Procedural city generation.

Tinman

Tinman
Since a lot of us are interested in how procedural generation will be used in ED I just want bring your attention to a new weekly "Humble Bundle". Some of you have probably on Youtube seen a demo by Introversion Software of how procedural generation can be used to generate cityscapes. Now you can actually get hold on that demo and play around with it yourself if you follow this link:

https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly

Haven't had time to test it out myself yet (since the kids refuse to go to sleep), but I just wanted to give everyone a heads up.

How far do you think/hope this will be used in ED (in future expansions)? I certainly know what I want to see and have already mentioned some of those thoughts previously in other threads...however right now I have to get back to my kids for a while. I'll be back later! ;)

Edit:
Here is what I got on medium size with the seed "Elite: Dangerous". ;)
EliteSeed.jpg
 
Last edited:

graham.reeds

G
Nice image.

There are a lot of papers on procedural city generation and procedural building generation. Some bad, some good. Most suffer from using poor texturing - there is an italian saying "It's not what you say but how you say it" and that applies to many of these procedural generation papers.
 

Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
I think for city generation they have much lower "it looks familiar" threshold, as buildings can have small details which makes them different from other places. Also I would like to see more interesting stuff like suburban territories, networks of small villages, road network, etc. Just cities is boring :) Altough I admit this is what they will do first, as cities are seen from space.

Also hoping for night time lights. Anyone pitched question about this? :)
 

Tinman

Tinman
Pecisk said:
I think for city generation they have much lower "it looks familiar" threshold, as buildings can have small details which makes them different from other places. Also I would like to see more interesting stuff like suburban territories, networks of small villages, road network, etc. Just cities is boring :) Altough I admit this is what they will do first, as cities are seen from space.
Click to expand...

As I have already mentioned in several threads...this type of variation can already be seen in Just Cause 2 so it should be possible. I also hope the employ some sort of "landmark" system to make things more unique. Most landmarks in the world (Empire State Building, The Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, The Pyramids, The Gateway Arch in St. Louise and so on...) are quite often really really big versions of rather simple shapes. It should be possible to create an algorithm to simulate this and populate some prominent places (capitals and other wealthy areas) with these. Of course, really special places should probably still be handmade by an artist.


Pecisk said:
Also hoping for night time lights. Anyone pitched question about this? :)
Click to expand...

You better take a look at Newsletter 2 again in case you missed it. ;)

Also, some citylights can actually be seen if you download the full size version of this image and look at the night side of the planet. (Personally I think those points of light are added later in photoshop in the specific example, but it still shows their vision.)
 
Last edited:

withnail

withnail
Thanks, I am going to have a good look at this.

Out of interest is procedural generation of cities and planets CPU or GPU intensive?
 

Tinman

Tinman
withnail said:
Thanks, I am going to have a good look at this.

Out of interest is procedural generation of cities and planets CPU or GPU intensive?
Click to expand...

Can be both...depends on how they choose to implement it. The GPU can for certain tasks be a lot quicker, but on the other hand you are then using up cycles on the GPU that might be needed for other tasks. It's a technical/balancing issue.
 

Robbie

Robbie
I'm also very interested in how FD approach their procedural cityscape generation. This'll be something that Star Citizen will sadly lack, other than their short loading sequence to each planet's landing/docking platform.

Can't wait to do some overhead flying though futuristic cities in Elite, if city flying is anything like this video I'll be well immersed. :)
 

graham.reeds

G
withnail said:
Thanks, I am going to have a good look at this.

Out of interest is procedural generation of cities and planets CPU or GPU intensive?
Click to expand...

GPU. While you can generate it on the CPU you then have to pass it to the gfx card for rendering. Also the GPU has more cores to divvy up the work between.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom