Procedural City Generation

Made with OpenGL, FreeGlut, Glew, SOIL, GLM and shaders.

Showcase

Here's an example of the camera and the rendering with OpenGL.

Controls

Input	Description
'w'	Move forward in the environment
'a'	Move backward in the environment
's'	Move left in the environment
'd'	Move right in the environment
Mouse Move	Look around you with Euler Angles
Mouse Wheel	Zoom in/Zoom out
'r'	Re-generate the building sizes and textures
'o'	Move up in the environment
'p'	Move down in the environment

Here's an example of how the program reacts to a re-generation of the buildings. I store the x, y, z and texture identifier in vectors, so the randomization is just made by clearing them and regenerate random numbers in it. It is draw at each movement by the camera, which makes the random very fluid. :

if (!hasStarted) {
		for (int i = 0; i < nbBuildings * nbBuildings; i++) {
			float randomX = ((2.0f - 0.25f) * ((float)rand() / RAND_MAX)) + 0.25f;
			float randomY = ((4.5f - 0.25f) * ((float)rand() / RAND_MAX)) + 0.25f;
			float randomZ = ((2.25f - 0.75f) * ((float)rand() / RAND_MAX)) + 0.75f;
			float randomTex = rand() % 5;
			_x.push_back(randomX);
			_y.push_back(randomY);
			_z.push_back(randomZ);
			_texture.push_back(randomTex);
		}
		hasStarted = true;
	}

And here's the rendering of the random method ->

Summary

First, what is procedural generation?

From Wikipedia : In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually. In computer graphics, it is also called random generation and is commonly used to create textures and 3D models. In video games, it is used to automatically create large amounts of content in a game. Advantages of procedural generation include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay.

For the purpose of my project, the goal was rather to find a way to generate buildings randomly in a small space.

Initially, it was a task I had received in my computer graphics course. Usually, in these cases, I immerse myself in the Github projects to get inspired by the kind of program structure I will need. However, I did not find anything concrete with the librairies I used.

Users used a lot more GLFW than FreeGlut. The few people who used the same tools as me had programs far too complicated for anything.

So I decided to start from 0 and create a quick and easy way to randomly generate a city with buildings of different size and with different textures, all using shaders.

I did not complicate my life, I created a single VAO to which I was going to apply transformations to avoid going into an overly complex generation structure.

Since there might still be some problems in my implementation, so please feel free to give me any advice!

So here is the result of what I made. I hope you will have fun with it!

Note : You can choose the amount of buildings to generate just by changing the nbBuildings property.

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Prerequisites

Ensure you have following installed:

• Visual Studio Community 2017

Compile and run

As simple as:

1. Open the project in VS.
2. Execute the project.
3. Have fun !

or by debugging the whole program in Visual Studio Entreprise

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My build environment

In case you face difficulty building on your own machine, following is the specifications of my environment which may be helpful for you to spot the difference to yours.

OS

Windows 10 2018

Configuration

CPU -> Intel Core i7 3960X
RAM -> 16Gb DDR3 1600Hz
GPU -> NVIDIA GEFORCE 1080 Founder's edition
STORAGE -> 1To SSD
POWER SUPPLY -> 750W GOLD
MOTHERBOARD -> Aurora R4 ALX System Motherboard 7JNH0 07JNH0

OpenGL

You can find the last version of OpenGL by following this link

FreeGlut

All informations about this library can be found on http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/.

Glew

All informations about this library can be found on http://glew.sourceforge.net/

GLM

All informations about this library can be found on https://glm.g-truc.net/0.9.9/index.html

SOIL

All informations about this library can be found on https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Image_Libraries

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Licence

None for this project, it's for the purpose of a class