BIAS - A Unity Asset for Procedurally Generating Cities

Abstract

Procedural content generation, or PCG, is a method of algorithmically generating, for instance, video game content with a limited amount of user input. The purpose of this project is to explore how PCG may be used in game development to make the process of creating game assets less time consuming. To achieve this, a study of existing algorithms, such as rewriting systems and noise functions, is presented. These algorithms have been adapted to generate cities consisting of terrain, road networks, as well as buildings. The result is a tool called BIAS, Built in a Second, built on the game development platform Unity, which can be used to generate graphical representations of three-dimensional cities. Additionally, BIAS is designed to provide game developers with a degree of control of the generation. The tool consists of a user interface that can be used by developers to manipulate several aspects of the procedural generation. The resulting tool shows that it is possible to use PCG to generate cities, but it is far from perfect; a lot can be improved and added to make the tool better.