CDDA has clear urban areas. Any town with more than 4 buildings (which is a hamlet at a crossroad) should receive a name from the game’s list of city/world names, while being careful no two identical names are used in the same game. This could have future applications, such as missions:
- Scavenge all the military surplus stores in Zombieville. Bring at least 90% of the items back. (Unvisited surplus stores only; list of target items is created when the store enters reality bubble)
- Find the basement in Monsterfield that contains weapons. (the city must have at least one unexplored basement; if even that turns out not to be a gun basement, either wipe the mission or change mission and assign another city)
- Destroy at least two spider infested basements in Humbugtown.
- Kill at least 50% of the monsters in Infeston (or 200, whichever is lower).
- Locate and evacuate (recruit) 3 survivors in Ditchriver.
- Place 6 turrets in 6 different street junctions in Blowuppington.
- Burn a building in northeast corner of Drywood to distract the zombies. (50% of the building’s tiles must be burning or rubble)
- Explore and map out 90% of the sewer network of Lake Stink.
- Locate the gunsmith building (gun factory?) in Powderhead and investigate its interior. (the player has to step inside to fulfill the mission)
- Photograph the interiors of hospitals, pharmacies and doctor’s offices in Nursecouver
Other potential applications:
- Full maps of cities, revealed by lootable maps
If city/locale names become reality, also include a map overlay filter or some other method to see where the city borders exactly go.
What counts as a “city”? The logic could be that each building on the overmap recives a 1-tile wide radius. If the radii of two buildings touch or overlap they are considered to belong to the same area. The radius could also be 2 tiles. Or even 3. If a building’s radius doesn’t touch another building’s radius on the overmap, then that building should be considered an isolated or rural building, not belonging to any city.
A city could have a max area size or a max number of buildings belonging to it, just to prevent infinite size. A world that’s been basically set to 100% urban area there wouldn’t be “cities” but boroughs or precincts. Two cities become two boroughs when their borders touch. We could also even have multiple overlays, and separate the civic boroughs, police precincts, fire department precincts… hospitals could have their own jurisdictions. So there would be separate overlays for each institution. Even individual hospitals or restaurants (or whatever) could have generated names. “The St. Anger Hospital of Metalville”.