For roleplaying purposes, I’d like to create a city map of a made-up city, and am looking for recommendations for software to do this - ideally open source, but I’m also willing to pay if it’s reasonably affordable for a private user. I’ve heard of, and tried, Inkarnate, but the maps it produces have a very fantasy-looking feel to them, whereas I’d prefer something in the style of a standard present-day city map. Probably software that is used to generate actual city maps would be best. Does anybody have recommendations for this?
This one looks pretty good for a modern city:
This one a bit more medieval:
An improving one for modern City generation:
Most of the City Generators I know are Fantasy RPG oriented.
@enipla does this for real for real cities. He might happen to know of some relevant fake city generation software, or know somebody who does.
Thanks for the nod, but I don’t know of any fake city generating software. It would be interesting for testing perhaps, but you get into a whole mess of other stuff like attribute mapping, proper projection and stuff like that. Not worth it. If we need to test, we make a copy of the real deal.
I can poke around though. Sounds kinda interesting.
Do you need data? Or just an image. The one What_Exit linked too looks pretty cool. But I think image only. But I have not dug into it.
If you do not need something realistic, there are ready-to-run programs on Github, e.g.
https://josauder.github.io/procedural_city_generation/
Just specify the growth rule and population density and it generates a “road map”.
Just an image. But I’d like to be able to customize at least the basic outline of the city (coastlines etc.) rather than using something entirely random generated. Perfect accuracy in terms of map projection is not necessary, superficial plausibility would suffice.
Inkarte looks like it can do that but it’s Medieval/Fantasy-themed.
Well, what about using an existing city, bring it up on their GIS (usually found in the County GIS) turn on the layers you want and do a cut and paste?