It occurs to me that the screenshot attached to the last post doesn’t show my classic buildings off terribly well, so here’s a grab of just one of them:

It’s been a while. It feels longer, as I turned 30 since my last update, so happy birthday me. It’s all downhill from here. I’ve still been working on this darned city, though, and here’s a screenshot to prove it:

So, what do we have since last time? Well, building on update 10, where I clarified the box-building code by assembling boxes out of 5 panels (I ignore the base, as my intent is to always have the camera high enough that you can’t see the bottom of a box), I’ve actually introduced columned boxes. To see what I mean by this, see the following diagram:

There’s two ways of creating a columned panel; either way, we can specify the width of the windowed panel, and the width of the spacer columns. Then we either specify the desired number of windowed panels (easy to do, harder to use), or the desired width of the whole panel (which is harder to do, as I discovered, and obviously means that some compromise has to be reached if the desired width is not exactly achievable with the panel widths supplied). The algorithm I use essentially ensures the whole panel is symmetrical about the mid-point, and won’t ever have two blank column panels next to each other. The implementation is a bit yucky, but you can check it out in BuildingBuilderPanels.cs in AddColumnedPanel() if you’re interested.

That done, I set about making panelled boxes, with exactly the same sizing options as before, and then from that made a “Classic” tiered building design, as you can see in the screenshot above. This is an extremely customisable building type, and takes a ton of parameters on construction. Basically, each tier is slightly smaller in width and height than the one below it, and is separated by a black spacer block, which can overhang the blocks slightly. All the box sizes are rounded to integer numbers of stories and window-panels, and (for the moment) stretched textures aren’t allowed, although I might bring these back in if I can figure out a clean way of doing it. I’ve also added a simple routine to add some rooftop furniture, but I’m not totally happy with this yet – it doesn’t really stand out enough for me.

If you check out the latest revision, you’ll also see the very, very early phases of some particle code that I’m going to be using for things like streetlights, cars and lights on top of buildings – these will just be simple billboarded particles, not actual light sources (although maybe I’ll change to deferred rendering later and have them as actual light sources… or, maybe not!) and I hope to have them in some time in the next few days.

I’ve also spaced out the buildings a bit more – it means there’s blue gaps in the world now but I think the city looks a bit more natural spaced out like that; my city planning code is still extremely rudimentary, so needs quite some work doing on it, anyway.

The latest revision in the Bazaar repository is 37 now – check it out and see what you think.

Not a terribly coherent entry, this one. And no pretty screenshot for you to look at either, I’m afraid – in fact, it’s not going to be very exciting at all. I’d skip it if I were you.

However, if you’re determined to know what I’ve been up to lately, you’ll find the following bits and bobs in the latest revision.

• Cylindrical buildings – and therefore, also, a new cylindrical primitive type. I tried to get this working in such a way that I could carve off sections to give a more modern, building-ish look, but I had trouble getting the surface normals to behave. The way I’m doing it at the moment, I generate vertices around the central point, with the normal for each vertex pointing outwards, and then generate the polygons by sharing the vertices. The problem comes when you slice a bit off, and the normals become interpolated across the face, thus:

  
  The led to some weird lighting artefacts and the only solution I could see that would eliminate the problem simply would be to stop sharing vertices and rework the whole cylinder geometry generation code. Which is a job for another day, I think.

• Manchester “Beetham Tower” style buildings – This is quite an iconic building in Manchester and a simple enough one that I figure it’s worth putting in – it’s basically a simple block skyscraper with an overhang halfway up:
  
  Simple as it may be, though, it took me quite a while to get my textures to line up, and it’s still not right – also, the tower has quite characteristic window patterning that I should perhaps attempt to replicate. Still some work to be done here, I think.
• Lastly, I’ve factored out a lot of the building builder classes into separate files – the Building.cs file was getting unwieldy and awkward to navigate, so now it’s much simpler.

I’m still not happy with the buildings: the big problem at the moment is a lack of detail: the buildings are all too uniform and the flat walls-of-windows lack any sort of visual interest. I’ve got a couple of ideas to add more interest – adding black columns to break up the walls of windows, a bit of rooftop furniture and more detailed buildings, that sort of thing – and hopefully I’ll find some time to add that sort of thing soon; it requires quite a bit of reworking of the BuildingBuilder, though, so it might be a while before we see any real results from it…

We’re up to revision 25 in the repo now. I wouldn’t check it out, though, as I seem to have forgotten to add a file to the commit. Bugger. I’ll sort that out when I get home tonight.