Natural Procedural settlements

Begining  as my honours project, this is a prototpye  for testing voronoi based PCG world gen in Unreal.

In short, it's an exploration into the use of Voronoi regions as a means to structure procedurally generated worlds mimicking human development patterns and helping diffuse patterns of the generation. 

Long-form, the goal was to set up and test a Voronoi-based once-per-playthrough style world generation (eg Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Civilization) to both reduce patterns in generation and mimic the asymmetric blocks of buildings we see in medieval cities and to try and find a method of generating settlements that feel distinct to players. 

As a brief technical explanation, the system uses a radially diminishing Poisson disc algorithm to place points around the settlement centres, the Bowyer-Watson algorithm is subsequently used to generate Delaunay triangulation from those points, from which a Voronoi tessellation is extracted. The cells are converted to Unreal splines for PCG, the cell type is set, and then the generation is run via PCG graphs. Doing it this way gives us smaller cells toward the centre of the settlement and larger ones toward the periphery mirroring land use density. 

In future, I'll be developing features like further segmenting the "blocks" into individual buildings, 3D terrain/geography, roads, and a material system that mimics local building materials to tie them to their local environment and give distinct looks. Integrating this into a game would be valuable to inform its design and to test its effectiveness over playthroughs, also utilizing emergent storytelling would be important for supporting any kind of narrative.

CONTROLS-
"c" for "map" view
"v" for pure voronoi view
"x" to show voronoi borders
"2" to switch to the fly by camera