Procedural Restaurants

My previous "restaurants" post was a bit misnamed because mall food court fast food stores aren't really restaurants. This time I've added proper restaurants in their own buildings. I decided to start with the house floorplan, since restaurants are smaller than office buildings and there are plenty of houses available to reassign. I limited restaurants to simple single cube houses to keep the logic simple. There are no garages or sheds. I also restricted them to two floor tall buildings with a large horizontal footprint, to provide ample space for the dining area and additional rooms. This produced a reasonable number of restaurants that seems to be around 5% of all secondary city houses. (None of the residential city houses are large enough to be a restaurant.)

The internal floorplan of a restaurant is simple and shared across all buildings of that type. The main dining area occupies around a third of the total space, which is separated by the remaining rooms by a wall that runs the entire length of the building and a series of doors. The other rooms consist of a kitchen, two bathrooms, and an optional storage room for large restaurants. The kitchen takes up about two thirds of that extra space. The actual size distribution depends on the number of windows along the exterior walls as the interior room dividing walls can't end at windows. The storage room can either be connected to the dining area or the kitchen with a door. All doors remain unlocked as there are no items for the player to search to find keys. Restaurants currently have no attic or basement.

The dining area features many small wood tables arrayed in a 2D grid pattern. Most of these tables have four wood chairs. Tables can be either square, rectangular, or round, with optional place mat or table cloth of a variety of textures/patterns. Each table has full place settings for each seat with a plate, cup, and silverware. Some plates have food such as fish on them, while some cups contain coffee. I placed either a custom procedural vase or a candle at the center of each table. The result is very repetitive, but also very orderly. I suppose it makes up for the randomness of the kitchen object placement.

I hung spherical lights from the ceiling in a grid pattern and placed rotating ceiling fans between some of these lights. The perimeter of the dining room is decorated with a variety of objects such as 1-2 wine racks, potted plants, pictures, an optional TV, and an optional fish tank. I placed rugs on the floor by the exterior doors and a podium with chair next to the main entrance for guests to wait at to be seated. The ceiling uses a white panel texture, and the floor uses one of two marble or granite tile textures.

3DWorld's procedural buildings are full of critters: rats, spiders, snakes, roaches, and flies. Restaurants are no different. It's actually quite fun chasing rats as they run between the tables and chairs. 

I've included some pictures of restaurant dining areas below. 

Restaurant with pink walls and square tables with table cloths.

The upper row of windows looks a bit odd, but I have the same layout in factories and two story retail buildings. This is one limitation of the current window logic. It's run on the exterior of buildings before the interior is generated, so it can't easily be customized by building type.

Restaurant with light green walls and round tables with darker wood.

Restaurant with pink walls and square table with red table cloths.

Restaurant with light blue walls and rectangular tables, viewed from above.

 

After taking the screenshots above, I realized that the ceilings look kind of plain. There's not much contrast between the light ceiling tiles and the bright walls. I decided to add wooden beams crossing the ceiling and hang the lights on these. Here is how this looks in the first restaurant. It's definitely an improvement. I like how all of the wood textures and colors match between the tables, chairs, wine racks, and beams.

First restaurant with wooden beams added to the ceiling that the lights hang from, and people.

 

Restaurants have commercial kitchens that use the same object placement logic as kitchens found in malls, prisons, schools, and hospitals. They have the same walk-in freezers, ceiling ducts/vents, and shiny reflective cooking equipment. The only difference is that the logic for placing hoods and some of the other objects is a bit more complex to handle the windows.

Kitchen from the restaurant in the first screenshot. There are snakes, rats, spiders, and roaches in here! (And the plates are metal?)

Restaurant kitchen, looking out through the door into the dining area.

The bathrooms are quite small with a single toilet, a sink, and urinal in the men's room. I placed gender appropriate signs on the outside of the doors. They look very similar to office building single use bathrooms, so I'm not adding screenshots of them. I included the medicine cabinets found in house bathrooms because this is a source of healing items for the player, and there are no other drawers or doors for the player to open in these buildings. The only major difference is that they have tall ceilings.

This post was much shorter than the last one, mostly because I only had one topic compared to three. I feel like I'm done with food related items for now. The next task on the list is car washes, so I guess it's back to working on commercial cities. I won't be surprised if I find more restaurant related changes to make though.