Infinitown: endless 3D-animated city in your browser

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/28/infinitown-endless-3d-animate.html

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Awesome! I’d love to see an eBoy infinitown

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But there are no people walking around… all those sad empty parks.

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That’s why I was thinking eBoy. They have a huge amount of 3D content to utilize. Can you imagine an infinitown with all this going on? Procedural beach towels? Why not?

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I’m looking for a blog with an endless procession of procedurally generated posts about endlessly procedurally generated things.

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Is there an Ikea in Infinitown?

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The buildings look extremely similar to the buildings in Japanese n-scale model railroading, specifically Kato and Tomytec.

I’m a real sucker for procedurally generated cities, I don’t know why. There’s some interesting work being done that creates some really impressive looking results, but I’m pleased by even fairly simple outputs.

The thing about procedural generation is that it is about using a limited set of parts, so that lots of assets don’t have to be made - I can’t even begin to imagine what things would look like if you started off with a massive amount of 3D content as the basis for procedural generation… whoo boy.

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First, we generate a finite grid of random city blocks. Then, using some tricks, the viewpoint wraps around this grid, which creates the illusion of an endless cityscape.

Illusion? How disappointing. I wonder if their random number generator ran out?

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It’s amazing what can be done. Groups like theprodukkt have released some mindblowing procedurally generated animation demos over the years, and even an 1-level Quake-like FPS that weighs in at only 95K.

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It’s a dystopian nightmare.

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Yeah, the procedural stuff that’s come out of the demo scene is amazing. I think I played that FPS, it was pretty damn impressive for (a hundred times) its size. That stuff is pretty abstract (they’re going for small size over realism). There’s also some quite realistic procedural systems for generating buildings and cities, though, where the building details and city street layouts feel completely plausible.

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It’s nicely done, with two oddities.

(i) The clouds gently bob up and down in some inexplicable wavy motion, as they drift by.

(ii) The light source is, unlike the sun, really close by, somewhere just out of the viewport in the top right corner, as you can tell by the changing cloud shadow sizes as the clouds bob up and down. In reality, the sun would be so far away, that the cloud shadow size would not increase if the cloud moved upwards.

I wouldn’t have noticed (ii) if (i) did not occur, btw.

The football stadium is actually a football stadium!
Well done, that man!

It’s not even a very big grid. You can scroll and see the same buildings over and over in seconds.

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I noticed the vehicles never turn and they drive right thru each other.

Seen it, it’s called Houston.

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It’s nicely done, with two oddities.

(i) The clouds gently bob up and down in some inexplicable wavy motion, as they drift by.

(ii) The light source is, unlike the sun, really close by, somewhere just out of the viewport in the top right corner, as you can tell by the changing cloud shadow sizes as the clouds bob up and down. In reality, the sun would be so far away, that the cloud shadow size would not increase if the cloud moved upwards.

I wouldn’t have noticed (ii) if (i) did not occur, btw.

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