Chinatown Assets

[Dubai Skyscraper 129]

yes, the LOD is about 114.  it would be a little more if I have to make them bigger of course

 

 

Hmm. Normally I'd say 114 is okay but using it in larger quantities, say 500 or 1000 of them... I'm curious if this would affect the performance. I'd recommend to test it with a few thousand instances before releasing it on Steam

  Edited August 10, 2015 by Dubai Skyscraper  

[boformer 3,169]

I would say make it exactly 16m wide, or maybe even wider so the poles are hidden inside the adjacent house walls.

In it's current state (just a simple modtools hack) it replaces all street lights of the small road.

It should not be a problem to add a separate road type for it, as a part of traffic++ or networkextensions.

I might try it in October.

[wallacet 336]

yes, the LOD is about 114.  it would be a little more if I have to make them bigger of course

 

 

Hmm. Normally I'd say 114 is okay but using it in larger quantities, say 500 or 1000 of them... I'm curious if this would affect the performance. I'd recommend to test it with a few thousand instances before releasing it on Steam

It's near impossible to get a poly count lower than that with circles in your model (while still having them look remotely circular).

[soldyne 111]

yes, and they are only semi-spheres at that, I removed the bottoms because you can't see them from the zoomed out angle.  I also removed the wire and pole bases from the LOD so all that is left are half spheres and the poles.

In the base model they are only spherical octogons (not sure what the mathematical term for that is), but, I did my best to reduce poly count while still keeping the illusion. even then, they are about 64 tris each with a single 8-sided cylinder in the middle and a prism at the bottom for the tassel (total of ~104 tris per lamp).  the rest of the count comes from the wire and two poles which aren't that much (about 96 total)

how tall should I make the street level ones?  how tall are most semi-trucks?  don't want the trucks knocking down the lanterns and causing a fire!

also, should I release both the spherical and oblong versions for the road or do you think the round ones are enough?

[Dubai Skyscraper 129]

I can think of a couple of ways to make the LOD significantly smaller than 114, but first let's see if 114 tris influence the game performance

[soldyne 111]

I did the experiment.  I created a small park with 50 lantern props each for easy figuring.  recall that the prop limit is 64.

I then placed 20 of them in a small area to make 1000 lantern props.

as a benchmark, in a small city of 4000 cims, I get about 35-40 FPS with vanilla buildings and models.  also, keep in mind that my machine is not optimized and is about 6 years old (still using a 460GTX as my graphics card)

at the closest zoom level where the main model kicks in I can't even get all the parks on the screen at once because of the area they take up.  infact, some of the lanterns in the far back are at the LOD distance, so I can't get 1000 of these on the screen all with the main model at the same time.  but I am getting about 30 FPS constant.  not much of drop but not negligable. 

At the closest distance where all parks are at the LOD range, my FPS goes up to about 32.

and at the minimum distance where props fade, I go back to my 35 FPS

So, yes, with 1000 of these on the screen there is a drop in FPS on my very old machine, but, in practice, you can see that 1000 of these takes up a lot of space and I just don't see the average person having that many on the screen in one place for it to matter that much.  anything more than 1000 would just not happen in a non-test city.

 

[GC_Vos 714]

Some really cool ideas in here, especially the big gate is very beautiful.

@ Soldyne: Hahah you could totally build a benchmark map like that. You know you could probably make those thing light up with an illumination map (not that performance heavy, it's just a glow effect not actual light).

I'd like to help out with some assets for this. I love doing signs so I can definitely help with those. Would they have to be like standalone props you guys attach to buildings?

Think signs like these would be really cool, especially with night time coming up:

  Edited August 10, 2015 by GC_Vos  

[wallacet 336]

Some really cool ideas in here, especially the big gate is very beautiful.

@ Soldyne: Hahah you could totally build a benchmark map like that. You know you could probably make those thing light up with an illumination map (not that performance heavy, it's just a glow effect not actual light).

I'd like to help out with some assets for this. I love doing signs so I can definitely help with those. Would they have to be like standalone props you guys attach to buildings?

Think signs like these would be really cool, especially with night time coming up:

See the first page in this thread. I asked earlier about how we were going to attach these signs. If you can figure out how to make a prop that sticks to a vertical surface, then you'll be in the money...last I had heard on this, props really only were able to be attached to a horizontal surface...maybe this has changed since then?

[GC_Vos 714]

Ah yeah I missed that part. I encountered that issue too with the default billboards. I think this shouldn't be a big issue though because we can model it so it hovers in the air at a certain height (say two stories up), with some metal rods sticking out. That way you just place it in front of the building. It'll come down to tweaking the pivot so it's easy to align. I will experiment a little to see if this is possible with default growables.

[soldyne 111]

here is the street version of the lanterns.  let me know what you all think before I release it.

this road/park can be inserted into an already built up district and buildings can grow along its edge.  the traffic flows under it just fine.  only problem is that they can't string closely together.  it has to hook up to a basic road before another park can be placed again, otherwise the road network won't connect to it.  but, that just keeps people from spamming it!

 

  Edited August 10, 2015 by soldyne  
adding new images

[wallacet 336]

sooo....there will be a pillar in the middle of all the roads?

