How To Build A 3D City Landscape In Four Minutes

@Brad League:

Try to imagine game development where you can get an urban landscape to design itself in two days of just leaving your computer alone. Completely randomized. So do it for a week, you've got about three fully completed individual cities.

Put your hand a little more into it as it goes along, and you can customize whats happening even further, with still very little input and programming needed (beyond this base).

It'll speed things up for amatuer devs for sure.

Or heck... it would be neat just to run disaster simulations on. The best part of SimCity was destroying your hard work. :)

@song: You know the Germans, they always make good stuff.

I thought it had more to do with skill, time, ability, and number of people working on the project than on whether or not it was possible to make something look detailed.

@song: Nod32 imon throws up a threat detected warning about that 177kb zip file saying it`s probably a variant of the win32/statik application.
Download at your own risk people!

Mirror's Edge 2 needs to use this in a "infinite" mode.

the city extends in all directions, forming and dissolving as you move around. you could run forever.

@_@

curly haired boy

I was thinking this was more like Crackdown...

SigmundTheSeaMonster

@bysty:

That music is in no way reminiscent of Brian Eno.

Eno is experimental, minimalist, zero beat, ambient or a combination thereof.

Eno this is not.

Hey, Shamus Young. You're freaking awesome.

@i_9: I disagree! as an aspiring indie developer the ability to procedurally generate content based on input and then tweak it manually through testing is very useful.

Remember better is a relative term. You will get a better city if you have a 20 strong team of level designers and city planners working together to design a city and then a whole bunch of 3d and texture artists working to make this design come to life. Remember though that this requires a whole bunch of man hours and cash that independents just can't afford!

With independent development speed is an important factor because you are working on your own budget. If I were making a 3d City game like GTA this type of tool would be invaluable. It would make my world shell and then I could manually adjust it while exploring at a ground level to get a feel for the world and see what needs to be changed. I'd say that by starting our with a generated city I could get a decent city built up in a week or two

Rory Michael O'Sullivan

That could either be a Super Hero's dream or nightmare..

Stormgazer

@Ericc Whetstone: Indeed, I recommend that site very much. (He's also the creator of "DM of the Rings")
You can read the whole developement of the program there.

Xakura

@Brad League:

It's definitely a neat little programming demo, but this kind of thing is almost useless in a practical developement team/pipeline. There are simply much, much better ways of doing things.

i_9

Yeah, Dylan Cuthbert was raving about this clip earlier. Pretty remarkable ^_^

Yeah, they could also use this to make a game in four minutes as well. Just add a spider-man model with webslinging and there you have it, another spider-man game with minimal effort.

I think webslinging is the only reason people buy those games anymore...

Remember Sim City?

EA will buy it out and exploit it!

This program saps 90% of the fun left into it. No more building cities on your own! Now you get to do the boring Mayor stuff like tell workers to maintain roads, and pay off loans! MAYBE get the chance to press that big red shiny button that says DO NOT PUSH to send in procedurally generated tornadoes that barely do any damage...

This program just made the entire insustry lazy.

Is this similar to what Borderlands does? From what I remember about that is it has large randomly generated areas in between towns and dungeons.

jrwimage

@Brad League: Holodeck?

godot

Step 8: Upload the jump progam.

godot

@Brad League: I'd totally want a Simcity done like this.

Now to build a procedurally generated zombie apocalypse. GO!

Mooglepinoy22

[www.shamusyoung.com]

This is the site of the creator, Shamus Young. He also writes articles and comics for the Escapist site.

Ericc Whetstone

@Mit: It's working for me under Windows 7 and an 8800GT, for what it's worth. Unfortunately it's almost useless as a screensaver (aside from LCDs needing very little saving), because the video card fan picks up some speed when it's running. When a new video card comes out that can render this practically at idle without putting extra wear on the GPU fan, then it won't be so bad. Though, this is a perfectly ideal application for scaling up to newer video cards by showing longer shots of the horizon, rather than these close up building pans.

CMay

@Noodle-Works: Well this was a one-man, 50-hour job. With more people and more time for additional rules you could get a lot more detail.

Just check out a two-year old demo made by .theprodukkt, some german dudes - [www.theprodukkt.com] - it's 177kb and everything is procedurally generated.

In case you don't have a good computer to run it, here's a video of it:

+ Watch video

song

For some reason I have an overwhelming urge to play a Sim City right now.

