Procedural Hospitals

The next types of procedural buildings on my list after malls, factories, and warehouses are hospitals and schools. I've been working on both of these together, but hospitals were started first and are further along than schools. I'll discuss hospitals in this post and probably get to schools in the next one.

Hospital Exteriors 

My very first addition to hospitals for this round was to add illuminated red crosses to either side of the lit signs on top of city hospital buildings. These use the existing text rendering system with a single "+" character. This is a good start, though it's a minor change that only works in cities and is only really visible at night time.

Night time hospital with emissive green name sign and red crosses to the sides.

Hospital Interiors

The next step was to add ambulances to hospital parking garages. Technically, this isn't the next task I worked on, but it was one of the earlier additions that was completed by the time I started writing this post. Ambulances don't normally fit inside parking garages because they're too tall and may intersect the pipes that run along the ceiling. I had to cheat and shrink them by 20% (compared to ambulances found above ground) so that they fit. It's not too obvious that this shrink was applied. I wonder if I can get away with using this same approach to squeeze a school bus into a school parking garage? Probably not!

Hospital underground parking garage with some slightly smaller than normal ambulances.

With those two minor changes out of the way, it was time to work on hospital interiors. Non-city hospitals are only assigned to larger cube-based buildings where the ground floor part is large enough to add primary and secondary hallways. This allows the existing secondary and ring hallway floorplan templates to be used, with various rooms placed along the hallways. The resulting rooms have relatively consistent sizes that work well for hospital room types.

The only major difference to the hallways themselves is the addition of a reception desk at one end of the primary hallway on each floor, rather than at both ends of the hallway on the ground floor only. These can serve as nurse desks or similar. All of the normal hallway items still apply: water fountains, fire extinguishers, clocks, and US flags.

The major difference between hospitals and office buildings is the assignment of room types. While hospitals can have some office rooms, the majority of rooms are related to hospital services. So far I've added recovery rooms for one or multiple patients, exam rooms, waiting rooms, operating rooms, and classrooms. Each of these contains a different set of placed object types with some amount of overlap.

Patient Rooms

Most rooms along the building exterior that have windows and a single door are reserved for patients. These have one or more hospital beds selected from one of three new 3D models, which are randomly selected per hospital part. The number of beds is a function of room size to best utilize the available space. Rooms that have multiple beds along a single wall have curtains separating the beds. TVs are placed on the walls opposite beds where there's space, and if their line of sight isn't blocked. I also added a variety of other items to hospital rooms including tables with flowers and telephones on them, chairs, couches, potted plants, and the new wheelchair 3D model. Chairs come in several existing varieties: wooden house chairs, plastic office chairs, and occasional rocking chairs. At this time the beds are all empty because I don't have any models of people with a lying down animation.

Here are some example hospital rooms. I've enabled indirect lighting in all screenshots, so they're quite bright inside.

Hospital patient room with three beds separated by curtains, a table, couch, chairs, and wheelchair.

 

Another hospital room with beds, curtains, table with plant, and rocking chair.

Hospital room with a different style of bed, couch, and TVs on the wall.

Very bright hospital room that's long and thin with a third bed type.

Just for fun, I made hospital beds slightly under the max player carry limit. This means that you can pick one up if your inventory is otherwise empty, but you'll be at max carry capacity and extra slow. It makes more sense to move the beds around by pushing and pulling if they get in the way. Their wheels make them movable by the player.

If the room is large enough, it also includes a private bathroom in the corner to one side of the entrance door. Once again I've reused the nested sub-room system from factories and warehouses. The bathroom has a separate light, toilet, sink, and mirror. The placement system ensures both the main room door and the bathroom door are not blocked by anything. Bathrooms are added at the floorplanning step since they require adding walls, which means that patient rooms are selected before the main room assignment pass. This complicates later placement steps as it requires shuffling room types around if stairs are added later or a bed can't be fit in the room.

Hospital patient room private bathroom, added as a nested sub-room in the corner by the door.

Waiting Rooms 

Waiting rooms were the next to be added, since they contain mostly existing objects. The interior walls of the room are lined with rows of chairs and one or two couches. If the room is large enough, an additional one or two rows of chairs are placed against a short wall in the center. I also put a TV on the wall, and either a bookcase with reading books or a vending machine in a corner of the room. Finally, I added either a digital or analog clock on the wall that dynamically updates to show the true time.

Vending machines are a new type of interactive object. These have been placed in office building and hotel lounges and lobbies as well. There are two types of vending machines with different exterior textures, one serving bottled drinks and the other serving snacks such as chips and candy bars. I got the textures, stats, and item lists for both of these from online vending machine ads. I was surprised at the typical cost: $8000 for refrigerated vending machines and $6000 for non-refrigerated ones! Of course the player could steal these for that value, if only they weren't several times over the player carrying capacity.

