Cityscape – update 6

Right, I’ve made definite progress towards getting things looking a bit better. It turns out that it doesn’t really matter than my buildings are ugly as hell, because buildings actually are ugly as hell – at least for the most part.

The first thing I needed to do was make the textures more interesting. And, again, I just went straight ahead and nicked the technique used in TwentySided‘s blog, althought it took some tweaking. In each window, I’ve darkened a random selection of pixels in the lower half of the window, and then addded a small colour modulation.

The next thing to do was to make the buildings more interesting. Currently, a building consists of a central main tower, and then on one or more of the building’s faces, a smaller sub-tower. This took a ridiculous amount of work to achieve, and several iterations of the maths concerned – and I’m probably still going to throw it away once I think of a nicer way of doing it. But it’ll definitely do for now.

The last thing this update adds is a movable camera – the spinny-round camera was handy for testing performance and getting an overview, but it was seriously limiting in terms of making cool screenshots 🙂 It’s pretty simple – we have a position, a rotation around the y-axis and a rotation around the x-axis. The WASD keys move the position, and the arrow keys affect the rotation. We generate a look vector by transforming a view straight down the Z-axis by the two rotations.

Oh, and I made the background darker and added a black base, to make things a bit more city-like. If I’m honest, the dark blue sky is the thing that adds most realism out of the entire update 🙂 One last screenshot:

Next, we make things a little less homogenous, and discover that it’s not as simple as we might think.

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