City Generator for C++

‍Requires C++23 (e.g., -std=c++23 for GCC/Clang, /std:c++latest for MSVC).

API Reference · Usage Guide · Releases

Features

• Population-Weighted Generation. Cities are selected with probability proportional to their population, mirroring real-world demographic distributions.
• Rich City Data. Every generated city includes 16 GeoNames fields: name, coordinates, country, administrative divisions, population, elevation, timezone, and more.
• Country Filtering. Generate cities from a specific country with get_city("BR").
• GeoNames Data. Ships with two dataset tiers — full (~200k cities, pop ≥ 500) and lite (~25k major cities, pop ≥ 15,000) — from GeoNames, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Deterministic Seeding. Per-call get_city(seed) for reproducible results, generator-level seed() / unseed() for deterministic sequences, and city::seed() for replaying a previous generation.
• Uniform Selection. Switch to equal-probability selection with weighted(false) — every city has the same chance regardless of population.
• Multi-Instance Support. Construct independent cg instances with their own data and random engine — ideal for embedding inside other generators.

Integration

citygen.hpp is the single required file released here. You need to add

#include <dasmig/citygen.hpp>
 
// For convenience.
using cg = dasmig::cg;

to the files you want to generate cities and set the necessary switches to enable C++23 (e.g., -std=c++23 for GCC and Clang).

Additionally you must supply the city generator with the resources folder containing full/cities.tsv and/or lite/cities.tsv, also available in the release.

Usage

#include <dasmig/citygen.hpp>
#include <iostream>
 
// For convenience.
using cg = dasmig::cg;
 
// Manually load a specific dataset tier if necessary.
cg::instance().load(dasmig::dataset::lite);  // ~25k major cities
// OR
cg::instance().load(dasmig::dataset::full);  // ~200k cities
 
// Generate a random city (population-weighted).
auto city = cg::instance().get_city();
std::cout << city.name << ", " << city.country_code
          << " (pop. " << city.population << ")" << std::endl;
 
// Generate a city from a specific country.
auto br_city = cg::instance().get_city("BR");
 
// Access all available fields.
std::cout << city.latitude << ", " << city.longitude << std::endl;
std::cout << city.timezone << std::endl;
std::cout << city.elevation << " m" << std::endl;
 
// Deterministic generation — same seed always produces the same city.
auto seeded = cg::instance().get_city(42);
 
// Replay a previous city using its seed.
auto replay = cg::instance().get_city(seeded.seed());
 
// Seed the engine for a deterministic sequence.
cg::instance().seed(100);
// ... generate cities ...
cg::instance().unseed(); // restore non-deterministic state
 
// Switch to uniform random selection (equal probability).
cg::instance().weighted(false);
auto uniform_city = cg::instance().get_city();  // any city equally likely
cg::instance().weighted(true);  // restore population-weighted
 
// Independent instance — separate data and random engine.
cg my_gen;
my_gen.load("path/to/cities.tsv");
auto c = my_gen.get_city();

For the complete feature guide — fields, filtering, weighting, and more — see the Usage Guide.

Data

The city data is sourced from the GeoNames geographical database. Two tiers are provided:

Tier	Source	Cities
full	cities500.zip	~200k (pop ≥ 500)
lite	cities15000.zip	~25k (pop ≥ 15,000)

The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0. See LICENSE_DATA.txt for details.

To regenerate datasets:

python scripts/prepare_geonames.py            # generate both tiers
python scripts/prepare_geonames.py --tier lite # lite only
python scripts/prepare_geonames.py --tier full # full only

Related Libraries

Library	Description
name-generator	Culturally appropriate full names
nickname-generator	Gamer-style nicknames
birth-generator	Demographically plausible birthdays
biodata-generator	Procedural human physical characteristics
country-generator	Weighted country selection by population
entity-generator	ECS-based entity generation