PeteeWJ

@gunluva The Steam servers are too busy to handle your reque...:

From my understanding of p.g. .. because it's a pseudo-random generation of some codes repeated over and over again, the resulting output is much larger than any input...

[en.wikipedia.org]

well I don't know, I may have screwed that explanation up...

First thing I'd do after spending 50+ hours building a city like that is send Bowser in to annihilate it.

SilentSomno

Really cool screensaver actually, but it sadly does not work with my dual monitor setup :\

@Brad League: Music à la Brian Eno.

bysty

@amarney: All I see in my imagination is Diablo/GTA wherein places go random everytime you visit them.

Kuwabara Kazuo

@Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.: There is still a lot of work that goes into that thing above, and I'm assuming the level of detail, when on street level, isn't GTA quality.

You still have to design all those buildings individually, and the city structure is... just... a grid. unlike that interovision thing.

It would be cool to have randomly generated cities for some next next gen MMO GTA-type game, but i don't think the detail and quality will be there.

Yeah, you can spam out a bunch of buildings... but if they arent important, recognizable and gameplay applicable, who cares? it'll be a ghost town. Maybe use this to get a basic map, and then hand-edit it to give the city character and a "feel". but at that point, you're putting tons of work into it. so... this doesn't save time.

It'll get there someday, maybe. but this isn't it.

Noodle-Works

Imagine playing a Mass Effect-style planet-hopping game where you're in a ship / mech / whatever and you get a fresh city every time you touch down on a new world.

amarney

@gametr4x:
5 seconds.

Avalanche (the Just Cause guys) use lots of procedural generation, including cities and roads.. Their city generator looked a lot cooler though. It didn't just drop things on a square grid, it made realistic looking roads, and placed buildings more intelligently than just "tall in the middle"... Going to see if i can find a video of it...

Step 8.) Have Superman fly through green rings in a difficult manner & attempt to save a citizen in danger.

huppster

@gametr4x: Ah that sounds about right too.

@Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.: The program most likely runs its course in minutes or less. But it took 50 hours to put the coding together.

gametr4x

Sweet, download it:

[pixelcity.googlecode.com]

phreakindee

@Komrade Kayce: Oh snap.

@MtlAngelus:
yup they would, any ways I saw this same video on wimp

@Brad League: Any game that doesn't need to realistically map out a specific city. You can just throw up some "background" city and paint it up.

Justin Nelson

I'm friggin' amazed at how tiny this screensaver is. 124 kb? Wow.

@momo: They are coming for you, momo.

What, no street lights? It's anarchy, the "cars" are just driving right through each other!

Justin Nelson

@MtlAngelus: Well this isn't like. Hit a button and you're done. I would think this is just speeding up the process of giving you a generic random city and then the level designers can fine tune the details how they see fit.

This was how matrix was built...

momo

@BubbleF**kingBuddy:

Coming soon - GTA: USA.

@Mobusaki: I'm going to guess it took 4 minutes to explain the process and 50 hours for the program to run it's course properly.

I would imagine you just plug in some variable and hit go then the program goes through its own logic to create a city at random.

@Brad League: Large cities built completely randomly based on a set of rules in the coding without the use of anyone needing to create large maps by hand.

@Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.: Unlikely, if you want to have the same level of detail those games currently offer.

Does this mean that making Huge GTA-style city-states that can fill up a Blu-Ray disc are now easy-mode?

BubbleF**kingBuddy

For those confused by the title as I was, but didn't watch until the end..."How to...in 4 minutes" because the video is 4 minutes long.

It actually took 50 hours.

... I know I'm not the only one confused by the title!

Wicked cool. It would make a great screensaver indeed.

YAY!

Maybe this will mean we'll finally have less games set in New York or obvious New York-esque cities!

that is awesome!

what are the applications of this?

Brad League

@Xusder:

GTA + L4D? Sign me up.

@InconspicuouslyConspicuous: Correct. The program/screensaver does not include any art at all. There are no models, no textures, etc within the file. Assets like these are what will take up the very large majority of any actual game.

Everything in here is made from some random math formulas when needed (during the 5s or so load time actually). In that 5s load time he randomly generates something like 4000 building models and 8 textures, then glues it all together into a city.

@Mobusaki: Should be "in 50 Hours", but that's not as catchy.

