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.
Tags: buildings, c#, Cityscape, programming, XNA