Making lots of progress on the procedural city generation!

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Making lots of progress on the procedural city generation!

Hey guys,

I'm making a lot of great progress on new and improved ways to generate the cities! This is going to be great stuff, everything is procedurally generated from a few input lines!

Here are the latest works-in-progress,

Building subdivision from lots & extrusion coming next...

- Dan

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Large buildings placed in the center...

Check out the latest images ...


- Dan

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this is looking great! I hope

this is looking great! I hope you can add some more types of buildings so the city is more diverse. Some alleys between buildings would be a nice addition, for that you would need another texture apart from grass to simulate concrete, and then adding walls, stairs and trash cans too.

I hope you will add trees, parks, fountains, traffic circles and that stuff.

other things could be road viaducts, bridges, train rails, metro and tunnels, but then this would become a really rich, complete and diverse environment, and therefore, difficult to create. Specially for procedural cities.

"Instead of making a game you hope many people will like, it's sometimes better to create a game you know a few people will love"

''My intention is not to create something that won't be hated; it's to create something that will be passionately loved''

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Yup 8)

Yea man, all that stuff is exactly what I'm working on, literally. Filling in the polygons generate by each lot w concrete to generate the alleys, then spawning random dumpsters/trash.

Obviously the building diversity is also what I'm working on, these screenshots are after an hour of work on the latest iteration. I've only got 2 medium sized buildings shown, much larger and smaller are coming. I can make each new building in only a few hours. Another idea is totally procedurally generating the actual city geometry.

If I had to rate those above images based on visual closeness to the final product it'd be like 10%, only thing almost finished is the roads. All the above is what I'm working in as we speak.

Also adding fences, parks, etc all the stuff I have added in my other game Urban Empires, and then some!

Most of this stuff will be in the next update in a few days! It's about to come together!

- Dan

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Building placement improvements ...

Quick update - got the buildings optimally placed around the city ... this will be good enough for the first release. The only things really left are...
1) More building variety, each one takes me a few hours - and I will borrow & upgrade a few from Urban Empires to save time!
2) Remove the grass in the center of the city! Fill in the alley-ways w/concrete and props like dumpsters and garbage [ right now it's grass! ].
3) Plazas, fountains, and other cool touches.

I can do all this stuff within the next 24-48 hours hopefully!!

* Note there are only 4 unique buildings in this screen, end cities will have from 30-60 different buildings, depending on how much support / interest it gets from fans!

- Dan

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Triangulation of city lots + Plaza / Alley fill-in.

Triangulation of the procedural building lots, then filled in with appropriate texture, can be unique per lot, or building. More progress coming soon! Next up, is some variety in the city buildings.




- Dan

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Adding more varity to the city & testing bridge rendering ...

Yesterday added a car wash...

Also removed the border grass around the entire city...

Tonight I added more variety of buildings types, and improved the rule set used to determine their placement.

Also - this is a forum exlusiveEE!!#@334 I'm messing around w bridges, etc. Not happy w it for lots of reasons, will revisit them later, there are lots of complications w implementing them currently.

- Dan

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Adding vents/sewers + Testing w Oculus Rift ...

Hey guys,

I've now got procedural vents/sewers/utility access decals placed along the procedural roads.


Testing the Oculus Rift on the latest build/city ...

Snapshot of how the city looks now [ applying rules about where Car Wash's can be placed, also limiting placement of billboard buildings [ will show later ]. Also I have 3 "rings"/"layers" of city density, radiating out from the center of the world.

Next up is an elevated-train you can ride on :-)

- Dan

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Elevated train!

Hey guys,

I added an elevated train into the procedural cities! It runs a basic straight track right now, but it's still very cool, and adds a lot to the scenes. It runs a straight path through the city.





- Dan

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buildings

it would be awesome if you could enter some of the buildings like stores and other places :)

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Yup...

I've had that working in previous city games, it is very possible given the way these are designed. Actually my initial design called for 100% procedurally generated and enter-able buildings ( X floors with rooms/etc all generated ) generated totally at random. I can still do that, it will take lots of time though. It's something that I've got on my radar. :-)

- Dan

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This game is gonna be awesome

This game is gonna be awesome :D

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Added a new building! the 7th

Added a new building! the 7th one ...

Still needs a bit of variety, but that's something I'll work on while the first early-adopter version is out there.

- Dan

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Leaving vacant lots for parks/plazas.

I adjusted the procedural rule-set to leave vacant lots for parks/plazas...


- Dan

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Added trees into the city parks!

Added trees to the city parks 8-) Still need to add a fence around them ...

