Making a city

#1 Here are some buildings I thought of and got from IRC (suggestions)

houses
shopping malls
stores
movies
stations
bars
clubs
resteraunts
repair stores
grocery stores
building material stores
factories
churches
hotels
apartments
hospitals
libraries
city hall
police station
pet store
whorehouse
schools
gyms
barbershop

#2 I think that this should be similar to the Game Beavers way of doing things. You commit a minimum number of buildings to get the rights to use all the buildings in your project.

Eh, you forgot the crackhouse we were talking about, maybe you could use the one-room house mentioned in irc ;)

Ive already got some buildings drawn out on paper, pehaps if you get neough people I could let you guys use those as examples to reference.

#3 32 QuArK Units = 1 3DSMax Unit = 1 Maya Meter = 1 Blender Unit = 80 MilkShape units

not sure i think thats one meter.

#4 Ok i made the crackshack we discussed in the irc im not an artist but hey i tried download it here

#5 Whorestore?!?

#6 Ben: Please include a picture of your model. Also you need to include the textures. the map file is fine for any one that wants to use it.

#7 You missed the following.....

Retirement Homes, complete with OAPs shuffling around on zimmer frames.
Bad Boys Boarding House (Converted Guest House), with charva teens strutting around puffing their chests and getting rat arsed on white lightning annoying local residents.
Guest Houses, with hordes of asylum seekers wandering aimlessly.
Biker House, stoned bikers tinkering with a bunch of knackerd bikes.
Greasy Spoon. Selling kebabs and pizzas. "Would you like some cheese with your grease?"
Lots and Lots of Bars.

You also need school mums driving four by fours and whose idea of off roading is to pull up on the kerb outside schools and shops, then pulling out without looking.
Drunks, staggering around looking for Kebabs.
School Kids, Skiving school worrying the OAPs.
Dogs. Crapping all over the damned pavement.

Of course, this should be totally familiar to anyone who has visited Whitley Bay. I may just be bitter now that I'm trapped here though. (At least the bikers are my mates).

#8 Thanks for the input Mark,
Actually im aiming at map type stuff. While im not adverse to player type models, im really interested in static models.

#9 Sorry, it was kind of a wry post after someone hurled in the front garden.

I guess it all depends on whether or not you need to be able to go into the buildings.

If you dont, it would be easier to make some boxes of varying sizes and use texturing to differentiate them.

I think there is a post somewhere where they discuss proceduraly creating buildings, which could allow you to create a wide variety of them from a smaller number of base ones.

#10 You are also forgeting the smaller items like:

Stop signs
street signs
street lights

#11 Check out Ken's book, it explains about unit sizes etc:

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5638

#12 Jeff and Thijs : thanks for the input.

Jeff: you are right ken does define some of this information. however, it reality these units can be rather arbitrary. they have to equal each other, however they could just as easily be equal to inches than meters. no one elses models would fit but thats a design decission. Im just as happy to go on with a generally accepted standard than try to fly in the face of what everyone else is doing.

Thijs: yep those are things that should be done too! not to mention all the other strange and unusual signs that could be done. like billboards and advertizing (how about an advertizement for the torque game engine!).

#13 I gave up on trying to keep model units synchronized. After a bit of playing with HL2's dev textures, the simplicity of it all hit me like a well textured brick. An interior is 128 pixels high, meaning a 128x128 texture would have an exact scale of 1x1. 512x512 textures would be scaled at .25 .25 etc. Pixels are inches in game, thus that 128 pixel wall is 10.6 high, about right for a building considering the additional room a camera needs. Players are typically 72 pixels high, 6' or 2 meters. Paint a stickman on your 128x128 dev texture, at exactly 72 pixels high, and you'll have perfect windows and doors. Paint a stair line at MaxStepHieght, and all your stairs will now work great. This system works well no matter what your building/modeling with since all packages (afaik) leave the textures scaled as you intended.

Oh, and for a good city start, check out 3D Diggers. Reasonably priced, and perfect for chopping into your own combinations. They also teach proper techniques for huge amounts of buildings to coexist nicely.

#14 Hey Michael (and everybody)

It sounds like you've got some good ideas going on here. It's great to see more people getting interested in what I would call "geographic data" for Torque.

Other things you might want to think about doing:

1) look into GIS. There's street/road data out there, as well as zoning, vegetation cover, waterways, etc., and it seems to me that if you want to make something like a real city, this data could be (fairly) easily converted to a Torque-compatible format. (Okay, it might not be that easy, but I plan on tackling it myself at some point, and those "Horsetooth Technologies" guys are probably working on something like this, you could ask them about it.)

2) I haven't really cleaned up my buildings code, and it's VERY, shall we say, ungainly at the current time, but I do have code that creates .map files for arbitrarily defined buildings, using cfg files to set out the parameters. see my profile page. What I've done is very simple, but it does allow any number of arbitrary windows (open spaces) in the walls. If you'd like to test run it let me know, it might take me a while to clean it up though.

#15 @Mark: damn, sounds like you live in an interesting neighborhood! I highly recommend moving to Oregon. You may experience some resentment from the natives, but they usually don't hurl in your front yard unless you live in Portland or a few specific blocks in Eugene. :-)

Keep your head down!

#16 Haha we've got some strange buildings floating around. hmm lets see if I can pull some up. weel you guys covered all the basics maybe you try
libraries
musuems
I think normal houses are always cool to look around.
treehouses ;)
oh yeah underground caverns aren't used enough in my opinion.

#17 Thanks Chris: Id be happy to work with you on this. For a while I was working of making modules for castle making. wall segments, etc. I gave up on it for a while but the way you are doing it looks interesting.

#18 A couple more:

Fire station
Shopping Complexes
Warehouses
Gun Armories

Cheers
Jason

#19 Here is the shipping crate Ive been talking about.


here is a zip containing everything you need to use this model.

users.qnet.com/~madwizard/Models/Crate.zip

#20 Has anyone tried modeling some various suburban homes? since thery're all based on like three different models, you could populate an entire commnity with a few models.