How do I do random isometric paths?

Question

I'm working on an Isometric city generator, and I am looking for a little push in the right direction. I'm looking to randomly generate roads on a isometric plane. I have never done pathfinding before, and I've googled it and didn't find any articles relating to what I am trying to do.

Basically, my program generates a random isometric city and, I am hoping to add roads to that.

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

The "isometric plane" is just the normal 2D plane, and every algorithm which procedurally generates roads on a 2D grid will do.

There's a nice overview of possible methods available online; just quoting relevant parts of the reference list off "A Survey of Procedural Techniques for City Generation" (2006) by George Kelly and Hugh McCabe (Google it if you want the full text) as an example:

• Yoav I H Parish, Pascal Mueller; 2001. "Procedural Modeling of Cities"
• Jing Sun and Xiaobo Yu and George Baciu and Mark Green; 2002. "Template-based generation of road networks for virtual city modeling"
• Thomas Lechner, Ben Watson, Uri Wilensky, Martin Felsen; 2003. "Procedural City Modeling"
• Greuter S., Parker J., Stewart N., and Leach G.; 2003. "Real-time procedural generation of `pseudo infinite' cities"

Answer 2

Algorithms may differ depending on what culture you want represent. Mexicans and Americans build cities in a grid, that is parallel and perpendicular streets and avenues. This is the simplest to program, because you just need to make a vertical street every let's say 10 tiles, and horizontal avenue also every 10 tiles. Some cities make road structure harder to implement, e.g. with crossroads looking like stars *, and some consist of nearly random process of historical evolution of the city.