Asset spawners rolling different structure features through theming volumes
City Planner Remaking Saints Row 3 scale in 2 days vs months.
Below are some early prototypes for Saints Row 5. These were not used verbatim as the actual game space, but were there to expose tech issues and limitations and give the rest of the team something to springboard from in dialing in the actual game map (Art, Design, Engineering).
These did not require a team of people to construct.
One person could easily administer and drive all the initial layout data in days vs weeks and months. This tool was called City Planner
Tech development
After Saints Row 3 shipped , during the in between project malaise, I started making prototypes that had the premise of building a world to the streaming/memory zones.
This was counter to previous efforts which involved blindly building to a art esthetic which during the end of finishing the game, caused a lot of memory thrash and diminished the initial art result. I wanted to find a way to solve this and some of those tests lead me to being paired up with a great TA and engineering team to look forward in improving our world building process.
City Planner
Once I joined the Core Tech Design Group (CTG), the first concept I pitched was a way to help us prototype large worlds to scale that didn’t require months of drudging to find the special sauce. This wasn’t just to feed the art direction but all team disciplines. The faster we had a world to test, in game, we could validate our game structure, art esthetics and mechanics. This idea spawned many supporting tech features, fixing others, and created new ones.
City Planners philosophy was to create a tool set that is artist friendly and easy to use. You don’t need extensive knowledge to use it. In fact you can just mess around and get a competent result. It was arranged in a linear flow of operation that would lead you through each step, and not allow you to skip them. This was by design to keep things streamlined into a controlled process.
Key Components
Control Mesh - This gave you terrain templates to choose from based on size. 500m x 500m and so on.
Road Network - Once you have some terrain you will build out your road network overtop. When you have all the loops closed you can conform that to your terrain and it will automatically cut out all the blocks
Theming volumes - This will trace out any block or blocks ( for larger volumes) and create transparent volumes that will be rigged with all the category information that drives what to populate in the blocks
Lot Population - This will auto parse out lots, based on theming volumes, and then spawn in all the structural elements associated
EXTRA STUFF
Video to the right is a mish mash of various ones. Probably good idea just to scrub it for anything of interest. Images below are some various screens of other city tests using actual road networks for the cities listed. The meeting videos at the bottom were just some fun things we did to make explaining technical things some what more interesting than the usual tech video.
Asset Spawners, City Planner Videos
Asset Spawning around the idea of themes.
Below are various test maps made with City Planner mimicking actual road locations. Each of these would take days to complete by one person.
Team Meeting Video 1
Team Meeting Video 2
Here is an example of the system driving layers such as street props and associated building props along with switching buildings out completely in the same footprints.
This idea was so we could build something once then do swaps to change themes or styles. We never got to implementing this into our companies work flow as circumstances pulled us away from this work.
Well if you did make down this far then well you can see a couple of team meeting videos we did to demonstrate the work we were doing to the company and tech team.
You could say we were a little loopy.