[lowfighter]

Placing buildings in continuous lines along streets, that's the right thing for simulating at least european towns. But I disagree a bit about doing it your way using 2-3 types of buildings. Surely it has advantage of faster building, smoother playing etc. But towns would look too schematic and very different from the real ones. The old core in almost each european towns is in most cases a charming maze of colors and different architecture styles piled very close together. You can see that even now, most towns have preserved the old core, that is, if they were not bombed too much during war.
BTW, nice to see you here Phil

Edit: there's another problem connected with using large and tall buildings. It's unrealistic to use them in large quantities in SMALL towns. Unfortunately they are used sometimes as isolated buildings in sparsely populated towns on some default maps. Imagine that: townlooks like countryside with a huge building here and there lol.
And then there's the problem of poping up at visibility range, mentioned by Zo in a different context. Especially very tall buildings poping up, that is disturbing to me.

I think it would be though profitable to discuss town building concepts in a separate thread and not hijack Maraz thread?

I don't wish to sound negative, as this is obviously a phenomenal piece of work, but I think this way of building towns with lots of isolated diverse buildings is not the right way. The best way is to use fewer building types, but lay them end to end in "streets".
This method has many advantages. As well as being more convincing, it results in faster load times (due to fewer number of different objects used) and smoother graphics (as the graphics card is processing fewer different objects as the player passes over). I would like map-builders to consider this method when they create new maps. It is more efficient and MUCH more effective.