@emwurst: Coming Soon - GTA: Background Scenery
Because It Wouldn't Look Pretty If You Were Actually There

*yes that second line is also part of the title

Kiri Komori

@Mooglepinoy22: Well, there have been those java applications that had simulations of zombie outbreaks (for example, the green dot is a zombie while the red dots are humans, watch as the green dots multiply, hehe!).

But I think you mean to mix this and that idea together, which would be also cool. Sort of like L4D on a massive scale...

can you say video game in the making

@CMay: Ah, mine renders it in seconds on one monitor and displays it nicely, but when mixed with my other monitor (a 1080p TV), it takes like 30 seconds to render, and it runs really choppy and none of the buildings have lit up windows. Just street lights and cars. Could be the uneven resolutions.

@Justin Nelson: Good job skipping through the video. Yes there are street lights.

"Step 3: Place rows as simple dots for street lights."

If you were joking, then it was a horrible joke and deserved a serious response because it sucked so bad that I had to respond seriously.

@song: Stuff like this taken the extreme is where MMO's should be heading. That way the world can be enourmous, and still let ALL players play on a single server, like EVE. Having only one server is a huge deal. That is prolly my biggest gripe about WoW. I know a ton of people who play, but every single one plays on a different server. A lot of things change when its only one server instead of 5000.

If we don't get the best Godzilla game ever out of this thing, I'm going to be so pissed.

slyeye

@Komrade Kayce: Your simplifying the problem too much.

sereal

@Cronoking: You didn't think that threw. This might be a stepping stone for creating some what of a random city - visually. What I mean is it could be very handy for a Flying sim, or something similar where you don't actually go onto the ground.

The real issue here is that a crap load of textures and building models need to be created. (it's at night in this example so it doesn't really matter)

People have been creating randomly generated maps and dungeons for a while(certainly in 2d - 3d not so much)
It's a interesting video for sure, but I think people are assuming this is way more complex than it really is.

Personally randomly generated game content is the best kind. I wouldn't of played Diablo1 from start to finish a few thousand times if every dungeon was the same. Nethack or Powder (also any other rogue like game for that mater) are good examples too of making a game randomly that results in unlimited replay value.

Hopefully D3 will be stepping up to the plate and setting the standard for randomly generated 3d dungeons.

sereal

@Komrade Kayce: Coming soon - GTA: Procedurally Generated USA.

emwurst

@CMay: Yeah, my GPU fan kicks in to hyperspeed running this screen saver (Radeon X1950) so I'm pretty sure its not really "saving" anything.

@[www.infinity-universe.com]

Titan8883

This would be useful for building cities in games like Ace Combat, but it wouldn't work well for games where you actually need to interact with the city. Designers need to set everything up perfectly for a game to be truly unique.

@UFO: It's not a virus. People like these use all kinds of tricks in order to make the program as small as possible, and some of these tricks are also used sometimes by virus writers, so that's why your anti-virus is complaining about it.

Narishma

- Step 7 : ???????
- Step 8 : Profit !

@song: It could be a false positive of course.I didn`t rule that out but better safe than sorry and thought a warning to fellow readers was best rather than them thanking you for a trojan infested pc later.
I have had magazine cover discs in the past infected with virus and trojans and they were not false positives.These things can get everywhere wether it`s intentional or not.

@Komrade Kayce: Or maybe a GTA game with a new city every time you start a new game?

@UFO: and obviously, you can always just watch the video since it's basically the same thing.

song

Wow... If I knew how to do this, I'd build a 3D miniature of Helsinki on my comp! .D
This was really something!

@UFO: Hm... it's most likely a false positive, avast doesn't detect anything and it definitely does run the demo... Heuristic detection from antiviruses is a bit *too* strict at times.

song

LOL @ step 7. That's what I was wondering too. Great work though.

Thut

@ara:

[www.vision.ee.ethz.ch]

dd528

@GcRayden: What do you mean 'anymore'?

dd528

@song: This reminded me of Dark City.

dd528

@Blue_Six : Can I really be the an hero?: Oh I know. Eno is my fav. But he also created "Generative Music", which is basically this idea applied to music.

bysty

I did mean traffic lights, thanks for pointing that out. And I did watch the video in it's entirety.

Justin Nelson

@Rory Michael O'Sullivan:

Game developers have been procedurally developed cities for years (True Crime, Spider-Man 2, etc) the only downside is that your city lacks any liveliness or unique character. It will literally look like a randomly developed city with no sense of history or developmental time line consisting of jumbled architecture and districts.

For this reason, Rockstar will never develop a GTA game using this technology because that sense of life is what they take pride in.

