I suppose you could try to determine some "feature bits" for town construction by sampling the terrain in a radius around the site. If sufficient samples are water you get a water-feature bit, if there's sufficient elevation differences you might get a hill/mountain feature bit. However I can't really think of any more useful features to test for, since many landscape features would be hard to detect (lake vs. coast vs. fjord), many aren't well modeled by the game (like natural resources), and some (like industries) are dependent on the town already existing.

I see, thanks for the insight. I just thought it would be kind of a fun feature to try and implement. Maybe I'll put a PR together this weekend.

We could also use the water distance to infer things like, "okay, never put Paris on a coast, because in real life it's not on a coast". Maybe that's a bit much though.. since if you're interested in realism like that you can just use a custom France heightmap or something.

The obvious features I could think of:

• near coast (any climate)
• in desert (sub-tropic)
• in rainforest (sub-tropic)
• above snowline (sub-arctic)
• above height level x (any climate)

Not sure enough town names sets would take advantage of it to be worthwhile, but it's a nice idea :)

I imagine having two bit-fields per name (part), a mask and a value. The location bits calculated for the new town site would be AND-masked by the mask, then compared to the value. If equal, the name (part) is a candidate. This will allow specifying locations where the name would be valid and locations where it would never be valid, and locations that would be required for it.

Pseudocode:

uint site_location_bits = GetLocationBits(tile);
vector<TownName> candidates;
for (var name : all_town_names) {
    if (name.location_bits == (site_location_bits & name.location_mask)) {
        candidates.push_back(name);
    }
}
string town_name = SelectTownName(candidates);

Just came across this - I suggest looking at the Wesnoth placename generator a) for inspiration as to the types of features you could base naming on and b) because Wesnoth also names [some of] the features. You can have a River Tal, and then a Talford, and a Talmouth. Rivers, Hills, Valleys, Peaks, Fords, Bridges, Castles, Marshes, Moors, Deserts, Woods, Plains, Lakes, Seas, Bays, Harbours, Springs etc. Seeing how the placename generation is hooked in to the terrain generator may also be of use.

And you don't need many towns to take advantage for it to become a worthwhile addition, because even if only a few do, the fact that some do still adds verisimilitude to the map as a whole.

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