Plans for modern city track

[CryHam]

So, Taoki started with finding buildings and city models on blendswap.
Since this could be of interest, I guess nobody will do anything as usual but whatever.

I'm curious if anyone besides Taoki would like to drive in modern cities, in SR ?
Keep in mind I hate those modern commercial games, and asphalt, and SR isn't meant to be anyhow similar to them ..

Here is the list of models, be careful don't edit it
http://saluuna.dy.fi/pad/p/sr-city
So, some stuff described on create objects and car modeling wiki pages applies.

But, in general, steps for each model from blendswap are:
(kind of applies to all whether car or static/dynamic object, vegetation etc.)
- Open in blender, if you see a million triangles, blender works slowly, forget it immediately
- If 200k-500k triangles, possibly could be reduced, see on all meshes, if they have Subsurf modifier,
reduce it, while it still looks good, or even drop it completely
- Sometimes Decimate modifier works ok to reduce if still high, but be cautious, it can make holes or crappy mesh in general
- Finally for a car 100k triangles is high but okay,
maybe also ok for a mesh that will be once on track. LOD would be nice, although I didn't manage to have it working on ogre meshes and have tangents, IDK
For a building, well depends on how many will be used, you probably can put it 1-4 times, I guess 1k-20k ?
In total, on scene, counting from only buildings (meshes) there shouldn't be more than:
300 batches (high already) if you have 1024 terrain then count 200 batches if vegetation too then 100 batches
and 800k triangles max.
in game if you look at whole track (in higher preset) there shouldn't be more than 1000k tris and 400 batches
- Flip normals, every time there has to be lots of polygons that are the opposite side (are 2 sided in blender, won't be visible in game), select them and Ctrl-F, F to flip normals, show normals to see if correct, or disable 2 sided in viewport
- Apply all modifiers like mirror, array etc. (those which were needed to create the final mesh)
- To reduce batches Join all meshes (ideally we need 1, but then needs uv unwrap to have different materials on 1 texture)
- Some places may have holes, add triangles so the mesh is full
for cars this is notorious, also making interiors, and keep in mind tris in game are 1 sided, you need to make the stuff twice, with some distance if it's meant to be visible from inside
- If the model is already textured that's awesome, but usually isn't, so:
- UV unwrap, takes hours usually (could be days), if it isn't done, and the model is complicated (lots of different parts)
do this last since you can't modify mesh after (will loose uvs) but some parts can be added after, just need to map uvs to some place on texture

I think about 1 to 4 hours for each model is needed to get it into game properly (if it didn't have more than say 300k tris/faces).

[MirceaKitsune]

Thank you for the info, and again for considering adding the city models. Since I'm fairly good with Blender, these sound like things I can do easily... less for UV mapping but I can try if need be. I shall download the blends you marked as OK in that list, correct what can / should be corrected, and maybe zip and send them to you once done.

And this might be slightly off topic, but since you mentioned LOD: I'm not personally a fan of static LOD models, although many games use them. OGRE is a modern and powerful engine, so I'm thinking it might support tessellation?

[MirceaKitsune]

Alright. After hours of going through the big list initially posted here, I decided which models I can fix up and make SR compatible. Here is a list of the ones I'll be working on and will submit when finished:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/72462
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/73728
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/71056
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/67817
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/67727
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/69593
http://opengameart.org/content/supermarket

It's indeed a small fraction from the original list, because most of the models have a lot of problems that make them unusable. Such as being very high-poly (and impossible to reduce with a Decimate modifier), using more than one texture on multiple materials (SR can't allow this currently), or only being modeled from one direction to be used in renders (not a full building but only a few walls). Those that aren't subject to these issues have no UV mapping at all... meaning they can be fixed, if someone is willing to work on texturing them, which I don't have the energy for right now. The only exception is #69593 because it's a complete and consistent set, so I will UV unwarp it and create a bunch of texture sections for different materials.

[Julius]

Since Blendswap now allows the -Non Commerical option some of these might not be able to go into Stuntrally AFAIK (-NC isn't compatible with Free Software).

[MirceaKitsune]

Since Blendswap now allows the -Non Commerical option some of these might not be able to go into Stuntrally AFAIK (-NC isn't compatible with Free Software).

Did I include any -NC ones? If so that was not intended, since I'd also prefer avoiding anything -NC and -ND. StuntRally is non-commercial itself, so -NC would be okay actually, though I don't think it would be preferred.

