Oolite Bulletins

Humans in that long running experiment called the Earth don't always use the same type of civil building arrangment. Though moderns cities with high-rise buildings are common in the West (including Japan - also known for it's earthquakes), places such as Saudi Arabia until recently disallowed tall buildings and floating communities are known in Cambodia. Also living underground is known in Turkey and China. From this I would conclude that other species would not build just one type of city, but I would believe that they may build types of cities that we wouldn't or haven't yet. (e.g. Insects could sometimes build giant termite mound like cities - though made of modern materials).

Also cities with large non-human populations could have buildings and structures you wouldn't see in human cities. Frog and Lobster dominated cities could have giant domed birthing pools.

submersible wrote:

Thanks for discussing this - it's quite helpful.

Is there a secret purpose to the query??

Selezen wrote:

Is there a secret purpose to the query??

Rather! - I'm hacking the povray planets original macros to see how easily city type features could be added.

The secret - the next generation of povray planets. It will be a very long road and _this_ time I am determined to invest more time up front getting the features , variety and "fit" correct. When trunk gets back into feature mode I will attempt to get shady-planets integrated with NEW_PLANETS, this would open the way shaders (and possibly special-case materials) for planets and planet-atmosphere.

Once such a feature is available on trunk and seems likely to make it into a release , I aim to launch a website allowing users to help crafting the inputs to a texture generating engine, previewing their work online with WebGL , with the option to download a generated OXP for testing their planet in-game.

You'll hear more about it this year, working title for the project is 'Shady Planets Alliance'

Nom nom nom. Sounds yummy.

submersible wrote:

You'll hear more about it this year, working title for the project is 'Shady Planets Alliance'

<chuckles> Project SPA, eh... is there going to be a Kickstarter?

PhantorGorth wrote:

Also cities with large non-human populations could have buildings and structures you wouldn't see in human cities.

The challenges added to "universal design" when you have aquatic, amphibious, land and air species of a range of sizes must be quite substantial. I imagine the Coriolis station corridors as having a couple of water-filled channels running along them, loosely covered for safety for air-breathers; quite a high ceiling, to give room to fly a bit; a range of benches and perches in varying shapes and sizes; etc. Similarly for planets, at least for the region near the spaceport, and perhaps almost everywhere on high-tech or mixed-species worlds. Ships I expect if you buy a ship from a pilot of a different species the first thing you have to do is have the bridge completely refitted so the controls make sense for your anatomy.

A bit too small a detail to be seen from orbit, though...

cim wrote:

A bit too small a detail to be seen from orbit, though...

In my experiments so far, general geometric shape and "busy-ness" is as detailed as it gets before starting to look too out-of-scale with the rest of the texture.

For the curious , here is an experiment using the new city placement macros. It's a pseudo texture-splatting technique, splats are only placed within the landmass and are masked by the landmass. This example used 50 random splats of texture picked from 5 different city masks.

City mask example. Used as intensity map


Edit: Additional test using 90 splats and a greater variety of city maps

They'll have to glow in the night... and look at the Nile or some of the bigger streets in Saudi-Arabia, for non-city lights...

Rorschachhamster wrote:

They'll have to glow in the night... and look at the Nile or some of the bigger streets in Saudi-Arabia, for non-city lights...

Fear not - shaders will be available for planets eventually, allowing emission maps and other fun stuff. Some evidence of those experiments are to be seen in the last few pages of About Planets

City texture overlay in magenta

submersible wrote:

City texture overlay in magenta

@submersible: That's looking amazing!
Given that the Earth has a bias to cities being on the shore in lower populated areas (e.g. South America and Africa) along with patches of high density of cities (e.g. Europe, USA and India) (see here for images of Earth at night) is it possible to reproduce that sort of distribution?

PhantorGorth wrote:

is it possible to reproduce that sort of distribution?

Reproduce - no , simulate/fake/fudge - yeah, probably. It is proving to be nuisance enough to get the number of splats and their threshold correct to give any kind of result. However if these were then modulated by same function which shapes the coast it would deliver that sort of effect. I'll keep posting these here as I progress

Looking good, sub!

90 splats , Now with a 'coastal-clumpiness' fudge.