- Dan

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wow that is huge progress!

wow that is huge progress! the train gives a good feeling to the city, somehow it reminds me of new York in GTAIV. I would suggest you to increase the building density as there are a lot of empty places between buildings. Another good addition would be construction sites, you know, buildings being built, with cranes and that stuff. Maybe a building being demolished, or that has been suspended. Sure an abandoned construction site would be a perfect place for crimes to take place. In addition it would give variation to the city. For the map limits you could use water, better than to put an invisible wall I think. If this was a first person shooter I would say the ''return to the battle in 8 seconds or youll be shoot'', but that is not the case in this game that has a first person shooter and sandbox style.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091105113509/gtawiki/images/0/03/Ca...
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hlinz3ivqic/UfsZVKeVytI/AAAAAAAABrc/dDgKskk3mp...

"Instead of making a game you hope many people will like, it's sometimes better to create a game you know a few people will love"

''My intention is not to create something that won't be hated; it's to create something that will be passionately loved''

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Yup construction sites are pretty much next

Yup construction sites are pretty much next ... I'll probably wait until after the first release to add them into the game, even though I already have all the artwork done.

Bulding density is going to be harder to adjust, I'm def gonna leave it as is for the first release of the game. I'm sure I can come up w algorithms to make it more interesting!

Thanks for the feedback!

- Dan

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Dirty alleys ( trash + dumpsters + new texture )

These are also great places for crime to take place ;-)

Added trash, dumpsters, and a new alley/plaza texture.

- Dan

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Trash bags into alleys

Finished all the collision detection, works great! Going to upload some videos soon.

Also added some trash bags to the alleyways!

- Dan

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really nice! Just another

really nice! Just another thing for parks and plazas, ways for civilians to walk would be nice too, maybe even bikes if you add them in the future. Small lakes and fountains would be nice details too as well as park banks and park lights.
http://www.mercedcountyevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Rahilly-Par...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Hyde_Park_PA2.jpg
http://sobreirlanda.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/phoenix-park.jpg
Maybe you could add that there is a probability that huge procedural parks will be created, not as big as central park nyc of course, but still big

the trees in game don't have any kind of leaf, maybe you could take advantage of that to make snow/autumn seasons, you know. for example putting leaf textures on the floor or snow/ice (this could be valid for roads and other places too)
http://images6.alphacoders.com/337/337847.jpg
http://www.hdwpapers.com/walls/central_park_winter_snow_wallpaper-other.jpg
day and night and seasons cycle, that would be awesome.

"Instead of making a game you hope many people will like, it's sometimes better to create a game you know a few people will love"

''My intention is not to create something that won't be hated; it's to create something that will be passionately loved''

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Yup :-) You're reading my

Yup :-) You're reading my mind :-)

1) Big time agree about the dynamic weather. I plan on adding Rain and Fog into this game for the FIRST release. Obviously day/night cycles have worked since the beginning.

2) Yup, the parks and plazas - I was going to add procedural paths inside the park's lots, and generate them in a much more random way than the building positions/orientations. Also I was just thinking yesterday how cool a lake would look in the middle of the park + some random / procedural terrain. I can def. do that in the future, after the first few releases of the game [ any day now ... ]

3) Snow is something I was thinking about too, the reason there are no leaves is because it's hard to get realistic leaves to render w/out a lot of work and overdraw on lush foliage. So it looked much better, and kept my framerate at 120FPS by having the trees be leaf-less. Also had an idea how to render snow on all objects, you can compare the normal vector in the pixel shader and modulate the amount of 'snow' rendered on the object based on how 'flat' it is at that point. I was also thinking about creating a leaf decal ground texture [ same as the paper trash one above, just use leaves instead and place it under the barren trees ].

Thanks for the feedback!

- Dan

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Added wall around the city + fence around parks

I've added a wall around the city to trap the player inside :-]

Also I've used the same system to render fences - example is the fence around the parks in the city.

Park fences added...

Park fence w Vigilante1 in the foreground

Fools be trapped in yo. :-o

- Dan

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AI Nav mesh is generated for the procedural cities

After some early morning hours, I have the artificial intelligence navigation mesh generated for the procedural cities in Just Death -- This mesh is how the AI knows where/how to move in the procedurally generated cities. The input mesh is well over 1 million triangle for this example it generates an optimized mesh of 30k triangles, VERY happy with the results. I'm also recording test videos with/without the Oculus VR virtual reality headset, everything is working great!! Expect to see this thing in motion very soon!

Screenshots of the optimized Nav Mesh ...


- Dan

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AI Traffic Navigation patterns

Made TONs of progress the last few hours, came up w a great way to generate the traffic patterns in the procedural cities! Here are a couple of debug images to show how it works!

//This image shows the North/South and East/West roads.

//This one shows the final road network, with North/South/East/West and Human lanes all rendered accordingly!!

- Dan

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AI Traffic Vehicle Simulation Bubbles

Below are some screenshots of the "dynamic vehicle-traffic simulation bubbles" that surround the camera and maintain a constant number of traffic vehicles in the scene/world. Of course this is totally adjustable traffic density and radius. Obviously the blue lines, etc. are temp debug output.


More updates soon!

- Dan

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