CityEngine Released

[EBAndrew]

Indeed, this can make things in the games industry much, much easier. Even if the city layout is only used as a vista model (something used in the distance, normally just a billboard or, in some cases, a sprite) or as the model for the area surrounding one that's playable... this'll make things a whole hell of a lot better.

As for the pricing... as an independant artist that's paying for my programs, $7000.00 is understandable, but hella high. As the guy who'd have to build that same damn city, and many others over and over again during my time in the industry, they could reasonably charge more. Taking into consideration the time (which is money, remember!) saved on a single city alone (depending on the size) would make the product at least well worth it. And multiplying that same time over x amount of cities, it's probably paying for itself very quickly.

It might have been my sheer amazement of the Endorphin toolset only being ~$1500.00 that made me assume this would have been less, but I really do hope they release a second SKU for us artists.

[crazycoder]

Hey All,

I just had to sign up here because I am working on a city generator of my own and have been for six months now, I will be opening an official website in a week with previews and screenshots and there should be a fully working trial within 1-2 months max.

Having found the CityEngine trial url at procedural.com, it's not exactly hidden, but not official yet, I can safely say CityEngine is missing many features I have underway, and in comparison seems like it is lacking a heck of a lot for the price, and anyone who pays $7,000 for it deserves the disappointment they will feel when they see mine.

Not that I think there is much risk of many people here buying CityEngine because they have made it impossible for the people that actually need it to afford while hailing it as something revolutionary in 3D Generation of which there is no competition, for a short time anyway.

I am implementing every feature of the CityEngine and more.
My city engine is being developed by myself for a Game I am working on and I see no reason not to commercialize it since I have over 50 Indie developers constantly asking me about it's progress and how much I will sell them it for.

$7,000 is a lot of money to a small studio, and to an indie developer/Student it is a complete write off, However to large Organizations in the Entertainment industry and others it is an affordable asset, a time and cost cutting tool which is why I believe CityEngine is so costly, because they want to make big money quickly from companies that will pay there price tag.

What I will be doing is offering a Student/Hobbyist, Indie and Commercial Licence.

What is a fair price to you all here for a Student (For non commercial use, use in non profit Films, Animations, Student Projects etc..), Indie (For small scale commercial Use, I.E, Games that make less than $5,000 net proffit), the commercial price i have already worked out by working with potential commercial customers.

I have a good idea, But would greatly appreciate your opinions before they are influenced by my planned price, so I can Lower them if needed.

Any feature requests are more than welcome.

[lightning]

crazycoder probably something under $1000

yeah guys if you want to download city engine trial go to this url
http://www.procedural.com/purchase/trial-download.html

[crazycoder]

Hey lightning,

Obviously I was thinking something under $1,000, most students and Indie developers I know would find anything above $500 to be out of there reach without saving up for a fair few months.

CityEngine seems to run very slow to me, Just rendering the Road Network of a few thousand roads seems to cause it speed problems showing only 4-6 FPS and 1 FPS with lots rendering and the RAM usage shoots up fast, My own road network generator gives me a clean 60 FPS while rendering a network of 10,000 roads, including rendering building lot's using the OGRE 3D rendering engine capped at 60FPS and the ram usage is at least 50% less.

For a piece of software that makes them $7 Million Dollars per 1000 copys I would think it would outperform mine.

I have a duel core AMD 4800+, 2 Gigs of Ram and an ATI  X800 Pro (An aging card but for a few roads i would expect better).

Hows the speed for everyone else?

[lightning]

im still downloading
Do you have a site or blog for your software and what is your software going to be called?
I wouldn't mind having a look at it

[crazycoder]

No site and no blog yet.

The game I am developing is a state of the art online game and is being developed in secret because I don't want the idea stealing, so I have kept it away from the public eye until near completion, and as such i have not blogged about my city generator either, I have ideas for a name but nothing decided yet.

My City Engine is born out of a developers need with no viable solution existing, CityEngine seemed to be the ideal bit of software, however the price and delay in release has only strengthened my desire to polish mine up and release it to the public for a fairer price.

I plan to have a site up within a week, I am currently re coding the facade generation class and polishing it up with a nice GUI, however if you like I will gather together some screenshots and post them here, I may even make a short video preview for you.

[sjefen]

...however if you like I will gather together some screenshots and post them here, I may even make a short video preview for you.

