I was reading a really fascinating article over at Digital Urban about creating a Procedural Cityscape, and an idea occurred to me. A Procedural Cityscape means, in essence, that the computer is provided with a logic framework - a set of rules - and then sets about designing an often Manhattan-like view of a city, gradually filling in greater and greater levels of fine detail. If my understanding is correct, there is a bit of a random element to how the city comes together, in order to create that natural lack of uniformity that makes it seem all the more "real."

Now step with me for a moment back over to machinima land. I've been working on a project called MScoper, a third-party tool being made to operate as a companion to Moviestorm. MScoper will provide a pleasant user interface for conducting some otherwise fairly complicated manipulation of the XML data that holds together a Moviestorm movie, allowing for some advanced functionality that is very likely too niche or too specialty in nature to work its way into the primary program any time soon (if ever). I won't get into specifics of those functions just yet, but they primarily revolve around the ideas of replication of paths, keyframes, etc. between scenes or between movies.

The more I've studied this XML underbelly of Moviestorm, the more ideas seem to surface. This procedural city thing got me thinking.

Moviestorm already has a really nifty modular building system one can employ within the program. It pretty much has all the textures and basic street decorations (including lighting) in the Town Buildings and Street Dressing content packs that one would need to create a basic machinima cityscape. Understand, it's not going to look like New York City unless you really get busy with some modding of textures, but it's a city no less. Get really ambitious and you start thinking about the keyframed move-on-a-path cars which are available in the General Cars addon. (Get all three packs together in the Streets Bundle, if you like.)

All these parts and pieces have measurable dimensions. The actual building parts lock together like Legos. So theoretically, if one studied these things and developed from them a logical framework of how things can fit together, one could conceivably construct a random-yet-logical cityscape generator that would fill the gridspace of a blank Moviestorm set and save an incredible amount of construction time versus placing all those objects one at a time manually. It's theoretical because it hasn't yet been tried, but it is wholly within the scope of the kind of info that could be inserted into the XML hierarchy and work within Moviestorm.

Interesting to think about, no? What other possibilities lurk in the shadows of the platforms like Moviestorm and iClone that open some of their architecture to us via XML?