How to interpret OpenSimplexNoise to get better road patterns

MirceaKitsune

I decided to start working on a procedural city generator, with the goal to allow drawing both roads and buildings to create your own interactive city in high detail. It uses 3D tiles in 2D space, painted in a similar fashion to image tiles in RPG games. Obviously OpenSimplexNoise is used for the generator to paint the roads. The results are looking promising so far!

There's one thing I wanted to ask, not about a particular issue this time but looking for suggestions on improvement. As you can see the pattern isn't really fit for roads, understandably so as I'm using the noise directly which generates splotches. How would you suggest I process this noise in GDScript to make it generate slightly more square patterns that are better fitted for roads? Let me know of any tricks that come to mind! I only care to get a predictable result when using the same seed so later it can be saved and reused. At the moment noise is simply used as:

var noise = OpenSimplexNoise.new()
noise.seed = randi()
noise.octaves = 0
noise.lacunarity = 0
noise.period = 16
noise.persistence = 0.5
var tile_type = noise.get_noise_3dv(tile_pos)

Erich_L

You can take the absolute value of the noise which will create winding lines used for rivers or ridges with terrain. You could use the same technique to make roads but... if straight it what you're looking for I wouldn't use noise. In fact for a city I can't think of any reason to use simplex noise unless it's indirectly used. For terrain an indirect use might be using one layer of noise for precipitation and one for temperature. For a city one layer could define wealth and another.. vegetation or something. You could try using voronoi noise to make more square shapes, especially if you fidget with how the feature points are placed in each cell; having them restricted in the center of each cell, for example, would make more of a grid.