Senzee 5 - Paul Senzee: City Generation

Showing posts with label City Generation. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Introversion's City Generation

At GDC I came across Chris Delay from Introversion Software. I recognized him from the picture next to his blog. I've been admiring the work that he's has been doing with city generation and I was happily surprised to meet him in the line for one of the sessions. Not thinking, I extended my hand. I hope I didn't get him sick.

I asked him a ton of questions about it, 'cause I'm working on similar ideas. Anyhow, please check out the city generation stuff he's doing. He's working from Muller and Wonka's shape-grammar/L-system generation ideas and producing some awesome work.

Check out this beauty -

Friday, November 09, 2007

The Impossible Dream #4

(Updated 11/23/2007)

Where Have I Been?

It's been months since I've blogged. They've been productive months, though. See, in early October, another beautiful baby girl joined our family! It's been a rush having another child. It's incredible how you can still be completely awestruck as if it were the first time, each and every time. :)

Prior to that, vacation.

Because I had some time off, I slipped in some hours on my Impossible Dream. I hadn't really considered blogging about it yet until I stumbled across Project Steel & Glass at The Cluttered Desk that motivated me to write an update.

Before leaving on vacation this summer, I'd made some headway with Pair, my embedded script language. Especially, I'd made some strides compiling it to more efficent bytecode, etc. It's in a sort-of usable state. Still, some things like lexical closures are not 100%. I'll leave blogging about that until later.

Basically, much of the material pass (no illumination yet) of the game is rendering. It looks pretty raw and repetitive with respect to content right now. There's not yet much differentiation in city sections. No niceties such as shadows or even basic lighting yet. And, jeez, how am I gonna do trees? It's time, though, to switch gears for a bit and prototype the gameplay. As you might infer from the screenshots, the protagonist will be capable of flight. I've got my Xbox 360 controllers hooked up to my PC and I can fly all around town.

(Zaragosa, Mexico [fictional])

(Puebla, Mexico [real])

Please, I'm Just One Man!

So I must enlist the machine to generate a great deal of content automatically, albeit offline. This approach, of course, runs the risk of a high degree of repetition, but I think with some caution and tool refinement this will turn out great. I'm really happy with how auto-generation has gone so far. It's actually starting to vaguely resemble the residential city streets of central Mexico, which is, of course, the idea.

Anyhow, I'm pretty pumped about it. Given some time (lots) and little-by-little refinement, we may have something pretty cool here.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Urbanization

Because I enjoy creating games on my own time and am attracted to the sort of open world games described in the previous post, I'm interested in automatic generation of urban landscapes for games. There is no way I can create an entire city such as the cities of GTA or Ultimate Spider-Man without a high level of automation. I've seen some work in this area, most of which is concerned with generating low-detail cities in real-time. I'm interested in offline high-detail content creation.

From 2004 to early 2005 I developed a pair of programs to accomplish this. The first of these is pov2mesh, a program that converts a constructive solid geometry (CSG) file (Pov-Ray format) into a Maya vector .obj file. The second of these is Urbia which generates the CSG file from an abstract .xml definition of the world, fills in the blanks and invokes pov2mesh to complete the conversion to .obj. The pov2mesh application is currently offered as shareware on my site. I also plan to offer Urbia as shareware when it's more polished.

See this for a discussion of pov2mesh's future and feasiblity.