{"id":645,"date":"2009-07-28T19:58:34","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T09:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=645"},"modified":"2009-08-24T19:47:47","modified_gmt":"2009-08-24T09:47:47","slug":"block-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2009\/07\/28\/block-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Block City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BlockCity\"<\/a>So I have most of the object placement systems in place now; \u00a0you can now place objects within the world (although there aren’t many objects yet available), and they’re stored in a useful manner. \u00a0The final missing piece is needing the game to throw away the renderable geometry for structures once the camera goes too far away; \u00a0currently, all placed buildings keep their geometry in memory, instead of throwing it away and re-building it when the camera comes back close to them again.<\/p>\n

Anyhow. \u00a0To get an idea of scale, and what placement of large, potentially city-sized objects was going to be like from such a low “human’s eye view” perspective, I set up the early-stages procedural geometry generator to give me simple cubes. \u00a0The one in the image above is a pretend-town that I just placed (okay, I’ll confess that the game thinks that it’s a graveyard, as I haven’t yet hooked up the unlocking of other building types in the UI). \u00a0The town shown here is actually quite small, compared to most MMORPG towns; \u00a0perhaps about the same size as an outpost like Ratchet in WoW. \u00a0It’s only 60 meters by 60 meters, and is 10 meters tall. \u00a0With such a (comparatively) small town being so massive on screen (and therefore difficult to place exactly where you want it), it looks like the player is definitely going to need a more aerial viewpoint for placing these things, and probably for landscape features as well.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I was sort of expecting that, and already have plans. \u00a0Although I think I’m going to work on procedurally generating individual buildings and other structures first, before putting my cunning plans into effect. \u00a0;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I have most of the object placement systems in place now; \u00a0you can now place objects within the world (although there aren’t many objects yet available), and they’re stored in a useful manner. \u00a0The final missing piece is needing the game to throw away the renderable geometry for structures once the camera goes too…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-ap","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}