GAME PROGRAMMING WORLD ROCKED TO ITS FOUNDATIONS

The internet is already beginning to drip with an image of a computer role playing game that features what appears to be a city with more than 30 houses in it. The image appears to show what could be several thousand buildings.

An industry insider has revealed that "Tod Howard" (seemingly unaware of all of this), at an Oblivion II work-in-progress conference, proudly anounced that Oblivion II's main city would feature up to 100 houses (excluding guilds, shops, inns, etc) that were not portalled into sections. Industry journalists were shown many screenshots and video footage of the (work-in-progress) main city. "Howard" seemed somewhat rattled by the lack of appreciation for such a step forwared in CRPG development. Apparantly, a journalist showed him the leaked image and he stormed out of the conference.

A Bethesda spokesperson later said that the image is clearly a 'Photoshop' and can be disregarded as mere hype.

However, another industry insider has revealed that a mole in a private Bethesda IRC chatroom has released a transcript of 4 very prominent Bethesda employees discussing that this would probably delay the release of Oblivion II by a somewhat large margin. The transcript shows clear panic and also a disbelievement that someone could create a CRPG city with more than 30 houses.

Game development experts agree that the screenshot is probably mere hype, as rendering that much geometry would be prohibitive, and many consider it simply impossible to do in real-time and in a game environment.

However, this opinion was shattered with leaked video footage of walking through the city from one side to the other. Many experts, who had gathered in Silicon Valley, gasped at what they were seeing. An EA Games consultant claimed it had probably set the rest of the industry back by 20 years. A senior Atari programmer claimed he had not witnessed anything like this since I.D. released Wolfenstein 3D and shattered RPG development that had seen 90 degree turning Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master style games battered into the stone age.

You made this with one of your media packs right?

Where can I find this video?

Puki's strange, strange little world.

Too funny that they get shaken up by something like this after they have seen what speedtree is capable of ... yet this is nothing else than "SpeedHouse" if we want to call it like that ...

Above that, such stuff isn't new ... question is on whose highend system it was done ... the Q3 realtime raytracer 50ghz monster? ^^

you gotta give points to puki for attention seeking :-)

Grey Alien, my thoughts exactly.

Points? Ritalin gets my vote.

Maybe Puki is actually in a prison for the criminally insane and he collects these media packs in order to build himself a little fantasy world that he can walk around like a normal level-20 paladin.

You fail at writing believably. id Software is not "I.D. Software." id is what Freud deemed to be the part of the mind that was responsible for impulsive and self-satisfactory behavior. In a sense, you could say your id is several times more out of control than anyone else's. ID is just identification.

100 houses ?

Are you boys talking about the Tiberion RPG again ?

I want attention too... :(

Maybe ill post a picture of my apple and insist its Halo 4.


It might work...

Well, there are 4,000 buildings in that section of the city - weighing in at 20 million polys (unless Blitz3D is not accuratley feeding back at such vast levels).

The point is that so many RPG games feature cities - when you go to these cities, you see 20 or 30 buildings.

I've played a lot of games that feature this city and that city and it only has a few houses. I don't consider them cities.

If Oblivion II featured at least one city like I have pictured wouldn't that get people excited? Wouldn't people be itching to explore it?

No it would piss them badly because you need a week through it and an Oct core to simulate fauna and AI ...

Such a city would just be the proof of totally noobish lead designer capabilities.

You seem to be a AAA sony fanboy candidate ... you rate quantity above quality as well.

Mmm, could just be me.

I think it is cool to have a big city. I just feel they need to be a bit bigger.

The predecessor to Morrowind and Oblivion was Daggerfall - Daggerfall had various sized towns and cities.

My city is more inspired by seeing videos of Assassins Creed. I thought it would be cool to have like a 'Thieves Creed' game. Sort of like a cross between Assassins Creed and Thief - The Dark Project.

