Procedural cities

Eric Chadwick

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Documents

Very interesting work. I could see developers using this for quickly generating city environments, though a designer's touch would still be needed for organizing interactivity, flow, etc.

CrazyButcher

cool stuff, definetely worth a read

Kevin Albers

Very interesting. Getting a system like this implemented for a single game seems like a lot of work. It might be a good candidate for some form of middleware tailored to the game industry.

SHEPEIRO

my bros always been interested in this, as a coder hes keen to get rid of the artist in the game creation process. ive always told him that this may be a great way of generating cities that an artist/designer then goes through and makes "more interesting" or for perhaps doing backgrounds or stuff you fly over.

but i think even the best generated cities will not be able to have the design and points of interest that a human touch can add.

noritsune

It's very interesting technology, and I was especially impressed with the street-generation system, how it can figure out the best block plans to get around a landmass.

That said I think their architecture shots (especially those on the landing page) are lifeless and unrealistic. The proportions are screwy... the colors are dull... the details are wrong... it looks like a beginner's 3D building model. I would say that cities like this can maybe look good in the distant background, but the few shots that show wide cityscapes just make the repetitions in the forms more obvious. They almost get away with making believable skyscrapers (Sears Tower, Lipstick Building), but I'm going to chalk that up to a repeating window texture with a nice cubemap.

In my opinion the images they display just solidify how necessary artists are.

Mark Dygert

CrazyButcher

it's weird that some of you guys are often scared by this stuff, it is meant to be a tool for artists, after all artists need to create those base shapes and so on. I mean I'm sure you use some sort of scatter funcs or "painting particles" when doing rocks and other stuff, this here somewhat similar to generate lots of content more easily. technology is there to aid, not to replace... after all I dont think you would like to place every blade of grass manually.
Another benefit of this is that the representation allows on the fly generation of meshes within viewing distance, while the rest are just dummys. You could fake cities with terrabytes of unique content that way.
of course someone will go over the city and place some "nice spots" here and there, but for managing lots of content and so on this stuff could really be a huge win. Especially as it's not the "same" house just instanced...

and although the art is not perfect on the shots, the tech under the hood is what it's about. think about the same stuff with more procedural effects for dirt or other detail object... think about more texture variety as input values...

Joao Sapiro

yeah loads of games looking the same .


EDIT : oh and the fack that the "cleanup" needed after this might take a lil more than expected dont know.

STILL , it might come in handy for indy developers etc..dont really know cant predict the future.

okkun

What butcher said. Any tool that can take the grunt part out of the work is welcome.

noritsune

Is it really? Some of those cityscapes are so dead and character-less I wouldn't be satisfied with a single building in there. I'd probably end up redoing everything to a point that took longer than if I had done it myself from the start.

Like I said before the streetplan generation is supercool though and could definitely have some uses.

Mark Dygert

It depends on the game, it looks like this is designed with Flight Sims in mind. Pre-generated art looks fugly, the only thing I would use this for is background noise outside of the playable area or use it to generate roof tops for a cinematic. I don't see this working for any kind of FPS game, it MIGHT work in a RTS.

notman

I'd hate to live in a city that looks like this one:



I think people would be too busy laughing about those buildings in game (I'm hidden at the top of Dildo number 2)

malcolm

Isn't that the city from the little Mermaid box art? The one with the giant golden dildo in it.

http://i.xanga.com/CrapMagazine/mermaid%20penis%20cover.jpg

Eric Chadwick

Ribbed for her pleasure!

Seriously though, I wouldn't expect a ground-level playable level from it, but could be used for fly overs.

There are some horrendous looking cities in there. But I do like the look of the Pompeii scene.

notman

I think this is an initial step of what I've been hearing about. Supposedly they are working on algorithms to create models through code rather than having a mesh. I made the assumption that it was in reference to the character model, but it may have been in reference to buildings, as we saw at that site. I think this is only the beginning stages. I'm sure it will improve later, to a point where it is the playing environment.
Imagine how much funner FPS maps could become if they had a random map environment rather than static maps as we have now. No more knowing where that secret hiding spot is

malcolm

Notman, they had that feature in Soldier of Fortune 2, random map and mission generator, I thought it was pretty boring since everything was random and had no polish or design tuning.

notman

I haven't had a chance to see the results... Didn't realize Soldier of Fortune had it. Hopefully it will improve with time. I guess I'd have to experience it though to understand how bad it is.

JordanW

Honestly this isnt bad, and obviously this thing isnt generating the art that makes the buildings... All it seems to be doing is organizing lego like pieces that an artist creates into a city-like pattern. I do however believe that this would be a silly replacement for level design. Random level or map generation is kinda dumb as it basically says the design of a game level is so unimportant that a computer can just randomly generate it. I Think this would be a useful -tool- for creating many things related to games though. Generating backgrounds that possibly had a city in them, or even using it as a basis to create a level then go from that point would be helpful.

okkun

Who's to say the gameplay would be centered in procedurally generated stuff? Something like this would be really useful to generate bulk for backgrounds. As with most things procedural there would of course have to be some editing.

EarthQuake

I think if you can throw in your own level layout, assets(textures and prefabs) and have tweakability on each asset(which it sure looks like you can fine tune assets from the videos) that this is VERY fucking cool. If only for filler content and non-important landmark buildings. Or even for rapid prototyping of level design/gameplay. Very very cool if it was as easy as it looks to whip up something playable fast...... You guys bashing the "art" here are just rediculous, obviously you can pick out the shitiest programmer created assets there and they'll look like shit. Wow, thats pretty surprising isnt it? But throw a bunch of good assets and some thought into it? Of course this wouldnt be to replace awesomely designed intricate buildings, if anyone thinks thats what this is for you completely miss the point.

Sabby

Looks great from the video, where you see a user scaling walls/moving things around and windows etc. being placed automatically. And the morphing architectural styles - a lot of potential.

You've just got to look past the blandness of some of the styles/textures/rendering in the video and imagine it combined with the kind of next gen art work featured in Gears or War or UT2007.
Video [low res]