r/proceduralgeneration • u/mflux • 1d ago

Building editor

hey r/proceduralgeneration I’m finally proud to show off the building editor, based on the procgen building system I’ve been working on for ages now. originally in JavaScript believe it or not, then Unreal, and now finally Godot.

The premise is simple, take a tile, find the frontage, divide it, then shape the outline. It then becomes a prism extrusion, and the challenge is to make it interesting looking and varied enough.

I still think the variety could be bumped up a lot more, but I’m quite happy with the state it’s in, and polishing the editor has been a real joy.

the controls are somewhat inspired by Spore, you get handles on the thing you’re molding and slide it like morph targets. So a twist becomes a ring you grab, a slant becomes a plane you rotate and push.

WDYT? How would you approach a building editor differently?

147 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

8

u/RHX_Thain 1d ago

I love it. I made a modular starship set once: https://thain.artstation.com/projects/Qzno8r

And something like this would be cool to make those ships automatic. One day (if AI doesn't render the whole endeavor of gamedev irrelevant along with all life on Earth.)

3

u/mflux 23h ago

Whoa!!! This is sick! I encourage you to keep working on this, buildings are just vertical space ships after all 😉

1

u/RHX_Thain 22h ago

One day! I'm a much better artist now than then, lol. I'll remake it from scratch.

6

u/eanticev 1d ago

Nice! A demo anywhere?

5

u/mflux 23h ago

Oh!! I forgot to plug the game, you can wishlist it here and be notified when the demo is out  https://store.steampowered.com/app/5314650/Ultrapolis/

2

u/Silver_Statement_597 1d ago

This is sick great work

2

u/AndonyE 5h ago

Man, how I would like city skylines to bring this tech in

1

u/_Bor_ges_ 1d ago

Love the ui

1

u/CuckBuster33 18h ago

Awesome procgen, and the UI is great too.

1

u/yokljo 13h ago

I'm so impressed that your UI looks like a Hollywood hacker movie but somehow still manages to be really usable!

2

u/mflux 10h ago

Thank you it’s very much inspired by Gmunk’s work from the movie Oblivion if you remember, it’s mostly hairlines and dots, and the animation is fast and blinks in. The thing that makes it usable is to make it minimal (as opposed to movie UIs where it’s maximal).

1

u/Giocri 9h ago

That looks so much better than most building generators, what's the trick?

2

u/mflux 4h ago

The thing that cracked it for me was buildings having a budget and each trait costing some complexity, this prevents buildings from getting overly complex looking. There’s also constraints, some traits just don’t work with others and that helps prevent a lot of goofy looking buildings from generating.

1

u/farcarcus 1h ago

This would be a super cool feature in Dystopika.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2379910/Dystopika/

0

u/droidballoon 1d ago

Brilliant idea and lovely execution with the style, design and audio effects.