I've yet to play Assassins Creed, so don't know the extent of its cities - but the crowd scenes blew me away and I like the idea of bustling narrow streets.

assassin's creed is looking good, but you will get bored really easy, all the good looking starts sucking when game mechanics start to get boring, because it's allways the same, the only thing that changes is character and the city, rest is exactly the same, you must do 4 things before you can even get to the character you are hunting... very boohring, but you can try lifting content out of that and making something better pukinator ;)

Bare in mind that my city has virtually no overheads. I'm only hitting about 300,000 to 500,000 polys for the buildings in view. This is easily running on my system.

The picture shows the size of a quarter of the city - that is not the view distance of the camera. That is to show the overall size of this.

The design of streets means that there are 'blockers' that enable me to keep the view distance down without the player noticing that it is being throttled.

There is no faffing about with portalling or occlusion. There is no pop-up or fogging being used. It is simple and fast and the view distance is very impressive.

well ... add the rest of the content and we will see how easily it will be running by then ... because there is one elemental and massively costy thing not present there at least not that you mentioned it: collision and picking

Collision is already in on all 4,000 buildings per quarter.

Doing 16,000 active at the same time did cause a noticeable slowdown. Even 8,000 was sluggish.

4,000 works fine - then again my system is high-end in graphics terms.

I'm probably reading ahead less than 100 houses.

Actually, I just spotted that I haven't single-meshed the buildings with Deep Exploration. They each comprise 7 to 20 objects. I'd like to test the multi-versions against single mesh versions.

EDIT:
Mmm, no noticeable difference between using single and multi-meshes. Then again, I never really saw any gain (other than memory) in DDS textures over PNG, etc. Could be my 8800 GTX just isn't feeling the pressure from Blitz3D.

Last I recall, Vivec in Elder Scrolls III was pretty dang big.

Graphics do not a good game make.

release a demo, let those with good ol' cards and systems ie non-super systems give it a whirl.

I think you're on to something interesting Puki, but can I make an aesthetic suggestion? Use buildings with a greater variety of heights and masses. Everything looks too flat and uniform. I'm sure you can find some "borrowed" media to sort this out. ;)

I've always been interested in city-building. I'd like to create something similar, but in an Akira Neo-Tokyo style. And with original media, of course.

my first thoughts were ankh-morpork (sp) but without the unseen university looming overhead (perhaps more of the shades area) ... just buildings erected too close together

i agree that 10 houses a city does not make
but do you have 100 houses that are 90% unaccessable to the character just for something to look at whilst you go from tavern to weapons shop instead of rolling filelds in the distance

"Fuller" - Vivec was bent - it was like pyramids.


This is utter rubbish - a city should look like a city - with houses and buildings - not several large pyramid things.


"JustLuke" - not a problem - I can alter the size of buildings in build-time. Most buildings have detachable stairs so can be planted higher or lower into the ground (ie with the door at ground level or up as high as you like and accessed by stairs).


"Ginger Tea" - all of my buildings are 100% accessible - they all have interiors - thousands of buildings to go inside.

1000's buildings for you do digitally burgle for media ;)

You'll need different stuff to do in most houses though. Walking inside a house generally isn't a thrilling experience :o) Unless it's a real one, and your wearing a balaclava.

walks in random house

"baa"
"Oi!"
"oh sorry wrong house"

Nobody else can do this - nobody.

Ask yourselves - when have you seen anything like this?

Who has seen a RPG with this much buildings in one location?

I simply am the most greatest who ever did do stuff that was greater than anything else that was once great but just got made to look totally bent.

There are commercial developers ripping their hair out looking at this. Bethesda are probably looking at their cities right now and wondering if there are any legal implications to sell a game that features cities that only have a few houses. I mean - surely someone can take a game back for a refund that claimed to have cities that turned out to be 10 houses, an inn, a few shops, a well and a pig.

wouldnt that be a hamlett?
or would they get sued by cigar manufacturers? ;)

when you develop something like the unreal 3 engine etc then i think you should wonder if developers are panicking. Really though, it's not been done as of now cos what's the point. When you have a fully up and running game ie gui, ai, fx, sound etc having a 1000 house in a city would be too much work to add any variety and is it really that important.

