Build buildings with a generally rectangular floow plan.

Motivations

Right, the idea behind this namespace is many fold.

1. To establish the broad principle of genetic buildings, by creating a function which reproducibly creates reproducible buildings at specified locations, such that different buildings are credibly varied but a building at a specified location is always (modulo economic change) the same.
2. Create good rectangular buildings, and investigate whether a single function can be used to create buildings of more than one family (e.g. can it produce flat roofed, north African style, mud brick houses as well as pitch roofed, half timbered northern European houses?)
3. Establish whether, in my current state of fairly severe mental illness, I can actually produce any usable code at all.

Key factors in the creation of a building

Holding

Every building is on a holding, and, indeed, what I mean by ‘building’ here may well turn out to be ’the collection of all the permanent structures on a holding. A holding is a polygonal area of the map which does not intersect with any other holding, but for the time being we’ll make the simplifying assumption that every holding is a rectangular strip, and that ‘urban’ holdings are of a reasonably standard width (see Viking-period York) and length. Rural holdings (farms, ?wood lots) may be much larger.

Terrain

A building is made of the stuff of the place. In a forest, buildings will tend to be wooden; in a terrain with rocky outcrops – normally found on steep slopes – stone. On the flat lands where there’s river mud, of brick, cob, or wattle and daub. So to build a building we need to know the terrain. Terrain can be inferred from location but in practice this will be computationally expensive, so we’ll pass terrain in as an argument to the build function.

For the time being we’ll pass it in simply as a keyword from a defined set of keywords; later it may be a more sophisticated data structure.

Culture

People of different cultures build distinctively different buildings, even when using the same materials. So, in our world, a Japanese wooden house looks quite different from an Anglo Saxon stave house which looks quite different from a Canadian log cabin, even though the materials are much the same and the tools available to build with are not much different.

Culture can affect not just the overall shape of a building but also its finish and surface detail. For example, in many places in England, stone buildings are typically left bare; in rural Scotland, typically painted white or in pastel shades; in Ireland, often quite vivid colours.

People may also show religious or cultural symbols on their buildings.

For all these reasons, we need to know the culture of the occupant when creating a building. Again, this will initially be passed in as a keyword.

Craft

People in the game world have a craft, and some crafts will require different features in the building. In the broadly late-bronze-age-to medieval period within which the game is set, residence and workplace are for most people pretty much the same.

So a baker needs an oven, a smith a forge, and so on. All crafts who do some degree retail trade will want a shop front as part of the ground floor of their dwelling. Merchants and bankers will probably have houses that are a bit more showy than others.

Whether the ‘genetic buildings’ idea will ever really produce suitable buildings for aristons I don’t know; it seems more likely that significant strongholds (of which there will be relatively few) should all be hand modelled rather than procedurally generated.