yes, i suggest to simply overlay them, something i have to do for my octaeder buildings (combo), the windows are inlet (the first model was a scripted one), but it's useless.

for all later buildings i overlayed either quads sized as the window or i used the "whole" quad and applied a cut out texture containing many windows.

to avoid z depth conflict you can set later the zbias in the script, to proper overlay one face on another.

make two or three groups of windows which you later can enlighten at different timepoints, you only have to change the material in the script, that costs nothing.

i made a short demo from my last building because it shows how you can use the LOD.

the building i used for the lowest visible LOD is the same as the collision mesh (pink).

watch also how the polycount changes, the windows turn to opaque and all what is inside the dome is left away.

Got it. I'm trying to do another one. Sorry, I'm barely new at 3d modeling and I'm kinda of stuck with the uv mapping and textures. I'm not sure If I'm doing it right. 😐 The Idea of the Jetsons Building was more for a apartment complex rather than a home. Single homes are not that practical with high population, or I guess It could with new planets.

i have made a few new buildings, but maybe need to rework my archology, before i post them.

[attachment=565:2011-02-24_021555.jpg]

i try to use the LOD more intensive for my buildings (if possible), that's why i revisited all city3k buildings.

[attachment=566:2011-02-24_024152.jpg]

well, some might to like some additional buildings, 😉

buildings_p66_2011-02-24.zip

it includes the previous coil building and the two above presented buildings, though you might delete the old coil_bld folder if you downloaded it allready.

intentionally i made them to place inside the dome of the archo, but they work as well outside.

like i said the whole city3k will be renewed, they will come anyway with the new version of it, because the models are needed by the archology.

imo it would look boring if all buildings were settled on leveled ground

[attachment=567:2011-02-24_071714.jpg]

woot! Can't wait to see the new city models! 😀 The new textures by potsmoke and the textures in Grey Models seems to work very well in the game. Here's some nice concepts:

Like how the buildings seem to intersect with some sort of pipelines:

Houses on top of each other perhaps:

Cyberpunk, my favorite style 😀 With neon colored windows:

[hsimg] [/hsimg]

the buildings are a good idea, now just need different styles and perhaps different bases etc

The cities would look a lot, lot better if there were roads and other flatter areas of land. At the moment it looks like somebody used a pepper shaker to scatter them over the surface just before the player arrived. They don't look like they are in a 'used' area of land, but just temporary appendages.

i don't know, i like it, it's ment to be that way.

at least you have three types of buildings which use different areas in the city, the rest is random.

there was road tiles and such in frontier/ffe i know, but it was like when you set shaders off in pioneer the surface was transparent for objects like ships or buildings. flat tiles of roads or parks would be seen no matter if above or below surface.

further and one can see that on the pictures taquito posted, it's a question of style, to me at least.

i repeat if i could separate cities on habitable planets from such that are hostile, i would have used skyscrapers and other more common buildings. but imo skyscrapers look stupid on a moon.

there are some limit's in such a game and cities can never have dimensions of real cities, that would go to far i guess.

allready it's hard to get more bigger buildings placed, because with the size they get rare and because they use some more space as they are sized you get a city with only a few buildings.

but buildings are really easy to model and to write the script to bind it into pioneer is no big thing.

go on, try yourself.

what one could do is to cheat the scale of the buildings, you wouldn't recognize in a normal gameplay if all buildings would have only half of the "real" size as long as all are scaled the same (but in a massively oversized spaceport).

this would result in a "bigger" looking city, because more buildings get placed on the same space.

I'm not suggesting that cities should be massive (although, given the dynamic nature of Pioneer, it's not beyond the realms of impossibility; flatten the land to reduce terrain computation overhead and have more buildings).

I'm saying that settlements - even the smallest - have some form of roads, and buildings - even tiny ones - very rarely just jut out of unmodified terrain. Because of this, the current buildings in Pioneer look totally out of place. They look like they do not belong where they are because there's no evidence of integration with the landscape.

strangewisely exactly this i like. 😉

and i guess realism shouldn't go to far with something secondary like cities.

well, it's to imagine that road tiles could be placed, but simply seeded? would look still artificial, displaced.

so you would have to connect building and road tiles and then powerlines, we have powerlines in frontier but how to place them in a reasonable way? and so on....

you see what i mean, it get's to far, this is pioneer not sim city