Cities on Kerbal/City Generator Tech Demo

[adamz5k]

I previously thought that having cities on the surface of Kerbal would be: A. Pretty damn resource intensive and B. Incredibly time consuming for a team that would have to model each individual city. Imagine modeling every city on the surface of the Earth; that would take oodles of time!

Packaged in this week's Humble Bundle's Weekly Sale, introversion software has a tech demo that made me rethink the whole thing. It's a city generator that essentially takes a plain of whatever size, factors in water sources, selects city locations, builds roads, starting with major roads and working down to minor ones, then builds buildings based on the size of their city blocks, and position in the city. Once the software is done, the city is actually pretty damn impressive. If you wanted to check it out, you could bascially head over and pay one penny to download it for free ('course it's for charity, so...you might want to pay more?).

Anyway, I got to thinking about the new Mun craters, and how they essentially use a similar process. You know, a random seed that's always the same; we all read the blog post. Suddenly, cities on the surface of Kerbal don't seem that far out of reach. Although it might be a long shot, is there any way two great devs might want to have a little phone conversation to use this tech demo as a springboard for Kerbal cities in .22? No matter what, though, it's a pretty cool tech demo and makes me giddy with excitement for what could possibly be a fully populated Kerbal. So, I just wanted to share.

[Apollo1391]

yeah that would be awesome orbiting over the dark side of kerbin and seeing all the lights from the cities below

[JakeGrey]

Here's a demo video I found on YouTube:

It looks pretty impressive, and definitely something to think about licensing.

[adamz5k]

Thanks for the Youtube vid. Yeah, I suppose a software license would do the trick.

And yeah, orbiting with lights from all the cities below would be absolutely breathtaking. I suppose this might even be something that you could re-purpose for ground scattering, as well.

Edited August 8, 2013 by adamz5k

[Motokid600]

That is very cool. Personally id rather see weather and auroras before cities. I think lightning on the dark side would be a far better sight then cities. Especially intense lightning when orbiting Jool. I'd glady take both though lol.

[Sof]

The only problem being that massive polygon count in the top corner.

[djnattyd]

As a stop-gap, would it not be possible to create a mod that creates a light map on the dark side of Kerbin? Universe Replacer shows that surface textures can be replaced so surely it'd be a case of having it show a layer with yellow coloured pixels.

[SuperWeegee4000]

Kerbin. And there's sort of a mod for that, and it's a planned feature on the no-suggest list.

[adamz5k]

Oopise. Yeah, I meant Kerbin. I knew it was a planned feature, I just thought this piece of tech was pretty cool.

[manskal]

Introversion is awesome. Any sort of collab between Squad and Introversion (both among the best indie devs out there imo) would be mouth-watering, to say the least.

[Monger]

I guess there is a good reason why the city buildings are neither textured nor properly shaded. I gets a lot more complex once you do that. Also, it already takes considerable time for a very small area. No idea what this would do to a whole planet. Still: maybe it is possible to use this as base for proper normal maps. As soon as you gain a few km height, it suffices if all buildings are only flat textures.

[rbray89]

I'm currently working on a procedural city generator.

First step is done: Generating unique city blocks of various sizes and building configurations.

No colliders, unique textures, etc. done yet.

Once I start adding windows I'll be using self illuminated shaders to make "lights" from space.

[rbray89]

Update:

I'm going to be needing some textures soon.

[M4ck]

rbray89, this looks very promising Just a small suggestion: what about a bit wider streets? The runway is something like a middle size street, I think it would be quite hard to drive anything rover-like into the gaps between your buildings. Good work so far anyways, though.

[Masked Turk]

rbray89, this looks very promising Just a small suggestion: what about a bit wider streets? The runway is something like a middle size street, I think it would be quite hard to drive anything rover-like into the gaps between your buildings. Good work so far anyways, though.

Seems he's working more on the mechanics of geometry generation and repetition, rather than how it actually looks, at the moment.

Very promising!

As a stop-gap, would it not be possible to create a mod that creates a light map on the dark side of Kerbin? Universe Replacer shows that surface textures can be replaced so surely it'd be a case of having it show a layer with yellow coloured pixels.

That's an excellent idea... I'd instantaneously use something like that if someone made it.