Complete City in Irrlicht

[Guest]

hi again!
because programming a whole interactive nature environment can be really damn hard i sometimes want to take a break and do something else. now i just had the idea to model the entire city where i live in (bramsche, germany in niedersachsen) in blender. i know that sounds crazy, but because the city isnt really big compared to others, it would be possible. it would take me quite a while, but that doesnt bother me because i have waaay to much free time. (besides, maybe i could presentate that in my school and gather a good grade of that hehe )

my questions are:

1. would it be possible in irrlicht to display such a huge level without big framrate drawbacks?

2. could i export the whole city in one mesh? or would i have to do all the houses and such in separate files? because that would suck, irrlicht has no level editor and placing them all by code is too much work (i know etcaptor is working on a good visual editor but i guess it will take a while to its completion and import and export functions...)

3. what about texturing? could i do it with UV maps? i guess the texturing will take the most time and i dont even want to think about it know

4. if the city is ready, maybe someones of you would like to form some sort of "team" and make a game out of it? i have no idea, but because the city would be quite big you could make a cool GTA style game or reallife simulation out of it ok, does not interrest me now because i havent even begun yet, i first have to get a city map and a few plans and a photocamera before beginning the work

5. how could i place the entitys? i could do it with my vegetationmap reader, but that would be freakin complicated because a city hasnt a shape like a terrain (128x128), so i would have to rewrite it a bit and it still would be so accurate as i wanted it.

6. can irrlicht acsess the mesh of a model? if so, wouldnt it be possible to make the city "interactive"? eg. i take a rocketlauncher and make a hole in a house by meshdeforming?

7. how would i texture this biiig model? should i merge it all to ONE mesh and then texture it with uv? but how would i scale and align the textures right then? or should i use many meshes and everyone with its own material and texture ? ( but i dont know if blender could handle THAT MUCH materials and textures)... very complicated. or the easy way is i look for a texturer that will do it for me then i model the city and the skinner will texture it... but i would prefer to do everything on my own, so if someone could explain me how to texture right it would be greatly appreciated and mentioned in the credits


and the last question:
do you think i could finish this before iam 82 years old ? any tips on how to do it ? or suggestions? free your mind and post every idea you get


ps: this is meant serious i really want to do it if it isnt too much for me to handle, so i dont start before you post some comments/critiques/ideas or something else

ps2: is this the right forum for my post?


edit:
for information:
www.bramsche.de

klick on the image to get a (pretty damn much) bigger size of the map (only streets and names, the rest i have to look "manually" (poop i hate walking around ) ):

[coder2000]

I am already planning on making a gta/underground style game. check my thread under project announcements. I was originally planning to model it after my own city and might eventually but I could use yours as well. What do you think?

[Guest]

I think you can expect frame rate hits regardless of how big your city is.

It will depend on culling and on the complexity of the buildings.

I also don't think the current rendering code in Irr is up to the task - AFAIK there's no optimization in what gets sent to the graphics card in what order, so there's bound to be a lot of overdraw which would be avoided otherwise.

However, let's suppose for a second that Irr's rendering code IS perfectly optimized:
if you walk around town, you'll only see maybe a couple of blocks of houses at the same time. Not bad.
But if you fly over the town, you'll see all of them at the same time.

In other words: you'll need to use lower detail versions when the buildings are further away, and higher detail versions when you're upclose (presuming that you want to see more details when you're standing next to a building).
I'm not sure you'll get decent performance with Irr when rendering a whole city, but using multiple levels of detail will improve performance a lot.

[Guest]

but then i would have to model everything separate and it would be complicated to place them on the map, so thats a not so good idea
maybe i do not model exactly the same city because i want to bring in my own elements and textures because photographing a whole city would take ages (and i may merge it with another city called saarlouis - i like that city alot and there is much more interresting then in bramsche, but lets see ...)

so far, any more comments ?

[AssiDragon]

In other words: you'll need to use lower detail versions when the buildings are further away, and higher detail versions when you're upclose (presuming that you want to see more details when you're standing next to a building).
I'm not sure you'll get decent performance with Irr when rendering a whole city, but using multiple levels of detail will improve performance a lot.

That's LOD unless I am mistaken. You can do it manually even now, unless Irr supports it builtin (dunno if it does).