Cities in the Sky

I found a little time over the past couple of days to have a fiddle with Cities in the Sky, but since I’m an idiot I didn’t concentrate on sorting out the physics. Instead, I farted around with Perlin noise and atmospheric scattering and made the sky beautiful :). Take a look at the new screenshots and see for yourself. The second one has a stupidly powerful bloom effect, which frankly looks a bit rubbish, so I’m going to either turn it off or tone it down a lot. Hopefully I can figure out how to ‘do’ shaders - I basically just took the code from the OGRE wiki!

Some technical details, since I know some of you like that sort of thing:

The clouds are generated using libnoise, a rather wonderful library capable of generating perlin noise and doing all sorts of clever things with it. I have to say, it’s an excellently written library, every bit as easy and intuitive to use as OPAL. At the moment, the clouds are generated in another little application that I wrote, and loaded in when CITS starts, rather than generated on the fly. This is because at the resolution I’m generating them (1024×1024), the whole process takes around 10 seconds, and also because libnoise does something odd with the alpha channel (Most of my time recently has been spent scratching my head whilst looking at black skies). I’ve used a few filters on the raw perlin - namely terracing and a power function. I was using this handy article on clouds as a guide, I highly recommend it if you need to generate clouds or are procrastinating.

Unfortunately, as you may have noticed from the screenshots, the noise isn’t tiled yet, resulting in odd seams in the sky. I may need to fiddle around with the source of libnoise to get it to tile the noise, or I may just partake in some Photoshop trickery, though that would rule out generating the clouds in the application completely.

As for the rest of the sky, I simply used Terragen to render an environment without clouds or a landscape, and fiddled the atmosphere settings slightly to get a nice haze, horizon and glare from the sun. Maybe I’ll add in some lens flare soon to show off, if it doesn’t look too cheesy. Again there’s an annoying drawback though - since Terragen expects you to be rendering a landscape, it doesn’t bother to generate sky below you, so there’s an oddly shaped black space below the camera. This will be fixed by more Photoshop jiggery-pokery when I get round to it.

Enough about the sky though - Remember when I told you I didn’t bother to fix the physics, all those paragraphs ago? Well, that was a bit of a fib. Actually I’ve tweaked them to the point where it looks quite nice and doesn’t explode (even Tim says it’s looking swish), though there’s still a little way to go before I’m ready to upload a video. Also, I need to stop the random crashes, else the video will be quite short. Still, it’s getting there… slowly.

Okay, this is the final move for the blog, it will be staying here for the forseeable future. I got annoyed with Wordpress.com since it turns out that they charge $10 to set up a domain name, regardless of whether or not you already own it! Unfortunately I only discovered this after I’d bought citiesinthesky.co.uk from 123-reg, which has caused me a week’s worth of hassle. Rather than go into the boring detail, I’ll just warn anyone thinking of using them: don’t. They don’t answer their emails or phone calls, and the only contact with customers is seemingly to send them invoices. I’ll be getting Trading Standards on their case shortly.

Anyway, onto happier things: I’ve now got the blog set up at www.citiesinthesky.co.uk, after installing Wordpress myself (aren’t I clevar?!), and it’s great Wordpress really is a great piece of software, and it’s very nice being able to fiddle around with it myself, as I wasn’t allowed to do on Wordpress.com. I’ve added a little bit of content (notice the ‘pages’ section on the right?), and I’ve been getting acquainted with lots of Google’s web developer tools - Analytics, AdSense, Sitemaps and so on. I’m quite enjoying it all, actually, much more so than my previous pathetic attempts at running a website!

As for Cities in the Sky, I’m still working on it. I’ve made plenty of lists of things to do, and I know exactly what needs to get done before I release a preview. I just don’t know how long it’ll take! Currently I’m fiddling with the physics - it still doesn’t quite feel right, and I’d like to get it straightened out before I go any further. After that, I’ll tart up the graphics and get them looking presentable (you should see some of the placeholder screens…), then it’ll be ready for a release. It won’t be very interesting of course, since there’ll only be one type of building and no people, but it’ll be a release nonetheless. Don’t hold your breath.

I’ve finally managed to find a little time to work on CITS, desipte being somewhat bogged down in university work, and have started development up again. To celebrate, I’ve moved my blog to Wordpress.com, which appears to be roughly 1 squillion times better than Blogger. All the old posts and comments have been moved too.

I had a bit of a battle with OPAL over the weekend, since the latest version appears to be configured wrongly out of the box, but I got it working and now things are looking up; I’ve figured a way around my previous problems with craziness and have spent plenty of time thinking about what needs to get done before I can release a preview version. Hopefully some time in the next few weeks I’ll have something worthy of a download. Until then you can expect some lovely screenshots every now and then, so make sure to check back occasionally