Archigen

Archigen is a tiny class library for integrating other procedural generation libraries and programs together. It provides two basic things:

• An IGenerator<T> interface for content-generating classes to implement
• A Generator<T> class for chaining instances of IGenerator<T> together

The library also provides a small set of convenience classes that are useful when nesting generators:

• ConditionalGenerator<T> for filtering the generated output space
• IWeighted<T> and WeightedSelector<T> for weighted-random selection from lists
• RandomSelector<T> for basic random selection

Example: Nesting Generators

Let's say you want to generate random teams of players as described by these classes:

public class Team
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public List<Player> Players { get; set; }
}

public class Player
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Archigen will let you construct a generator for Team and nested Player objects like so:

var g = new Generator<Team>()
        .ForProperty<string>(x => x.TeamName, new NameGenerator())
        .ForListProperty<Player>(x => x.Players, new Generator<Player>()
            .ForProperty<string>(x => x.PlayerName, new NameGenerator()))
        .UsingSize(5);

This generates a new team and the players of the team every time Next() is called:

var team = g.Next(); 

The NameGenerator class used to populate TeamName and PlayerName can be anything that implements the IGenerator<string> interface and has a Next() method that returns a string. If you're looking for an actual name generator to use, see Syllabore which uses Archigen.

Example: Simple Selectors

When generating a value for a nested property, you may want to simply select from a list rather than procedurally generate it. Archigen provides two selectors: WeightedSelector<T> and RandomSelector<T>. Both can be nested and chained in place of other generators.

Weighted Selection

Let's say you have a City class that implements IWeighted:

public class City : IWeighted
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Population { get; set; }
    public int Weight { get => Population; set => Population = value; }
    
    public City(string name, int population)
    {
        Name = name;
        Population = population;
    }
}

You can create a weighted selector for cities like so:

var cities = new City[] { 
    new City("Astaria", 840000), 
    new City("Belarak", 420000), 
    new City("Crosgar", 210000) 
};

var citySelector = new WeightedSelector<City>(cities);

The WeightedSelector<T> can be nested and chained in place of procedural generators and return values with calls to Next().

In this example, Astaria is twice more likely to be selected than Belarak and four times more likely than Crosgar.

Random Selection

If you just want to randomly select from a list of options, you can use RandomSelector<T>:

var options = new string[] { "Mages", "Knights", "Dragons" };
var teamNames = new RandomSelector<string>(options); 

A RandomSelector<T> can be nested and chain in the place of procedural generators and return values with calls to Next().

Installation

Archigen is available as a NuGet package. You can install it from your NuGet package manager in Visual Studio or by running the following command in your NuGet package manager console:

Install-Package Archigen

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2021-2025 Kevin Sacro

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