Virtual City

[don_Pedro]

DEMO RELEASED - www.mupolis.com



I am working on engine intended for real time rendering of large urban environments, like in GTA for example. It's based on Irrlicht, of course . Core functionality of the engine is already implemented, that means it can display anything designed with my homebrewed editor .
Now something about its capabilities. After some tests I conclude that average modern computer, with 512Mb of memory should with no problem handle(store it in memory and display) virtual representation of comlete city of area 25km2(this is, I think, European city of about 50.000pop), with detail level not whorse, than seen on following screenshots . It surely doesn't sound stunning but consider that impression of size is much better on computer than in real life, and I belive, it's beter than in mentioned earlier GTA. All about i'm talking is case when all city is completly stored in computer memory, there of course is no problem with uploading some data at runtime, what gives even more area. The problem actually is that there's
need for big team to design such a gigantic map .
Well, I'll now present some of my work so far. I just started to design my first test scene(to this time I tested engine on random generated ones), and here goes first screenshots. I will release little demo, when I'll make a few more buildings .

[MikeR]

Wow, that's looking great.
Are you using 3dsmax to build it?

[don_Pedro]

No, I didn't use 3dsmax, because of limited structure of my maps I didn't found any existing 3d editor fitting to this purpose, so I had to write my own. It's still very incomplete but working . I will add feature of loading mesh objects into scene, and they will be edited in 3dsmax or whatever.

[area51]

woah..., this looks good, very good.
________
FAMILY 0 ENGINE

[Guest]

Looks nice.

But I doubt that an entire city of 50000 inhabitants would fit into 512MB memory.
Because for a virtual city you'll want more variety in the buildings (unlike in a flight simulator or racing game where you hardly get to see the buildings).
And variety in buildings means textures. Lots of them.

The good news is that when users travel around at walking speed, you'll have plenty of time to load stuff from disk.

[JoeWright]

Very impressive.

Next step is to be able to go inside the buildings and talk to the inhabitants

Joe

[don_Pedro]

This is of course estimation, but as I said, I tested it on random generated maps and it seems that such city would take about 300mb, that would leave some memory for system and the rest. But even if it would be 30.000pop. town it still would be quete big, big enough to get lost in it . The engine allows to give every building individual look, but it of course have also some weaknesses. It actually doesn't allow to make absolutely every shape and every architectural form, it have strong limitations. The city isn't stored in memory as mesh, it is stored in some kind of structure and only visible part of it is decoded at runtime and displayed on screen. The structure is designed to take as litte memory as possible and at the same time make as good visuals as possible, the results you see on screenshots. It actually can be better in future when loading mesh objects into scene will be possible. I plan them to be repetable objects you find usually in city, like lamps, benches and so on, it will give the scene even more diversity.

[don_Pedro]

It will be possible to enter some buildings but don't expect any impressive interiors .

[AssiDragon]

Looks nice. Keep the good work up

[etcaptor]

Yes, very good screenshots. Keep us informed about your project. Nice!

[DexteR]

Very Cool,

Are those PANTIES hanging around, can be pick up? Lols.

[katoun]

Oh my god that's very nice.
Have you actualy modefied Irrlicht or not?
Do you use Portal rendering cause for big worlds like that , that method is the best I know so fare.

[don_Pedro]

I haven't realy modified Irrlicht, I just made my engine over it. When I started working on it I was waiting for some functionality of future versions, like shaders and rendering to texture, that I was too lazy to make myself . So I decided to keep Irrlicht as it is, besides some minor changes - that made me easier to upgrade. Basically I tried to do it so it would be easy to replace Irrlicht routines by straight directx or opengl, to make completly independent engine. It of course will take much work, so it's future, now I just wanna have it working.
I didn't use portal rendering, I make outdoor engine, and I think portals may be better for indoors. Actually my idea is very simple, I started this project just as experiment to prove if it is possible, and it seems to be possible, so I work further . I can tell for now, that map in my engine have block structure, blocks are like fields in chess and over them is built something. Blocks are dynamically created when they become in field of view of camera and deleted when are not visible. I succeded to make it quite fast, and I still plan to make several optimizations, first of all occlusion culling, it would significantly improve performance.

[katoun]

Super
That is quit a very original idea and very interesting.
Nice.

[katoun]

By the way your work would surely help me to my game I intend to do so can I be able(after you release your engine) to make Virtual Post Apocaliptic Citys .
How about having more than one city on a map and roads cause I read somewere on the internet that it is posibly to code road data(there is actualy an engine that hase made that thing it is free open source but you must send an email to be able to download it but haven't got an ansuer yet)
the page:http://www.vterrain.org/index.html
about roads:http://www.vterrain.org/Doc/roads.html