The beginnings of procedural generation

ProcGenWell.. procedural generation of buildings, anyway;  plenty of other stuff is already being generated procedurally.  There’s not a lot to look at, here, really, but what you’re looking at here are the first three fully procedurally generated buildings in MMORPG Tycoon 2.

While all the geometry that you’ve seen before has been generated on the fly and on demand, it was generated according to explicit instructions that I gave to the geometry generation code.  These here are the first ones generated entirely by the building generation code without my input — they’re the first ones which I didn’t design myself.  Obviously, there’s still an awful lot to be done to make them nicer, but these are the very first ones.

The building on the far left is an inn.  I kind of like that precariously balanced prism on its top!  To its right, those four narrow pillars mark the boundaries of a starting area.  Behind the starting area is a graveyard, which looks almost exactly like a regular “as defined by me” cube graveyard model, except that the procedural generation code seems to have randomly decided to make it about a quarter its usual height.

I’m not certain quite how much latitude to give to the procedural generation code — whether I should be giving it complete freedom (as I have here), or whether I should have some standard building templates which it’s only allowed to make minor variations upon, so that a player can reasonably be expected to distinguish between the different types of building just by sight.