Real-time procedural generation of `pseudo infinite' cities

Link to ACM digital library.

Authors of this paper (Stefan Greuter et al.) present a way of creating "cities that would take a life-time to explore."

Their approach is based on generating a site or a grid to which the buildings are placed. Every cell receives a randomly generated integer. This value is later used during the building rendering as a seed to a pseudo random number generator. So two buildings with same initial seed will look exactly the same. This fact can be used for tweaking performance. The building can be removed from memory when out of sight and then rebuilt again.

For these performance issues they render only buildings that are in 120° cone in front of the camera.

In my project, I'd rather avoid creating an infinite city. I'd like to incorporate some suburban and industrial areas as well, which can hardly be found "in the middle of a city". While in an infinite city you're always in the middle.

I think that the PRNG idea could be useful.