[soldyne 111]

originally I thought that a string of lanterns that long would need some extra sag support.

hows this?

 

[GC_Vos 714]

That definitely looks a lot better than with the centered pillars. I would make the line sag a bit more. (Make the poles a bit more tall if needed)

Now all we need is Godzilla and call it a day

[soldyne 111]

thanks for the feedback.  these have been released.

I have one more lamp design (a single pole, path lamp) and then I will work on a wall set...

walls...its what I do...;)

[GC_Vos 714]

Think this could work for most buildings, only 37 polys. Fun will be the texturing

Also gonna make a horizontal and flat version.

[boformer 3,169]

Nice work! This is slowly taking shape.

[GC_Vos 714]

First vertical sign is almost done, just over 60 tris, still workin on lod and mirrored version

 

  Edited August 11, 2015 by GC_Vos  

[wallacet 336]

Looks good! I suggest making some sort of border for the colored part on all of them, similar to the red sign in the last picture. Since the edges of the signs (simply due to constraints of the graphics engine) aren't well defined at certain viewing angles, a sign border will help to define the physical area of the sign a little better.

[GC_Vos 714]

Very good point! On that note I hadn't generated normals or specs yet, though I think for this one diff/color/illum should be enough.

I added this border to the one with the black background, the other one I left as is (colored background).

Published:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498464216 A1

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498464406 A2

Both are the same base mesh, just textured differently. 72 verts base, LOD is 14 verts and should be super lightweight.

I would highly recommend changing the colors to your personal preference. The A1 colors are based completely on the colormask, the A2 has red symbols. Pivots are aligned wallside and moved up about 8 meters. This means minimum height is right above the average storefront. If you want to attach them higher up, just move the pivot up the walls (can bit a bit iffy but possible as you can see).

I think next I will be making some of those awning/canopy things. Any idea what size you guys want them to be? 3 cells wide maybe?

  Edited August 12, 2015 by GC_Vos  

[boformer 3,169]

can you also create a sign where every letter is in a separate square?

I would say 3 cells is good for the canopy. I hope that It won't look bad because of the view distance limit.

  Edited August 12, 2015 by schmidtbochum  

[Lot Creator 304]

can you also create a sign where every letter is in a separate square?

Somehow I don't believe that's how Chinese or Japanese works. While it is possible, it would take a while to sort out every letter, not to mention the amount of lots spamming the parks menu. It's more or less the amount of letters that exist that make it a feat. 

[Linoa06 1,374]

can you also create a sign where every letter is in a separate square?

Somehow I don't believe that's how Chinese or Japanese works. While it is possible, it would take a while to sort out every letter, not to mention the amount of lots spamming the parks menu. It's more or less the amount of letters that exist that make it a feat. 

Given how Chinese doesn't work like the latin alphabet, and Japanese uses kanji for many common nouns (though with a syllabic alphabet or two on the side)...it's just not how it works, sorry.

The best you could do is narrow down to Kana for Japanese so you can still write Japanese stuff, but even the Kana alphabets take up a lot more room than the Latin alphabet does. It also would not be idiomatic without kanji.

Given Chinese works with sinograms, I don't think that would even happen at all in the first place, there's no way to write Chinese even non-idiomatically without those thousands of signs. You could have a select number of sinograms but they could convey very little meaning...unless you don't care at all.

(Of course you can use Latin transliterations for both languages but it kills the flavour)

[GC_Vos 714]

So far I used google translate to find the symbols for restaurant, big supermarket etc.

The only thing I can imagine is to have it in one prop, so a bunch of those boxes instanced on top of each other. Then we can put anything we like in there.

But Lot Creator is right having a bunch of individual ones is probably overkill.

I kinda like the designs on the top right, maybe even with a big one on top?

Draw distance on the current ones is pretty decent, at least good enough for viewing a neighbourhood

They do disappear if you zoom out much more.

[wallacet 336]

Great progress. The borders do help to bring the signs out a little more! I'll definitely be downloading these!

[GC_Vos 714]

Thank you! I put a bunch of them on some generic high density shops and they seem to work as intended. Sorry for no better screens but I don't really have a dedicated Chinatown in my cities (yet). Only downside these will pop up anywhere, so I'm not sure how we would go about using these in specific areas, unless you want a completely Asian city.

I really really love this gate!

From above still visible...

[boformer 3,169]

can you also create a sign where every letter is in a separate square?

Somehow I don't believe that's how Chinese or Japanese works. While it is possible, it would take a while to sort out every letter, not to mention the amount of lots spamming the parks menu. It's more or less the amount of letters that exist that make it a feat. 

I just mean a single asset that looks like these:

It could also be bit larger than the first ones, maybe twice the height.

  Edited August 12, 2015 by schmidtbochum  

[GC_Vos 714]

How about this? Not sure if I would call the scaffolding structurally sound, they look pretty wonky irl

  Edited August 12, 2015 by GC_Vos  

[boformer 3,169]

Very nice! I can't wait for the night cycle update.

 

[Dubai Skyscraper 129]

Just a thought, not all signs should be iluminated 24/7, it looks kinda weird at daytime.

[GC_Vos 714]

I agree it will end up looking like a christmas tree if there's too many. If wanted I could upload the same ones without illumination.