It seems there is an awfully large amount of meth and crack roaming around for there to be not a single drug lab, There should be drug labs with either basements or a certain room that has maybe 2 or 3 tables several tools and an assortment of ingredients, tubing, beakers, baking soda, so on so forth. There are already pot farms and such in basements, so this seemed to me like i’d eventually find a drug lab but i still have not found one and still haven’t heard of them anywhere so i assume they don’t exist yet.
I know there is plenty more higher priorities and such, I’m just putting the suggestion here so maybe eventually someone will implement it. Also it would be nice if its not already implemented to be able to make meth and crack with certain ingredients, EX: Crack… Cocaine, boiling water and baking soda… at least i think that’s how they make them into rocks… not some sort of expert or anything. I haven’t messed much with chemistry in game so i’m not sure if its doable.
Perhaps its not the case were you live, but were I do, abandoned buildings that have fallen victims to urban decay tend to be hubs of criminal activity.
Never have i heard of such a thing and i grew up in what is considered to be a “meth capital” in this area, totally urban and full of abandoned buildings, while yes abandoned houses were common to find this and even on the occasional warehouse, but a storefront next to a road around several other active stores… No that’s absolutely unheard of. Here atleast. Though i have heard of hundreds of meth labs being found in actual homes, mostly trailor parks and crappy little apartments.
Nah I live in Guatemala, that small country beneath Mexico. And abandoned stores (and not abandoned ones!) in the center of the city are known to occasionally hold lots of nasty stuff inside them.
That said, I have wanted to do a warehouse building for a while, I think ill move the meth lab to it once I get to it, the problem would remain with the point that you’ll have a meth lab in the middle of an otherwise completely normal neighborhood. Not much you can do about that without reworking a nice chunk of city generation code I fear.
So what would you want for that, would you want neighborhoods identified as slums somehow, and they get “disreputable” buildings in them? I agree it sounds like a total mapgen overhaul to make it happen, but if we’re going to do it, need to start investigating how it’ll work sometime.
FYI, roughly how town generation happens right now is it picks a point on the map, and grows branching networks of roads in the cardinal directions from that point, it goes 3-6 squares or so before generating a side road, which in turn uses the same algorithm recursively to make side branches, so to follow just a few iterations of one branch:
S = start, | = vertical road, - = horizontal road, B = building
S
|
S
|
B|B
S
|
B|B
B|B
S
B|B
-|B
B|B
B|B
S
BB|B
--|B
BB|B
B|B
S
BBB|B
---|B
BBB|B
B|B
S
Which buildings get placed are a function of distance along this branching path from the town center, businesses cluster toward the center and houses spawn on the outskirts. While using this structure, we could easily have subtrees be marked as having different properties, but I’m not sure if that would be at all sensical.
I think that the sub tree approach in combination with a weighted list that allowed for different ones to decay into each other would be the best. As I think that it would allow for a more realistic and organized city generation to take place.
As an example, you could start with a 12 tile long high-rise commercial boulevard that is to be populated with tall office buildings of whatever kind. Then the roads that branched from that boulevard could either “decay” into roads with high rise apartment buildings with a moderate chance, keep being roads high rise buildings with a small chance, become a civic center with small chance or a big chance to become roads with shopping centers and hotels. Each of those possible road options could in turn decay into several different types of roads themselves, so at the end you would have a city with tall buildings at the center, an area with high concentration of factories and warehouses somewhere near the outskirts, and a suburb zone in the outskirts that is separate from the a industrial area with hopefully smooth transitions between them.
Ultimately, I am probably over estimating the abilities a sub tree system would have but something that could work like the paragraph above would be what I would like. But on the other hand the generation we have now works perfectly for small and mid sized towns and my suggestion over complicates things unless we are talking about generating Boston or something similar
That’s precisely it, I want big cities
If need be I’m perfectly happy having multiple different town generators to get different effects, for example it’s really common in large cities to have a strict grid, but smaller towns tend to be laid out more haphazardly.
Hmmmm, I personally would just like to see some houses to generate a meth lab basement or bedroom. But if we were to base it of slums and such which is a brilliant idea though requires a lot more work.
Maybe make something similar to a farm or FEMA camp covering multiple spaces but make it a trailer park, this could be added into cities and medium sized towns but make it so you wouldn’t have to rewrite the whole map generation, These would work as slums or impoverish neighborhoods. IF you really wanna rewrite the whole map generation for this i suppose that’s fine too if it sets for more options non drug house related but i didn’t want to suggest a whole rewrite as i know that is beyond a pain in the neck. =)
It’s tricky, the “just stick a trailer park in” isn’t all that much simpler, not if you care about where it shows up.
This is more “mapgen needs an overhaul, where should we go with it when it happens” rather than “we need to overhaul mapgen so we can add meth labs”.
Also I agree houses with meth labs would also be good, but I’ve heard of them appearing in abandoned storefronts too.
It would be cool if there were underground drug dens branching off of old subway/sewer lines. It would add some interesting things to underground areas, while still remaining semi-plausible.
vcache’s idea sounds really cool, as it would be a good way to add all sorts of odd activity to a city seperate from the (main, I’m not sure how it might be connected) city generation code. I can see underground accesses to caves, smuggling and drug dens, perhaps secluded last-ditch-effort escape points where people evacuated to, etc.
Vache does have a point, the subways are rather boring aside from the monsters. Meth labs would spice things up a bit. Maybe add hobo camps, crashed trains, whatever would fit in such a setting.
