Threescaper: A website for loading Townscaper models into Three.js | Hacker News Reader

Threescaper: A website for loading Townscaper models into Three.js

github.com

199 pointsRed_Tarsius24 comments

For context, Townscaper is a lovely, meditative townbuilding game (or what you might classify as a toy, since there's no obstacles, progression, or external objectives). It's only $6 and I highly recommend it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/

In the same vein is an upcoming game called Tiny Glade, which currently has a free demo available, and HN may be interested to know that it's written in Rust and makes use of Bevy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/

Isn't there an online version?

yes, a version is here: https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/

Offtopic, but I really like the UI/UX of these games. Very intuitive building. Would be cool to see some of these concepts get into Unreal Editor. They already have some when it comes to landscaping.

> HN may be interested to know that it's written in Rust and makes use of Bevy

I seem to remember that Tiny Glade specifically makes use of bevy_ecs, but not the rest of Bevy/not the Bevy graphics pipeline. Maybe someone closer to the project/with better memory can confirm this.

Edit:

> The gist of them is that they really enjoy Bevy's ECS, they wrote their own rendering solution due to Bevy's relative immaturity and their expertise, and that the migrations have been really smooth: about half-a-day for the whole game.

According to https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1d4pnj5/tiny_glade_ma... and below comments

Townscaper seems to be one of the few games Steam games on Mac that works with a PS5 controller.

Nice game, I love the trick of making floating buildings.

Ditto for all Xbox controllers. It's bewildering how bad the gamepad support is on modern macOS compared to the Intel/OSX days

Also in that vein is Island & Trains [1], though the release date may be further out.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1957760/Islands__Trains/

Oh my god! Seriously. Wow. This is honestly sublime – emotionally. For so long I've had townscaper builds, many of which were from a really crummy time for me in my life. I still build at least one a week, as a kind of meditative task. I've always so wanted to explore these little creations. They often have embedded coves, labyrinthine stairways, and hidden gardens that the normal controls make impossible to fully appreciate.

So this is ... wonderful.. and I'm so so so grateful there are people that make these things. What a beautiful surprise to see on HN! Thank you so much for sharing this :)))) EDIT: my day tomorrow is entirely forecast to be spent indoors navigating these little worlds. EDIT2: I wonder if there's a way to get to floating castles? I seem to get dropped in the ocean below.

EDIT3: A rather big build I'm whiling away time on: j11y.io/stuff/Town.obj

I'd be curious how hard it would be to add things like teleport or double jump. I was telling my brother that these would make pretty interesting FPS maps (really probably not what most people would be using this for).

Double jumps work for me.

Awesome project! I've been very excited about stuff like this cropping up - where people take model-builders and then load those models into first/third-person 3d scenes. I know someone trying to do a similar kind of thing with Cities: Skylines, and I just can't wait!

But this is exactly as satisfying and surreal as I had thought it would be. You did a great job with this! If I had one note, it would be to start the player high above the map and let us fall into the town so we can kind of see the whole of it, as we fall. I simulated this in your demo map by running and holding jump as I ran up and across roofs which resulted in some wonky super-high jumps. Which I'm not saying are a bug! It just led me to being way up over the map and falling back down onto, which was really nice.

Townscaper also has a Unity WebGL build, for anyone interested:

https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/

When I'm in the demo, it lags to <30fps while I'm on any part of the city. However, once I leave it for the water (with the whole city in view), it surpasses 60fps. Why would that be? I expected having the whole city in view would drop the FPS rather than raise it.

without looking at the code, I can guess that things like occlusion and visibility calculations are a lot harder when you are within a city than when you know the entire city is in the same direction relative to the camera.

LOD optimizations are pretty common and standard too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...

I don't think LOD optimisations are enough when you are in the middle of a solid with complex holes in it, but that's a detail (no pun intended) - there are doubtless lots of other techniques you can apply. but my larger point was whatever optimisations you make, performance when looking at the entire city from the outside is likely to be better than looking at some part of it from the inside.

This is seriously amazing! Could have potential for parkour-like games, or even for exploring randomly generated liminal spaces.

That was my immediate reaction as well. Some part of my brain just prefers building walkways. In the web version, you apparently have to keep adding walkways above a building to convert it to a walkway. Super satisfying.

https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/#IzhCuIQmN6b832-HkACCzF...

That demo page gave me Battlefield Heroes vibes and made me nostalgic and sad. Looks really cool in any case.

There is some issues with the geometry that become very noticeable at a distance. Also while the nearest neighbor filtering looks good close up it aliases very badly at a distance.

This game is also great on the quest 2 and 3.

Lovely. I love that double jump works -- you can get on top of the very highest building in the demo.

This might be what push me to buy Townscaper

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