Aloys:
(I was going to put this in the 'City Age discussion' topic but I thought it deserved its own thread)
As this Age is progressing on the modeling front, I start to realize it might be a bit repetitive, especially in the beginning, since 80% of it will be made of shells that will all be identical at first. And with all these similar walls and similar streets and similar shells, it could be monotonous to walk around the Age, I think we need to make something about this and add some variety in there.
There are a couple things I can think of right now:
Districts
We toyed with the idea of different districts. The first thing it would bring us is that it would allow to break up the City, both on a physical level (building walls higher than shell would nicely block view and optimise performance) , and on an organisationnal level (it would allow for a numbering system of shells based on districts)
So far I have broken up the city in 4 districts according to the plan dustin made here. It has 4 districts: White (central one where the hub is), Red, Green and Blue.
By having various disctricts we could differentiate them, have their walls and grounds different colors, and have them follow a certain theme. Blue could be about water: more canals, a waterfall, lakes in the courtyards, even some shells that can be accessed only by the canals, the whole Venezian theme. Green district could be more about vegetation: grass on the ground, trees, gardens in the courtyards etc. And red could be more about rocks and sand. The central one (white) will be dominated by the hub so it could be more generalistic. Just ideas.
Courtyards & Decorations
The way the city is layed out there is a large & 3 smaller courtyards in each district, they could all be decorated in a unique way at least the larger ones.
Water
So we have the rivers and the canals. The canal is circular and goes through all districts, but there could be some more canals placed in various areas to add some variety. Also some bridges would be useful.
Heights
The idea to have the Age be shaped as a bowl is nice but difficult to execute well. However I agree that some changes in the height of the shells or the district would be nice. The hub will be the highest point of the city, but some shells could be on hills, even the rivers/canals could follow that and have canal locks (I like that idea).
Lights
If the Age is to be underground and we have to light it up, lampposts or lanterns are needed. since we already have tons of lamps in Uru what about glowing plants? or mushrooms? They could be different depending on districts..
These are just ideas.
-- To somehow illustrate this, I made this plan (158kb).
J'anim Paedet:
Very nice. I like the idea of the courtyards especially.
One thing to note about the water:
The canals, rocks, bridges, etc. that will be interacting the with the transparent water areas should probably be tested behind a transparency before fully modeling, so that we know they will not turn out invisible!
About the lighting -- I don't think (let me emphasize the I in this sentence) that this should be a particularly dark Age, at least not as dark as is Ae'gura. Glowing plants and fungi all sound good, but I think we should probably have some sort of inherent ambient light at the start.
Aloys:
About the transparency: I am now in the following frame of mind: Cyan is trying to support custom Ages, they are tying to get tools released at some point, and they will not let us release Ages before that. So we might as well think that whenever they will let us release Ages again we will have better tools, and issues such as transparency won't be issues anymore.Maybe I am wrong though. And if I am, water will indeed be a big issue ph34r.gif
About the lighting, yes I'd like to see the Age with some real light beside the 'artificial' light. An idea I had posted in the 'city environment' thread was that shrooms/plants would emmit luminous spores that would spread in the atmosphere so we would have a diffuse light comming from above (think the spores in teledahn, but floating toward the 'sky'). Just an idea.
J'anim Paedet:
The only problem with that, beautiful as it would surely be, is that I don't think Uru's engine supports atmoshperic light distribution. Which puts a limiting factor on just how creative we can get with ambient lighting, because to my knowledge, we will not be able to implement areas of darkness or light in our Age.
Which reminds me -- did we ever agree on where this city is going to be?
Aloys:
If we're going down the plants/shrooms road, and if Cyan release tools we would use regular vertex lighting for the lighting, and we could use particles for the plants that fly up in the air (kind of like in teledahn).
Also, I agree we need to discuss some more about the environment of the Age.
Robert The Rebuilder:
QUOTE (J'anim Paedet @ Mar 6 2006, 10:02 PM)
The only problem with that, beautiful as it would surely be, is that I don't think Uru's engine supports atmoshperic light distribution. Which puts a limiting factor on just how creative we can get with ambient lighting, because to my knowledge, we will not be able to implement areas of darkness or light in our Age.
J'anim, I believe it does support some form of localized lighting. For example, look at Teledahn. There is different ambient lighting depending on whether you are in the shroom, outside, in the slave cave, in Sharper's office with the blinds open/closed, etc. It might be a matter of scripting, not sure at this point.
J'anim Paedet:
Hmm, you may be right. Not quite sure how it would be implemented though, leastwise through Blender. I think part of the Teledahn effect rests on avatar lighting combined with variable dark/light texturing.
I wonder if we could use RayBaker or something to accomplish this (although I never was able to use RayBaker for anything at all).
Robert The Rebuilder:
Shall we decide on the zoning for each district? This will help determine what type of development occurs in the shells of that district. Once we hash this out, along with a numbering scheme for the shells, we can then get to the good part: selecting shells for development!
So, let me propose the following zoning:
White: Community/Recreational
Red: Commercial
Green: Residential
Blue: Anything goes!
Note: the zoning is independent of the themes that Aloys suggested.
