A bit of detail on how Vuntra City's procedural interiors are generated and how I make sure each one is plausible and unique. Song: Shiah Maisel & Clarx - Done Better (feat. AViVA) [NCS Release] Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds
One recommendation I have for your city is to add air conditioners, ducting, roof access panels, piping, etc. randomly generated on the top of flat roof buildings. At 2:34 it's particularly noticeable that the roof of the building is barren, and I think adding even very simple models for HVAC units and such would add a lot more realism and depth to otherwise lacking buildings. The project looks fantastic so far and I love the quality system for interiors. Genius.
The key to good procgen is combinatorics and rarities. Rather than having 12 set interiors, you could break it down into several components for an interior that interact in different ways, potentially getting hundreds of combinations, and by making some components rarer than others it will feel more special when you see that particular variation. Strong combinatorics can create unique things even the author did not expect.
I love what you're doing. Keep it up! So awesome! This is amazing well done, This is very interesting, The city already has a good vibe/structure to it. Can't wait to see more.getting better all the time. please can I have a test demo,,
The interiors and color palettes look great! I’m curious if there will be different types of spaces (office, residential, shopping)? The footage I’ve seen so far looks like a city of infinite lounges and hotel lobbies, which admittedly has a certain kind of cool vibe.
Hey! Love your procedural mountain paths!Yes, there are offices, apartments and shops. The reason I don't show them as much is because they have a lot of empty shelves that I still plan to fill with interactive items that I haven't implemented yet. And yeah so far the interiors I've made are somewhat superficial because I'm still working on the deeper lore of the city, so I can create more specific and more unique spaces.
What you've accomplished so far is already really unique - not sure I've seen another game like this. I read in another comment you plan on adding NPCs to the game. Just curious do you have an idea in mind for the level of simulation you planning on doing with them? For example will they have schedules, jobs, etc.
What an amazing project so far. You really made it into something of a beauty already! If you want to go for a little more realism, remove the shine upwards from the lights (I assume you use a point light, because the ceiling gets lit up equally by the lights). Other than that, random objects on the walls might be nice (wall mounted lights, paintings, posters, an emergency hammer, etc.). I wish you all the best for this project, it is already looking fantastic imho.
just started working on a similar idea recently, thought I'd see if other people have done it before which is when I stumbled on your channel, this is pretty cool and makes me hopeful for the my project!
This will really be an awesome sandbox once , you add nav NPCs and maybe a NPC job system with personality roles that can react to when a player interrupts current and scheduled job actions . maybe alternate interiors hierarchies , like dilapidated chairs which basically have an additional decal in the sub tree (holes or tears, pealing paint etc... and unpainted rooms and exteriors ), when an areas economy goes down the drain ,for example a building/neighborhood is destroyed by the player or building management stops doing their job because player stopped all the NPC from following their job schedules and not being able to enter the area somehow with something that blocks nav meshes/zones with things like car pileups or barricades or destroys a major water pipe or electricity line etc... Anyway Im sure yo dont need ideas but your work got me thinking so thought I'd share.
This project looks incredible, I'm hypnotised just walking around the streets. I don't even play video games, butI would love to float/drive/walk around this city, especially when it was empty. Let me know if you need music contributing or support writing storylines
Gameplay, and interactive elements!? Just being able to explore like this is already incredible. Also, will these be "infinitely" generated, like minecraft, or will it generate an entire set space at the beginning, and have a set space? Also, will there be any plans of basic NPCs that walk around? Perhaps ones with no ai, but just wander in random directions, so that there can be a huge amount in places, with no significant performance impact. I don't know what's possible or not. you're the genius, not i.
Technically the city doesn't have a size limit, so I could make it infinite. But for now It's limited to a 20x20km square because I felt like it would be the right size. This might change though. And yeah I am working on vehicle and NPC AI right now, so that is definitely something I want. There won't be much combat if any at all, but there will be quests and NPC interactions to make the city feel alive.