That would be great

[lightning]

this would be awesome
i would like to see some screenshots of your work
so does your engine have all the capabilities of cityengine like Image-based Procedural Modeling of Facades
etc?

[crazycoder]

Image-based Procedural Modeling of Facades is just magical to me.

I have played with Image recognition for a long time but I do have to give Pascal credit, It's one heck of a magical thing when you compare the experience to building a 3D building model and then texturing it.

It not only lets you make a whole face of a building in no time at all, but it enables you to import some facade pictures or Textures from a place like texturama.com and then you have a large number of facades to which you can have a completely random building generated from.

The answer however is yes, though it did have me sweating to get it working 

I am currently polishing that up as we speak, so once finished I will post some screenshots, perhaps a video too.

Btw, I don't think that is in the City Engine demo, I couldn't find it.

[lightning]

no that demo sucks its realy hard to use and how the hell do you create single buildings from scratch all i can do is just create a basic cityscape withjust very basic polygons

[crazycoder]

If you load in the sample scene, you can look at the basic building script, there are 2 skyscrapers I think, you can edit the tile width, spacing etc on the script, perhaps clone it and modify it for variation.

The idea I think is you manually code the Facade script that are used as a guideline for generating buildings,
Storing the information to reproduce a tile facade I.E a door or a window, the scripts are then used to divide a building into floors, facade tiles and the tiles are populated with the correct facade model faces & texture etc... Like cloning a Model of a window a few times in a row side by side, of course I suspect you could create the facades and building scripts with ease in the Image Based Facade Editor, if it where available and possibly generate a script.

In comparison to the way mine is shaping up I am beginning to question just why CityEngine seems to perform worse and why they did not either provide a large number of building scripts with the demo and just why there Image Based modeler is not included in the demo as without it you have to learn a modeling language and build your own Facet models to evaluate it properly.

Should have some screenshots when I have polished this Facet class up nicely.

[old_blaggard]

This looks very interesting.  I am a student/freelance artist, and so I would need a fairly cheap version for my use.  I have just a few thoughts; I'm sure that you've thought of many or all of them already, but I just want to let you know what I would find most useful:

- First, I'm glad to see that there is some competition out there.  CityGen looked good, but I personally thought that the high price was partially because it seemed to be the only product available.  This will bring some good competition to the market.

- Second, good object export is a must.  You need to be able to create very high quality objects from this to use in other applications.  Tiled export would also be very helpful.

- Third, heightmap support.  It would be my dream to be able to import a file (such as a Terragen terrain or even just a black and white image) that would guide the elevation of the buildings in the city.  I could then import the city back into my program (I'm thinking Terragen specifically here) as an object that was matched perfectly to the terrain, and thereby get extremely refined and custom cities with very little effort.

- Fourth, Mac support.  I'm on a Mac, and many visual effects artists and development studios use that platform too.  I would seriously consider making a Mac port of your engine, assuming you haven't already.

Looking forward to further progress!

[Oshyan]

May I add a fifth? Once the TG2 SDK is available, make a plugin for TG2 so cities can be generated with dynamic detail in TG2 at render time, thus saving the high geometry count, overhead, and disk space of exported geometry.

- Oshyan

[Christopher]

Speaking of the TG2 SDK. Add X-Frog, World Machine and GeoControl to the mix for Plugins. We need more shader and object control stuff to.

[EBAndrew]

I have to agree. Maybe it was the lack of documentation that put me off of it... or maybe it was it constantly giving me errors when I tried to load anything from the example file they gave away. It could even have been it demanding a licence key this morning, after less than 24 hours of having the thing installed. But yeah... if I could break through the UI and figure out how to do all the cool things they've been pimping, I might like it more.

It's really lame that they don't even have a trial version forums area. I've got all these questions (since there's no doc) and nowhere really official to ask them.

Crazycoder, if you could deliver even half of the features Procedural is touting, I'd pay. I'm not sure how much - given the past day of CityEngine frustration, I can't really justify $7000.00 for it and therefore can't really come up with a reasonable value for what you're going to push.

I really look forward to what you're going to be doing... it'd be cool to have something like what Planetside's doing with TG2 and have a public-beta-thing, so we can get our hands dirty and appetites wet, and you get large-scale testing and... and... just lemme play with it!