Procedural Building Placement Design

Introduction

Given Atlantis is supposed to be a glorious pre-existing city, it was important to do it justice when placing buildings procedurally. Procedural placement was chosen over static placement, to continue the theme of variability between different playthroughs - as the map and resource collection are procedurally generated. This will hopefully give the game some replayability, and require the player to be more adaptive between subsequent games. Although the placement of the buildings is dynamic, the number to place, and the types of buildings are static, to allow the game to be balanced (as having 5 barracks in one game, and one in another would be unfair)

Motivation

The algorithm required to generate the layout of the city was required to be quite rigid, as just spawning buildings randomly all over the place to fit would be too chaotic and unordered for a city with the pedigree of Atlantis. It was deemed essential that while building placement would be different across each game, the player would still feel as if they were being presented with an ordered city, and not just a haphazard collection of buildings. These constraints informed the construction of both the algorithm and the supporting classes for the BuildingGenerator (the class which handles the procedural placement of buildings).

Helper classes

Building

This is a simple class containing the basic information of a building as it is to be placed in game. It includes the name, width, height and tile that the building is placed at.

CityRow

A city row represents a row of buildings within the city (so that the city can be arranged into a grid formation - as would be expected from an ordered city). A CityRow features a list of buildings, which are placed into ordered positions relative to the city row. It provides functions to centre the buildings within a row (run at the end of generation), and tracks how much space is left, to know whether or not a building may fit.

BuildingSpecification

This class tracks the number of buildings of each building type need to be placed, and how many have been placed. It interfaces with the BuildingGenerator to inform it when to stop placing buildings of a given type

Algorithm

Testing

Unit Testing

Experimental Testing