely the way to go imho). Being in the Architectural trade one thing that struck me straight away watching the Video footage though was the absence of any vertical cores running up through the building. Though this might be because it's early days with the code I was thinking that you might want to have a look at either the 'New Metric Handbook' or 'Neufert Architects' Data' as both books give you the skinny on the necessary elements that make up a building in terms of their functional program. Office buildings are generally constructed with a view to let by the landowner rather than be owned by the companies that occupy them, and it's easier to let floors rather than whole buildings, so the essential services (Toilets/Kitchens/staircases/elevators) are clumped together in one generic format that runs up through the building (large footprint buildings often have more than one core), whilst the floors themselves are kept open plan so the tenants can set them up as they please using partition walls etc (all the electricals etc are run under raised floors and false ceilings. Offices/shops etc floor to floor are about 4M where as the average house is about 2.7M floor to floor in the UK for example).
Regardless of how grandiose (Foster, Rogers) unconventional (Gehry, Hadid, Libeskind), or minimalist (Ando, Pawson) an Architects buildings designs might be, all their works operate around necessary programmatic requirements (whether it be a Hospital, a Museum, an Airport, a Shop or an Office). High end Architects like the ones I mentioned are sort of akin to celebrity Chefs, they take ordinary and mundane ingredients and mix them up to make diverse forms, but the basic recipes are the same throughout, and most people can't afford gourmet meals. I think it's entirely concievable that you could write code that could procedurally generate viable layouts for pretty much any form of building given the inclination.
I'm sure you probably know some of this stuff, but I'd recommend those books for reference. Looking forward to seeing more of this game.
Kadayi
