Procedural... house with rooms generator
- by pek
I've been looking at some algorithms and articles about procedurally generating a dungeon. The problem is, I'm trying to generate a house with rooms, and they don't seem to fit my requirements.
For one, dungeons have corridors, where houses have halls. And while initially they might seem the same, a hall is nothing more than the area that isn't a room, whereas a corridor is specifically designed to connect one area to another.
Another important difference with a house is that you have a specific width and height, and you have to fill the entire thing with rooms and halls, whereas with a dungeon, there is empty space.
I think halls in a house is something in between a dungeon corridor (gets you to other rooms) and an empty space in the dungeon (it's not explicitly defined in code).
More specifically, the requirements are:
There is a set of predefined rooms
I cannot create walls and doors on the fly.
Rooms can be rotated but not resized
Again, because I have a predefined set of rooms, I can only rotate them, not resize them.
The house dimensions are set and has to be entirely filled with rooms (or halls)
I.e. I want to fill a 14x20 house with the available rooms making sure there is no empty space.
Here are some images to make this a little more clear:
As you can see, in the house, the "empty space" is still walkable and it gets you from one room to another.
So, having said all this, maybe a house is just a really really tightly packed dungeon with corridors. Or it's something easier than a dungeon. Maybe there is something out there and I haven't found it because I don't really know what to search for.
This is where I'd like your help: could you give me pointers on how to design this algorithm? Any thoughts on what steps it will take? If you have created a dungeon generator, how would you modify it to fit my requirements? You can be as specific or as generic as you like. I'm looking to pick your brains, really.
