Pixel City – Procedurally generated city (2009) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Pixel City – Procedurally generated city (2009) [video]

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210 pointsjdmoreira33 comments

Shamus Young's stuff is pretty incredible. Not the programs themselves, because it's "been done before." Rather, it's his writing skill that really shines. He has a true talent for describing and illustrating difficult or complex programming, and then showing it in action in a nicely-wrapped binary executable. You can see all of his wonderful series here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=16458

If you like scifi, go read his System Shock fanfiction novel. It's great.

Would that be his book "Free radical"? He mentions System Shock in the Forewords at: http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/

Yes.

He has also had a bit of a rough life, good to see he making the best of his:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12687

A little surprised that this doesn't seem to be a demoscene production, because it has all the characteristics of one. I was even expecting greets in the endscroller.

If he could get the contents of this video down to a single 64k or 4k binary (including the music), it would make a great demo. Cityscapes are pretty common and definitely doable in 4k or 64k; here are two examples of winning demos containing similar scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UgbKQKD9I4 4k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaNYOzwlVC8 64k

Polygons are for the weak.

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsBSRG

(There are several awesome-looking procedural cities on ShaderToy. Here's another nice one: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdXGW2)

I really enjoy these, and had this bookmarked. A nice example here:

http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_city.html

Holds up very well and looks very impressive (plus the source is uncompressed and interesting).

Plus if you ever need to warm up your hands on your old laptop, this is another very good example from the same author:

http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/animation_physics_vehic...

Step 7: Release it as a... Damn. I actually have no idea what this thing is for

Summarizes my development career to date. Still awesome to watch...

I would love this as a screen saver.

It exists as one for many platforms

http://rss-glx.sourceforge.net/screenshots.shtml

I ported some of the RSS-GLX screensavers to Android, but never tried this one.

This was from the scrapped game project that Introversion Software ended up not finishing in lieu of making Prison Architect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J30i0gABfS8

What makes you say that? I'm fairly certain the two projects are unrelated.

I'm sorry, I was in a rush to write that comment and didn't make myself clear. I was bringing up a similar, related thing, and did not mean to conflate the two.

I like the Introversion one better because it builds the city organically out of roads, personally.

Did they ever release the source to that tool? I'd love to take it apart

Introversion, the indie game dev, also different-but-equally-amazing procedural city generator, for their now-cancelled game Subversion. It was actually bundled in the Hunble Introversion Bundle, and you could play with the parameters and make your own city. You can see a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pR8jpK4ETk

10/10 would buy it as a screensaver! It has been years since I saw a cool screensaver that is just fun to watch when I am not doing stuff.

[edit] There is a screensaver and it works! http://code.google.com/p/pixelcity/

I generally use videos as a screensaver, it allows me to have pretty cool screensavers fast. I use xsecurelock [0] with the saver_mplayer backend, which means that when I lock the screen, xsecurelock runs the videos in my ~/Videos directory on repeat.

I couple that with something like the Iron Man schematics videos made by Territory Studio [1] and I've got myself a pretty rad looking screensaver (with minimal effort).

[0] https://github.com/google/xsecurelock

[1] https://www.behance.net/gallery/26009421/AVENGERS-Age-of-Ult...

I used to be into modo as a hobbyist and this reminds me of the Telematics City showreel which for me was a true work of art (also from 2009).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PodUqc4B5Fc&list=PL4DFBA006A...

I ported this screensaver to OSX way back when, and I think it still works: http://emage-software.com/

It does! Awesome, thanks :-)

Seems like it would make an amazing GPL Mirror's Edge clone.

The whole shamus projects, from books (I read his autobiography) to programming posts are awesome. His game "Good Robot" was greenlighted recently so we are going to see his first released game soon, which is pretty interesting coming from a guy who talked so openly about it http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20638

ArtMatic Voyager has amazing procedurally generated cities and landscapes: http://uisoftware.com/Voyager/index18.html It's based on a powerful texture engine to generate colors and height maps and the model is ray traced...

I have one question, are the buildings generated randomly or is there any algorithm that generates which building goes where. The generation is like the urban version of "No man's Sky".

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

Funny, I was just looking at this yesterday night to get some ideas on building design.

The best part was when he added the yellow red lights. The swing of mood was stunning.

Makes me appreciate the Chrysler build all the more.

I would love to have this as a screensaver.

Also add [2009] to title.

Thanks, done.

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