I think an RPG city with anything more than 50 buildings would become a tad tedious to explore. Id want to be out of the city down dungeons whacking stuff.

i think the defining issue is the term city

city = big
town not quite a city (although some towns have been upgraded not due to size but by the addition of a university or cathederal hence why cambridge is piss small but a city)

village (the most common rpg setting size wise)

hamlet (do we still have those?)

What's with the the 3D obsession? I have seen some isometric
rpg games with big cities too without annoying loading times between every gate like in elderscrolls.

Why is there so much empty sky?

yep, if a place has a cathedral, it's automatically a city. My question is what's the difference between a cathedral and a big church? There must be some technical definition.

a Cathedral is a church that contains the seat of a Bishop.

The word cathedral is derived from the Latin noun "cathedra" (seat or chair), and refers to the presence of the bishop's or archbishop's chair or throne

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral

[edit] accidentally removed link somehow. replaced!

thanks for the clarification dude. Did you wiki?

Yup! but uh, looks like I deleted the link when I edited my post. Fixed X-)

(That was not done to make me look clever at all- I promise ;-) )

I thought it was a cathedral or a university (as in old-skool uni, not a polytechnic) although i can think of no examples where you dont have one without the other.

Anyway, medieval style cities didnt have *that* many buildings (mabe only capitals like london), look at oxford as recently as the 1600s:

haha. well to be honest when anyone spouts any info on a forum, you can't know if they are really clever (or have a good memory) if they just wikied it. Everyone is now an expert (potentiall) :-)

I don't know puki, Assassin's Creed is pretty damn impressive when you see the city from above, like when you climb one of the high towers.

Yeh, but Assassins Creed is not like a traditional medieval sort of city is it - I mean it looks sort of arabic to me.

Anyway, it isn't on the PC yet - their effort is purely academic to me (whatever that means).

My city was made the day I posted the picture - I just wrote a program to auto-generate it and implement the method of 'blocking'. It will look better - even though it already looks better than anything else currently out there.

medieval but just in another country?

Arabic doesn't count. Has to be similar to mine or it doesn't count.

My earlier quote:

Hello.

Personally,I thought the opening animation of 'Lords of Midnight' was better, more realistic looking.

Goodbye.

Lords of Midnight:


It most certainly is not better than my city.

More colourful though ;-)

puki are you going to be a second Xylvan?

"My city is brilliant! Lovely! Awesome! Lights of Medieval City in a Cold Winter Night of Dreams 3"

Good Job Puki that is something to be proud of (seriously) :) I love big worlds too but one city; 1000's of houses? that does sound kinda bloated. Amazing though

Nope hardly ever seen such a useless pushing of geometry instancing and nobody else did. But if you need it, load the Xors3D instancing sample and replace the cows with buildings.
It will look as unrealistic, uncreative and bad designed as yours.
Good looking and interesting scenarios are about Quality not Quantity man, even if you own every XY models packs that one could own.
It still is about how and what you do (and most likely why), not about the how much!

or borrow (c) media wholesale from games like puki does ;)

Mortis: lol

Hello.

No, I meant the animated intro on the C64. In work at the moment, so can't look for it. But it's much, much better than yours.

Goodbye.

Now if it was a living city, with ai and 1000's of people to go with the houses, then it would be amazing. We wouldn't want 1000's of house and not many people, would seem like a ghost town and really pointless.

the game Revolution was meant to have an infinite polygon engine. Edge magazine ran articles where they zoomed into a window ledge from miles away, zooming righ into the flower pots on the window ledge. Obviously it was all bullsh@t and the game looked pretty normal by the time it came out.