Zamn, you've really planned this out. But I'm curious, will you be creating dialog for each npc, (like... 10 total dialog+branch options, but randomized to every NPC) or, will you be using a LLM Api?
@@synthwavesoundscape1893 I don't like the dialog created by LLMs that I've seen so far, so I will be writing dialog trees by hand. I might use LLMs to add variation to them and switch between dialog branches depending on the NPC's personality, faction, and attitude towards the player. At least that's the plan.
Add random cats to the interiors ;) But joke aside, your project is awesome. I can see a few genres that could take place in your city and come out as a really unique game.
I wrote my own system for spawning objects as you approach them and destroying the ones out of range, so there aren't actually that many on screen at the same time.
Why do you still require the 'illusion of percistance' once you have generated the city? Can't you bake the city layout so that you then have more freedom to add other shaped buildings? Your method is amazing and you have done so well, but I am just wondering if you could give yourself more freedom by taking this procedurally generated method as a starting point that you add hand placed architecture to.
The city is very, VERY large, so baking anything would take too long and too much space. Also the building shapes are limited by the interiors that can fit into them, not by the exterior layout.
Looks great, keep it evolving! You mentioned elevator do they work? if yes how ? Also is this optimized, is it render heavy ? I think you should create discord community so people can help you with it.
Yes the elevators work. They have buttons that can be pressed. It's a bit on the heavy side when it comes to rendering, but the quality is adjustable so it'll run on lower end hardware with lower quality. Discord sounds like a good idea, I'll look into it, thanks!
Maybe you could achieve rounded or non-rectangular buildings by using non-Euclidean geometry? Maybe the building is round or irregularly-shaped on the outside but the interior is rectangular and regular. Just a thought.
I'm using UE5. It is very stable so it never crashes. And I'm recording the footage on a RTX 4090, but the draw distances can be tuned down to run smoothly on an older system, my earliest vids were recorded on a GTX1070Ti.
Absolutely amazing. I do not have the werewithal to do this, but some of the things you're doing are similar to my thought process on city generation. Okay, so you use squarified tree to subdivide buildings after the elevator is placed there, and once they get cluster size you slot in one of the clusters, which are picked from what is available for the quality level of the building/room, which seems very smart. I presume the wall fixtures are a specialized cluster like you have a specialized color function for the lights? So, if I have all that right I have a few questions: 1) The Gaussian function you talked about for the more realistic color palette, is that nested or is it one function with multiple crests? 2) I presume you're using a number of furniture assets that are brought into the clusters. How many different models of common chairs do you anticipate using to fill out a 20x20 city? What about possibly unique chairs to do so? 3) You said there are 12 types of interiors, are these analagous to room types? Bedroom, dining room, family room? 4) I also presume that you can add to the division function to add color or texture profiles to make a given sector/district have a common theme? Though I imagine that would not be a trivial task...
Thanks for the comment! Some answers: 0. Yes I have specialized color palettes for the lights, also based on gaussian functions with multiple crests. 1. It's one function with multiple crests for hue, and separate ones for saturation and value. 2. I don't have that many assets right now. I got like 5-10 models for each piece that are mostly from marketplaces, although I made some on my own as well. But I think it's OK for models to repeat because furniture does repeat in real interiors. 3. There are currently no separate rooms, every floor is one big room, with occasional walls and doorways. Although I will likely add them later. 4. I can easily vary the parameters based on the more global sections of the city (like different color palettes for different districts) . But I'm not doing it right now.
The objects get created and destroyed dynamically, and I use pooling to make this process seamless. So there aren't millions of objects at any one time.
@@VuntraCity sounds like a very good approach and the results look fantastic. Do you have different lod models for the buildings as it seems you can see very far looking out of the windows
Any plan to make your work a plugin for unreal? Or other kinds of collaboration? We are a small indie dev team from MIT. Found it really amazing and cannot wait to build upon it.