[EDIT] Yeah, the first is indeed -NC. It still looks pretty good however, so I'll let CryHam clarify if it's acceptable.

[Akien]

StuntRally is non-commercial itself, so -NC would be okay actually, though I don't think it would be preferred.

As far as I know StuntRally is GPLv3, so it can be commercialised. So -NC would NOT be okay in my opinion. If -NC content was added, I would have to drop it from Mageia's official StuntRally package (at least from the "core" repository which contains only 100% free software). I'm following the licensing policy from Fedora, which clearly states than -NC is not free software.

[MirceaKitsune]

As far as I know StuntRally is GPLv3, so it can be commercialised. So -NC would NOT be okay in my opinion. If -NC content was added, I would have to drop it from Mageia's official StuntRally package (at least from the "core" repository which contains only 100% free software). I'm following the licensing policy from Fedora, which clearly states than -NC is not free software.

Why would including something -NC affect other assets? That should only mean the model in cause cannot be sold... so if anyone was to ever sell SR (which I don't see happening), they'd have to remove it. But I'm no expert in this domain, and if that's indeed the case the -NC model should be skipped.

[CryHam]

Ok so we need to avoid using -NC licensed assets.
"NC means you can't say, put in on a disc as part of a magazine"
and we were already on such disc.

[Akien]

Why would including something -NC affect other assets? That should only mean the model in cause cannot be sold... so if anyone was to ever sell SR (which I don't see happening), they'd have to remove it. But I'm no expert in this domain, and if that's indeed the case the -NC model should be skipped.

You're right, adding -NC content would not affect the other assets and would be completely okay legally. But indeed, it would make it harder to redistribute StuntRally, since this -NC content would have to be removed if you want to commercialise SR (and the problem of -NC licenses is that "commercial use" has no precise definition, so it could be inferred that you can't sell a CD or DVD with SR on it, e.g. on an open source games compilation or a Linux distribution ISO).

[MirceaKitsune]

Yeah, I also must agree that using NC is bad. Thankfully the others are only CC-BY or CC-BY-SA so they're fine.

[MirceaKitsune]

I finished texturing and adapting two sets of buildings during the last days. CryHam included them in SR on GIT, so go ahead and try them out! Here are the screenshots he posted, which I assume are okay for me to link here:

[Wuzzy]

Ugh …
Certainly nice models, but I wonder how they fit into a rally game. :/

Except the hot air balloons, maybe.

Besides, it is going to be a long way until you can build believable cities in Stunt Rally. Models alone won’t cut it, the textures would be important, too. Stunt Rally is currently optimized for nature scenarios with vegetation and stuff. A city scene is going to be a HUGE leap from that. Do you have any plans how to tackle it?

Sorry for being so pessimistic. But I am curious about how this effort will work out in the end.

[CryHam]

Yeah I agree. It's not my idea, but Taoki's. It's up to him entirely how this ends.
I'd say it didn't even start. And I see this pessimisitic/realistic as always.
True, what is needed is actually great textures. Models can be even simple boxes and with good textures can look good.
And cities have also huge variety of stuff and buildings. I really don't see it being possible. And there isn't even 1/10th of that on blendswap or else?
If somebody was modeling and creating textures for 3 months straight, maybe we would have a city. But that's not gonna happen.
That's why I like 0 A.D. buildings. There are many, are already made, look cool and it is possible to create small town tracks with them.

[Akien]

I'd love to drive on a 0 A.D. themed track :-)

[CryHam]

We got 2 already: D11-PersianCity and D15-CityWall.
And I got plans for 2 more, probably even bigger (more buildings).

[dimproject]

How about these?

List.txt

(1.76 KiB) Downloaded 901 times

How about using some cars as objects?

[Wuzzy]

Cars as objects sounds cool.
I’d suggest them as dynamic objects. Maybe some trash cars, great for a “stunt” theme.

[Calinou]

Cars as objects sounds cool.
I’d suggest them as dynamic objects. Maybe some trash cars, great for a “stunt” theme.

The cars have lots of polygons, even putting 5 of them on a track would quite slow down the game.

[CryHam]

@dimproject. I added those to our list (link in 1st post). Few rejected, too high poly.
Of course that needs time to check each one if it can be good for game and export etc. I'm not doing this.

I agree with Calinou. Current cars as objects are too high poly. But trash cars is a good idea. Just need custom low poly model and a good texture (may be rusty).