So, we’ve got a road layout – now we just need to add some buildings to it. For a first pass, I just add simple blocky buildings; one per lot, with a height equal to the minimum of the width or height of that lot, and it looks like this:

…which isn’t bad, I guess, but there’s these enormous monolithic slab like buildings all over the place, and it looks really homogeneous again. So, let’s add the other building types back in and see what that looks like:

Well, that’s a bit better, but it still looks a bit Bladerunner-ish – the big buildings are still far too big, and I’m getting scene-dominating and unrealistic massive wedges still. It just doesn’t look realistic – I need to reduce the size of some of the buildings.

So, the next step is that once I’ve done my initial load of lot-splitting, as documented in the previous entry, I then loop over all the lots I’ve created, and if any of them are bigger than a certain maximum size, or have a length:width ratio of greater than 5, then the lot is split again, and this repeats until all the lots are a sensible size/ratio. And the final result of that is this:

…which I’m much happier with. I’ve also played around with the fogging a bit, which means the buildings don’t start to fade out until they’re much farther away; I’m not totally convinced it helps – especially on the NC10, which these screenshots were taken on – it just makes the scene busier and adds more visual noise. I’m also a bit unhappy that the buildings still all seem to blend into one – it looks better in motion, but perhaps I need to increase the amount of colour modulation that happens with the windows? The other this is that there’s no street lights or roads yet – I’m hoping that these might help to break the city up a bit more, and that’s the next step.

(note that the framerate in all these screenshots is ridiculously poor – this is because I took the screenshots on my little Atom-powered Intel-integrated-graphics netbook – on a machine with a sane graphics card, we’re still getting close to 60fps – although not close enough that I’m happy to leave it without future optimisations)

In the meantime, you can, as ever, check the code out of the bzr repo – we’re up to revision 45 now.