Vending machines are interactive. They have a fixed number of random items (0-9) that can be purchased for $2 each. Where does the player get $2 from? You have to steal it from somewhere else in the building. Drink vending machines give random drink consumables that have various effects on the player: water, Coke, beer, and wine. Yes, $2 alcohol from vending machines! In hospitals! The first two drinks heal the player and the second two make the player drunk. And if the player doesn't need a heal, that's $2 wasted. Being slightly drunk is a good thing because it increases damage resistance, but being too drunk causes visual artifacts and can eventually kill the player. Snack machines produce a variety of items that heal a small amount of health. I don't know how practical these vending machines are, but they were a lot of fun to add.

I also changed the set of random items the player can loot by breaking into parked cars so that some of them have effects such as healing. Maybe it's too easy to get healed now? Most of my time playing I'm either at full health or dead though, so it may not matter all that much.

Waiting rooms are more commonly placed on ground floors, but can appear at any floor. Rooms that would normally be assigned to patient rooms are re-assigned to waiting rooms if stairs or elevators are added to them later during the "connect" step. However, these rooms may already have nested bathrooms. That works out fine though because these can be repurposed as waiting room bathrooms. Or maybe they're intended for sample collection for lab work? I do need to check for bathroom intersections when placing other room objects.

Here are some waiting rooms that I've come across in the hospital closest to the starting area. 

Hospital waiting room with gray chairs and couch, a TV on the wall, and a bookcase in the corner by the elevator cutout. (The elevator opens to the hallway outside the room.)

Another waiting room with a drink vending machine and stairs going up on the right side. This one has a private bathroom as well.

A very small waiting room with a single couch, at the top of the stairs shown in the previous screenshot. This one has a snack vending machine and an analog clock.

Exam Rooms 

Exam rooms were next. I felt like I already had enough hospital bed 3D models, so I used a random existing bed model rather than adding yet another exam bed model. I placed a doctor's desk with computer, monitor, and phone in the room. Then I added an optional computer monitor on the wall, an optional first aid kit, an optional wheelchair, a filing cabinet, a chair, and a stool. I added either a simple sink or full bathroom vanity with doors/drawers full of items.

Hospital exam room that's probably too large, with bed, desk, sink (behind the bed), wall monitor, first aid kit, and filing cabinet.

 

Ah, that's right, vanities are new as well. I started by adding these to house bathrooms. They're basically the same as kitchen cabinets + sinks, except they're white rather than brown wood and contain a different set of items. They also have mirrors that open, similar to bathroom medicine cabinets. At the moment exam room vanities have the same items found in house bathroom vanities. That will likely change later.

Vanity model used as a hospital exam room sink and cabinet. Those are definitely not cans of beer inside the open door.

All right, I changed them to contain bottles of medicine rather than other types of cans and bottles. But I'm not going to capture a new screenshot for this post.

Hospitals sure contain a lot of medicine bottles. Right now medicine fully heals the player, including the effects of snake and spider venom. Maybe I should add different types of medicines that have different effects? Some of them can be bad for the player, just to make things interesting. Or I can add a time limit to prevent players from using medicine too frequently. Maybe there's a message "can't take more than one dose of medicine in the same minute" or a negative effect on the player.

I feel like I should add some other equipment such as a blood pressure cuff. The problem is that I don't want to fill hospitals with a large number of unique models as that hurts both load time and framerate. A second problem is that these rooms are too large for exam rooms. This particular hospital with secondary hallways has a main floorplan where all the rooms are the same relatively large size, so I can't do much about the wasted space. Ring hallways have a greater variety of room sizes that produce more interesting room layouts.

Operating Rooms 

Operating rooms were added last, mostly because I had a hard time deciding what to add to them. I started with a hospital bed 3D model (again), but eventually replaced it with an operating table. I changed the ceiling lights to be round, larger, and brighter. I added the 3D model of what is apparently called a "trolley" - the metal wheeled cart that holds the operating instruments. I added one or two machines along the walls or in the corner of the room. These are the same machines I previously added to extended basements and factories. They seem to fit with the strange equipment likely to be seen in operating rooms. I also attempted to place a metal chemical/gas tank along the wall, using the same tank object as factories. I placed a clock on one of the walls. Finally, I added another optional wheelchair. It's a nice looking model, so it may as well go into every hospital room type.

Operating room with large and very bright lights, an operating table, some machines, a trolley, and a wheelchair.

 

Another operating room. This one is larger and has a chemical tank along the far wall.

 

There's a good chance that I'll go back to improve operating rooms in the future. I think there's a lot of potential, especially if I can work them into the gameplay somehow. Maybe the player can strap zombies onto operating tables? Maybe the player can use a scalpel as a weapon?

Classrooms 

Finally, there are classrooms. I actually copied these from schools, so I won't show classrooms until the procedural schools post. I suppose these are for training of student doctors, health related classes for the public, and that sort of thing.

Hospitals occasionally contain conference rooms that are assigned during the floorplan stage. These are left over from the office building logic and seem okay to allow. And of course there are standard bathrooms with stalls. Whatever rooms remain that are too small to fit beds, etc. can be made into offices, storage, or utility rooms.