Trashing buildings in SimCity 4

Discussion in 'SimCity Legacy' started by Judhudson, May 10, 2009.

  1. Judhudson

    Judhudson is a Hi-Tech Redneck

    Trashing buildings in SimCity 4

    Ocean Quigley shares more of his time spent with the classic SimCity 4.* This time, Ocean talks a little about the plans for decaying buildings in the game.* They were trying to figure out the best approach for the buildings to degrade over time - through various conditions and sprites.* But it turns out that they couldn’t do all of the things they wanted to do due to memory and disk space constraints!

    Each building could have it’s own custom, automatically generated “crud” map (a combination of ambient occlusion and 3D noise rendered through the source geometry).* Just multiply it over the base building to make it dirty.

    Each building could also have automatically generated window masks (normally used to make the windows glow at night). Just multiply those over the building and the windows start looking dark and dingy.

    We could break the window masks into sections and apply them independently for a further stage of decay (we didn’t wind up doing that, having to save memory as I recall)

    As things go from bad to worse, we could mask a tiling boarded-up-window texture through one of the window channels.

    Since the game was in an isometric perspective, we could pre-render “crater” decals and lay them over the building, making it look like parts of the facade had fallen off.


     

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