> So, in V3.0 I plan to change this. Instead of using a scatter-gun
> approach to placement and a mask, random building location will be
> read directly from the mask, defined by a single pixel.  The color
> (actually blue value from 0-255) will define the size of building
> (small medium, large), and the red channel the rotation.

> So instead of a material designer blocking out a large area for random
> buildings to be placed within, they will define the specific location
> for each random building.

Which would in fact not make them random buildings at all :-)

May I propose to think about something more ambitious? One thing which bugs me 
is that we have now well-working de-tiling strategies for terrain, but not 
really for city textures and agriculture. Forest is effectively de-tiled by 
placing sufficiently many random trees on top - but we still get huge tiling 
artefacts for large city areas or fields.

Deterministic 'random' building on top of that will make the tiling problem 
worse, because you get repeating patterns now in both texture and objects on 
top, which wasn't the case with the scattergun.

I think one could at least partially solve this by subdividing the terrain into 
individual coordinate cells and give each city texture inside the cell a random 
orientation of the texture. The template would be the sparse dot noise function 
introduced in terrain-haze-ultra.frag , but instead of creating the dot 
position and radius randomly, the routine would just create a rotation angle 
randomly. I believe this would improve city and agriculture, but for this to 
really work, the 'random' buildings and trees would have to be shifted by the 
same function - probaby at placement time.

Would it be technically hard to design the system in such a way that this could 
be introduced? I don't have a function ready yet, but it's something I wanted 
to give a try at some point with running a distinct shader for 'random' and 
'civilized' terrain which needs different types of overlay.

* Thorsten
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