@DarCowAlways: all this does i generate a lot of very simple polygons and randomly draws "lights" on them. there's no textures, no shading. I don't see why it would take 50 hours. That number is probably just how long it took him to write the code.

Jotsy

@Xusder: I'm fairly sure what he meant was "traffic lights" rather than "streetlights." There are definitely streetlights, but no traffic lights, and the "cars" do nothing except travel straight along whatever "road" they occupy. They don't turn, or stop and yield the right of way. It's a little distracting if you pay too much attention to it since it ruins the effect.

bardofawen

Historical architectural and cultural preservation visualiation projects have done this kind of things for years now. Turning historical architectural rules to math and random generating ancient cities on top of old maps, etc. I saw presentation of one project few years back, just can't remember it's name for the death of me. -_-

@DarCowAlways:

50 hours is like more than 2 days straight, that's crazy. It took me 4 mins. to figure out that equation though which is equally too long.

@MtlAngelus:

This just goes to show that playing video games and making video games are two completely different things. Yet we still get adds to go to schools which pretend they are the same.

if you find this one good, i came across a hand made one with a cool video to go with it

[www.byhook.com]

put some tanks, planes and random explosions around it and you have a nice custom HAWX map =)

@Komrade Kayce: Speaking of which... I want a new SimCity already. :(

Mudkip 2: Return of the Zombie Meme!

I kinda liked the music, but they boys left out some serious things if they wanted to make this thing look remotely real:

- blocks that aren't prefectly square
- streets that aren't all the same width
- light reflecting off of the actual buildings
- add a level of randomness to the lights - not all buildings have roughly the same amount of lights on. Some should have more and a lot should have less
- throw some silhouettes or oddly-shaped light blockage in some windows
- a lot more smaller/older buildings
- VERY few cities have such uniformly developed downtown cores, spots here and there without office towers would help
- conversely, buildings of a similar style tend to be found in clumps i.e. 4 office towers built in the same style together, without some intentional repetition, it looks too random
- and where are the parking lots?

etc.

Pretty cool.

--Core--

@n00b_pwner:
Missing the point.

@mariospants: He has another video on his profile that shows off how the program does streets in a more irregular pattern, and frankly I'm far more impressed by this vid than the one in the article here.

+ Watch video

GravityBoots

@Justin Nelson: Same effect used in GTA IV when you're not close to the action. Haha.

@momo: Exactly!
The "I dunno what this is for" is just diversion tactics.

It's "for" nothing... we're IN it now.

Bokusatsu_Tenshi

@Rory Michael O'Sullivan:

I see your point of view, but you really shouldn't even be using something like this to start a city layout or even a simple block-out. You'd be much better off doing it yourself just building cubes in max and working off a proper layout on a grid.

Using this type of tool, you'd be able to show a "3d City game", but for any other reason than aesthetics, it would be useless. There's just no detail or effort put in to give the player any sense of wonder, it's all just a repeating pattern. That's even assuming you ever get it to become playable in the first place.

In a week or two, a group of 5-10 people could easily knock out a city with a good foundation/layout using the methods developers have been for years, and it would be much better than anything this tool could crap out.

i_9

My only complaint is that 80%+ of the building designs have the same "step pyramid" tops. Why? Of course, you don't see them in the final product.

Fred W Ramsey

This is pretty cool. Way past anything i've done/used!

However, if you like the steps in this, you should check out Subversion from Introversion.
[www.introversion.co.uk]
The blog there goes into some detail about the process.
It's also a lot more detailed in the generation of maps and buildings (actual internal floor plans/schematics and rivers, scripts for lift/elevator function etc).

Again, the question of Step 8 has been repeated!
To date, they have not publically said what the game Subversion will be about. They've just hooked you by a very intricately designed city maker that leaves you wondering how you play/interact.

OrientalHero

So what does this do to the whole "intellectual property" argument? Technically, you could write code to "procedurally generate" anything, like a movie/television/play/game script, a plot line, a painting, a movie/story/play/game character profile, a car design, a wallpaper design, furniture designs, clothing designs, a valid chemical compound combination to cure diseases, etc. ad infinitum...

I guess my question is: what gets "owned" by the "creator"? The code to do it, *everything* the code is *capable* of generating, or both?

Oooh. We could see more 3d randomly generated levels. Very nifty proof of concept.

The Amazing Exploding-Man

That's what she said.

Justin Nelson