City Planning: Any Tools Available?

[-Cor-]

I'm just wondering if anyone had a good link to any tools for city building. Not so much the people or the factions in a city (I have Box of Flumph, etc...), but actual graphical tools for designing the layout of a city/town/metropolis/thorp/what-have-you.

I've been trying in Photoshop, and on paper, and (g-ds help me) even in MS Paint, but I just can't get things to work out quite right as I'm not very good at translating mental images into graphic ones.

Thanks.

[psychoticbarber]

I've shopped around, but because I'm too poor to buy any of the programs specifically designed for it (and from what I understand, they're not actually very good programs), I've decided to do mine by hand. It'll be quite a job, my campaign city has 30,000+ residents.

Basically the point of this is to say that if you want well-done city maps, you kind of have to do them yourself.

Edit:

I've been trying in Photoshop, and on paper, and (g-ds help me) even in MS Paint

Whoops, sorry, missed that. Drawing maps by hand takes practice. I've been doing it for a couple years now, and my maps are just starting to look okay.

[Lord Tataraus]

The Campaign Cartographer 3 package has a city builder in it and there is a stand alone one to. Of course both are expensive and even though they are amazing, I'm not willing to shell out for something like that. I just use Gimp to draw out my cities as a bunch of districts. I like to draw something up by hand and scan it in, patch it up with Gimp and I'm good.

[sikyon]

Simcity with mods spring to mind. Heck, if you pretend that various buildings are other kind of buildings (police house -> sheffif's house) or something like that, you might even save on actually needing to build it. If not, you can still zone commercial, residetial and industrial.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Just search for maps of London and Paris from the 17th century. Then modify them as needed. Not too hard, and you have information on-hand for the time your PC's go somewhere you didn't anticipate.

[Glawackus]

I haven't actually read this, but I always tend to find good stuff on S John Ross's site, and he has an article on Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

I could swear I saw a spreadsheet somewhere that would let you plan out cities right down to the number of honey wagons running the streets (), but I can't seem to find it.

[edit] Computer is not cooperating with the "link" button. Article is here:
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

[-Cor-]

Thanks for the responses. :)

Looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy a specific editor for this kind of thing.

[Mr.Moron]

Thanks for the responses. :)

Looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy a specific editor for this kind of thing.

There are several free map editors(AutoREALM etc...), though they don't specifically have city-builder tools. However, if you're willing to deal with interfaces that are bit clunky, you could probably make something serviceable with them. It's probably not as good an option as a professional program, but the price is right.

[Prometheus]

Google Sketchup will do the job wonderfully. It frees, it works nice in 2D or 3D, it can be a s simple or as detailed as you want. The art is specficially designed for things like architecture. You can specify exact points rather than freehand, if you want it to be to scale.

I tried to post last night but the forum shut down

[-Cor-]

Wow... thanks Prometheus. I'm downloading it now. :)