If you imagine what the world was like before the Romans gave us roads, there would have been isolated settlements dotted about with nothing linking them.

Flash forward 3000 years and we have the same thing, except with skyscrapers!

But would it be possible to create some random links between buildings represented as flat grey rectangles? No more detail than that would be necessary. Could some code work out a mish mash of roads based on where buildings have been placed?

I always liked the Moonbase Alpha look

Cool pics Geraldine! Looking at the top one I see radial tiles upon which have been placed buildings. Hmmm... interesting thought.

radial tiles and radial buldings could be interesting

[attachment=586:2011-03-03_194659.jpg][attachment=587:2011-03-03_195241.jpg]

Cool. Spacestation?

them ads really make it look realistic. I mean, you see them everywhere in real life so I imagine the real future will be full of em as well.

Also, that moonbase (the one Geraldine posted) looks absolutely sweet.

Why limit ads to inside space stations? Why not put them on the outside? Or on ships? Or giant floating billboards near station entrances?

Amazing! If this were a commercial product you lot would all be moaning about the adverts and yet you now want more of them! 😉

theoretically it would be possible to have fake holograms,

ads on ships? we have sponsored cars, why no sponsored ships.

could be a lower priced one, using a seperate skin, i.e., a cool-cola cobra mk3.

evereythings fine with that idea and i can imagine it very well, but unless "tiles" can be placed seamless it's not to realise or it will look like bold islands raking out of the ground.

further size is a factor for % of seeding, so big buildings appear less, blocks with a sidelength of i.e. 200x200m you will only have up to 4 or 5 even in a big city (compliant to the archology, height doesn't matters but diameter of the building and additional space around).

of course a flattening of terrain is senseful to, but should be controlable by the architect. also tiling and "gap/no-gap" would be useful.

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but unless this and the possibility of different cityshapes is given we have to work with compromises, unfortunately.

but you can take this as a challange, to design a city looking somewhat reasonable under all given circumstances ;).

Sorry for not posting anything here in a long time.

Here are three more buildings for the project. I am aware that The pioneer engine cannot deal with bump or spec maps however I included them in-case someone else is able to use them. I am not very happy with the center building, I think the texture is stretching because I just don't have enough polys but adding polys means heavy game asset. So Ill leave it up to you guys If I can add about a hundred more faces it will start to look better.

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[attachment=939:Buidlings.7z]

Also I have another idea that may make cities a bit easier to randomize. Is it possible to give an OBJ. object a name that will cause the game engine to populate buildings on its surface? See image below, imagine that the red mesh had the name that caused the engine to populate buildings on its surface. This way we could have an orderly grid like city without sacrificing the randomness of the terrain generator.

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could some enhancments be made to the underlying engine to allow this outcome ?

hm, i have a idea

i guess you know that i'm the one who didn't likes flattened terrain, well it's a problem, yes and no.

i prefere no.

by looking at the large city tiles above and the large basements, something came to my mind.

i added a weird useless torus as kind of railroadtrack to my new (varied) groundstation model, that thing has no collision mesh, else there wouldn't be placed any buildings in the inner circle of torus.

well, i guess it should be possible to make large basement tiles that would fit as long as you use,

1st no collision mesh for the basements

2nd always the the same basement size, i guess it should be possible to find a fitting size

you have to find a size for a simple quad with collision mesh, this will give you the "pattern", you will have to use this quad for every building(group).

then you can evaluate the size of the basements with no collision mesh by try and error, will fit more or less after a while, imo.

limitations

there will be of course still a valuable height difference between the tiles depending on steepness of the terrain and size of the tiles.

any building which has a collision mesh can't overlap the size of the quad you used as "pattern".

you can't collide, means also you can't land or will land rough on the underlaying terrain, it's possible to fly under a building.

i guess it will look more or less like this

of course not the whole radius of the city is filled with buildings(groups), there will be "holes".

further the size of the "pattern" shouldn't be very large, size lowers prevalence.

but it will give the city a very uniform look in all, i imagine this as a bit boring, but you have to try...

well some like and imagine for the future metropolises like we have maybe larger,

wrong concept, if mankind will survive we need another, better concept then mega cities!

and what about "only the rich will have visited earth"?

i guess it will look like a tourist attraction, like a mega disneyland perhaps 😆

which do you like better a hut in the swiss alps or a flat in a skyscraper?

The idea is solid flattened terrian or just a flat top with buildup on the sides to support an elevated rise, in that basements could be shoved in, tunnels anything else creative that could be put in for stations.

The outcome could be to mold to the terrian, pehraps even bridge structures could be put in between buildings on elevated terrians for just an idea