OT: Making a Game System (part 4: A Game World)

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

ok great. what about the ubiquitous peasant village: did such things exist? what about farmsteads; were there isolated farm houses, or did people always cluster into villages? by the 1500-1700 were there things like bandits and raiders that would threaten villages and individual farmsteads?

It may depend on the country/region, but there were many isolated farms in France. In certain places, farms were fortified. Whether fortified or not, they often had outer walls with several buildings inside, like a barn, housing, stables... Not many walls inside. Often barns have only 3 walls.
Not all villages were fortified either. Bandits would rather attack people on the roads.

lastly, for layout, were these things just clusterflucks? A recursive splitting algorithm (split space into two sub-dungeons, then likewise split sub-dungeons, then split sub-sub-dungeons, so on recursively until no split is larger than some set minimum on any one dimension) tends to make decent looking dungeons, and even halfway sensible city/village layouts, but they will be no means be a grid. Is this probably realistic for villages and maybe a sector of town, and then maybe some parts of towns start with a grid and randomly merge some cells?

I'm not sure what you mean. A medieval town would not look like a grid at all but like a mess of streets. You usually had one main street and a few others which branched out of that. Few meaning sometimes two. Bigger villages or towns would get one market square and several roads leading to it, and then a lot of houses crammed around that. Cities with walls would be similar but since houses had to be built inside the walls, they'd be very crowded. Look at these for instance (in French, but the pictures are the important point):
http://www.yvoiretourism.com/chapitre7_fr_10.html
http://www.saint-denis.culture.fr/fr/1_4a_plan.htm
http://www.vence.fr/Vence-Ville-medievale-du-12e.html
You can also google-map some old villages, like Jouarre in France 70km east of Paris. It's probably not changed much in 5 centuries (it's got a merovingian crypt, so it's at least 1000 years old).