T w e n t y S i d e d

You’ve most likely witnessed the thing in action already, but I thought I’d go over the final steps.

Building Logos

i 
Green 
Mega
Super
Omni
e
Hyper
Global 
Vital 
Next 
Pacific 
Metro
Unity 
G-
Trans
Infinity  
Superior 
Monolith 
Best 
Atlantic 
First 
Union 
National 

Biotic
Info
Data
Solar
Aerospace
Motors
Nano
Online
Circuits
Energy
Med
Robotic
Exports
Security
Systems
Financial
Industrial
Media
Materials
Foods
Networks
Shipping
Tools
Medical
Publishing
Enterprises
Audio
Health
Bank
Imports
Apparel
Petroleum 
Studios

Corp
 Inc.
Co
World
.Com
 USA
 Ltd.
Net
 Tech
 Labs
 Mfg.
 UK
 Unlimited
 One

The names themselves are generated by combining elements from the three lists to the right. The first column is for descriptive self-aggrandizing that companies like to give themselves. The second is generally the name of a good or service that a boring conventional company might use in its own name. And the third column is for for the dry descriptive that generally follow the name of a business. Pixel City generates business names by taking a random entry from the center column and pairing it with either a prefix or a suffix, but never both. So you might end up with “Vital Imports” or “Imports Tech”, but never “Vital Imports Tech”. Using all three works in some cases, but looks ungainly in others. It also gets hard to make sure it all fits on the texture. A bad roll could bring the three longest entries together and make something verbose like, “Monolith Enterprises Unlimited”. Which doesn’t sound nice and won’t fit on the texture. (The system I’m using to draw characters is pretty primitive and doesn’t have the ability to predict how long something is going to be before it gets drawn.)

Obviously not all names make perfect sense. (iPetroleum? Really? Are you drilling for oil on the internet?) But most names are plausible enough and have a respectable level of variety. It can make 1,221 unique names right now, and every once in a while I think of another entry to make it even more diverse. Note that some prefixes have spaces after them and some don’t, so you’ll end up with “iMedia” in one case but “Pacific Media” in another.

Streetlights

I’m still not happy with how the street-level lighting came out. If this was a Game Developer Magazine Postmortem, then we’d be explaining how this feature put us a year over budget. I spent more than a few hours writing different systems, tweaking them for a few more hours, and then deleting them to try something else. The problem here is that my initial idea of simple dots for lights didn’t look anywhere nearly as good as I’d hoped, and I lost a lot of time searching for another solution. In the end I came back to my original idea and just decided to live with it. Many people looked at the screenshots and suggested the lights be bigger / smaller / higher / lower/ closer together / further apart, but these problems are just emergent results of the underlying problem that light simply doesn’t behave the way the program depicts, and the break in fidelity attracts the eye and draws attention to the weakest part of the scene. Changing the lights by making them (say) higher would simply change the problem being reported by your eyes. “Oh, now it’s too small… Now it looks too bright… Now they look too far apart… Now they look too far off the ground… etc.”

It will be interesting to see what other solutions people come up with once the source is released. Perhaps someone will find the silver bullet solution that eluded me.

Roof lights and radio towers

Image lightened in Paint Shop in order to make the towers more visible against the sky.

The radio towers are a simple 4-triangle spike with a lattice texture applied. A blinky light is added to the tip. I have a blinkentower on almost every tall building, and I still get complaints from people to the effect of “you should have some towers on the tops of those buildings”. I think they’re just too hard to make out in the low-res screenshots and YouTube video. Spotting a few black lines against an almost-black background amidst a sea of compression artifacts is no easy task, but I think that when viewed full-screen they’ll look good enough.

Screensaver Behavior

When invoked, the program generates a city (unlike in the demo video, this is done behind a loading screen) and then the camera flies around it for a few minutes. There are a few keys that change the program behavior. There is a key to toggle wireframe, another to cycle through the special effects, from bloom to the “glass city” effect shown earlier. F1 shows the full list of keys. Pressing any other key just exits the program, as screensavers do. After a couple of minutes the scene fades out and another city is generated. Rinse, repeat.

Tomorrow: The source and the Windows Screensaver will be released.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Here are the key points of the project, distilled into a short video.

Seeing the thing in motion really is more exciting than screenshots.

I know in the video I claimed it was released as source and a screensaver , but that step has been delayed and I’m to lazy to re-cut the video.

Soon.

Note that the stuttering apparent in the video is not from the program itself. It was running at 200-300fps with no slowdowns when I made this video. The stuttering either happened during video capture or during the encoding process, which I was obliged to do twice. (Cheapo Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support multiple audio tracks, so to get the typing sound and the music in there together I had to encode the entire movie with just the typing, then re-import that movie and add the music. There were probably better ways to have solved this, but all of them would have taken longer and I’d already spent more time on this than I’d intended.

The story of the cool cam is one many engineers (and by extension, programmers) need to take to heart, that marketing does not always deserve the scorn we give it, and that a little polish in presentation can go a long way to covering up the lack of polish in everything else. I applied that lesson to great effect here. The animated camera does a great job of showing off the cool stuff and hiding the rough edges.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.