I like this a lot.

It reminds me of the game simcity, which had a similar theme of arranging districts that would affect both the layout and the overall city, but this interface is much more interesting.  It would be neat to also be able to control the strength or size of each type of attractor.

Another use that comes to mind is using this for transit planning.  Maybe try and have the city create a transportation network and see effect moving the different attractors around would have on the speed of efficiency of travel around the city.

The skyscrapers seem to be very overpowering. I think for this sort of scale of city that the area(s) with skyscrapers would be much smaller, and with skyscrapers not so sky-scraping!

The coloured control objects seem too large when you are demonstrating it - I am assuming that they are intended for a larger implementation, such as is shown near the end of the video.

I'm interested to know if the city in the nice animated flythrough rendering near the beginning is created using the interactive tool, and if so, was the 3D model exported from Processing to another application for rendering, or was it all done using Processing?

-spxl

Intriguing (and well implemented); though I'd be interested to see some public responses.  Presumably if you don't incorporate industry the city will degenerate because of a lack of work?  If not I suspect the public will choose not to add factories and in fact may only opt for the 'village houses':  sadly the ideal 'attractive' city may only be practical in a virtual environment.

I rather liked the ability to add a river but I'd be inclined to also include bridges as these tend to impact on development also.  If you were being really ambitious you might even add another dimension: time.  Cities don't just spring out of nowhere; they grow from towns and villages.  It would be really neat to be able to go back in time, place some villages etc.  and then project how these might grow into a city...  Thought perhaps that's something for another project

blindfish wrote on Feb 8^th, 2010, 1:33am:


I am also one of those spatial designer who has gone off into a processing tangent, but has since been trying to develop ways of spatial design through code.

I think this is a great start to what could be a reasonably accurate generator that could predict how cities change over time, if you can take into account various factors that could possibly determine the behaviour of a city.

blindfish wrote on Feb 8^th, 2010, 1:33am:



Hi there!
thanks for the input. Indeed time is implemented in the project. Once you add a village, it starts with only a block or two and then spreads to fill the area. The extend to which it will expand depends on what is around it (i.e. other attractos), and on how many of its attractors are present. However, the village cannot turn into skyscrapers unless there is a skyscraper attractor present.

cheers!
S.