if that can be put into the procedural generation side of things keep em coming

maybe remove city.lua and contents of city folder (use Games Mod Exchange or similar, or my latest upadated complete pioneer), but keep city3k 😉

i will give your model a script, that's simple for a building.

Good to see new building types. That will make those boring cities really come to life. Keep 'em coming please 😉 .

To compile the previous discussions and ideas concerning buildings and cities in general, I will add a link to the two following threads:

* Most important read, from the linked post and two pages forward, for discussions and examples on desired architecture

The first thirteen pages of the linked thread above also contains posts spread out containing the various initial nice buildings done by potsmoke66 like the Arco Dome and smaller condo's.

* This thread, from the linked post forward, is also vital for initial discussions on cities

All the best

Frans

Thanks for pulling that together. If anyone is looking for a way to contribute, something that would be awesome would be to compile information like this and put it on the wiki.

[attachment=541:2011-02-15_123733.jpg]

[attachment=1]building_greyoxide1_1.zip[/attachment]

[attachment=542:2011-02-15_132005.jpg]

some facts and thoughts about cities/buildings in pioneer

if it would be possible to place tile to tile gapless, i would have done buildings on decks including street tiles, parks and other stuff allready.

but before we can have such tiles must be able to position one to the other.

it would be even nice to separate cities, at least for planets with breathable or non-breathable atmosphere, as soon as a affility (federal,imperial,allied) is possible it would be fine to have this for cities (all models, a theme?) to maybe.

there is this problem that cities placed randomly sometimes on very steep hillsides. one way to get around that is to have rather deep basements or blocks.

i.e.

the combo building has ~10m radius and a basement 50m deep, the archology has 200m (base ~10m) radius and a basement 160m deep.

what i wouldn't like to see is flattened terrain around cities, it would kill some of the artificial look.

a groundbase is stil under construction 😀

the poor fellas that can't use shaders, can use the no_shader scripts for the city3k respectively the new bgo1 building,

they are placed in the models folder and must be renamed to activate them (exchange suffix).

this will result in a city using buildings with no basements.

i made a second building of the same, that didn't changes much,

except that it shuffles the buildings new and brings back more of the archologies.

[attachment=0]building_greyoxide1_2.zip[/attachment]

I hope you can forgive my lack of familiarity with the codebase. I am wondering if it is possible to impose a heightmap on the terrain generator for city areas? Then you could divide the buildings into groups according to terrain types;

1) large city type buildings with streets/tubes around the base of the model (cannot tolerate a slope at all)

2) buildings that can handle being on a slope (large basement blocks or platforms to sit on)

3) buildings that can occur anywhere like the hab-tower thing

you would just define what greyscale value the appropriate buildings would occur on. In fact it seems like this placement value could be programmed into the .lua file, on a building by building basis according to that particular buildings toleration factor.

If it is not possible to auto-generate the height-map creation I would be happy to work up a few to start with. In my very limited experience it seems like this would be easier and cleaner in the long run, as opposed to trying work up big chunk type building blocks that may or may not be occluded by extreme terrains.

[attachment=545:untitled.png]

another simple background building, this time with bumpmaps

[attachment=546:build_2.7z]

looks like a disco ball

would be cool to see more cities/bases over some planets randomly generated but without starports.

habitable planets like Earth should be covered in stractures. don't display names to keep the clutter down. just building clusters here and there like 'shrooms in a forest...

Greyoxide, that first building of yours looks like it's ready to take off! Actually both of them look like spaceships to me. The first one especially looks like it could be a colony ship that would land and spend the rest of its life as a home base while the colony would be built around it. Nice work! 😀

And potsmoke, I'm once again amazed at how prolific you are! I just spent an entire day just figuring out how to apply a texture for the side walls of the docking bay of the ELITE station in the same way that I applied it for the back wall (the one with the doors). I finally had to draw an isometric projection of the vectors of the docking bay on a piece of paper to figure it out! 😆 Hey, at least I'm doing stuff, and it's fun! 😀

that could be a building...

[attachment=548:2011-02-16_073039.jpg]

Exactly! The have a similar Heinlein, 50's, retro-future look about them.

yet another one

[attachment=549:2011-02-16_111858.jpg]

[attachment=0]building_greyoxide2_1.zip[/attachment]

i had to remap the model, seamless textures arn't possible in pioneer in this way (needs splitted vertices/edges at seam), so i used some new textures.

i guess i do the same for the first building and add some lightened up windows to.

btw, bumpmapping is not supported and not needed imho.

both buildings use the same folder and script file now, because they use the same textures.

[attachment=1]bgo_1_and_2_2011-02-16.zip[/attachment]

[attachment=552:2011-02-16_145812.jpg]

I really like this one. Nicely done Grey! The first one looks like it could be used as some sort of extracting device. Please keep em coming! 😉

Would you guys mind if I used them in my game engine? I really like the look of them 😉

As long as you know where to send the royalty cheques I'm sure it will be fine. 😉

different building types, styles, even desnities could be adjusted depending on political and develpment levels etc

I guess that would depend on what you intend to use them for. What kind of game is it?

here is another simple filler building. I tried to give the glass a mirror type material but it seems like the version of 2.5 that i'm using doesn't do mirrored reflections, which is kind of weird to say the least. I may repost this one when I can bake a mirrored reflection onto the surface.

[attachment=553:render.png]

i like very much the second globular building, as already sayd it is a nice retro-style touch

who remember the landscape destroyed by the planet in Star-Maidens? (look at 1:21)

They will only be used for testing. I will be working on procedural building layout soon and need some buildings to test with. They won't be in the final game since it's a commercial project but would help get that part started. The game is Galaxy Empire, link is in my sig.