The Sinking City - Creating a Part of Instanbul

Myrthos

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The devs of The Sinking City show off their city building tool in creating a part of Instanbul in 8 hours time. This tool is going to be available for free once the game is released.



28/09/2018: Kiev, Ukraine – Ask any open-world game dev and they’ll tell you creating a digital city is a massive undertaking, often manually placing assets street by street. To help streamline the creation of Oakmont, the fictional 1920’s flooded metropolis in The Sinking City, Frogwares created their own city builder tool in Unreal Engine 4.

One of the brains behind the tool, Katerina Frolova, is a trained architect and level designer. Her design allows users to set a few urban planning variables inside the tool and then city districts can be generated at the click of a button. Something that normally takes weeks, can now be done in hours.


For an internal test of the tech, Frogwares asked fans on social media to vote from a list of iconic cities. The team would then see how big a district they could recreate within just 8 hours / 1 working day. Armed with buildings created earlier for The Sinking City and a Google Maps overlay of the winning city, Istanbul, the team got to work trying the speed and layout accuracy of the tool.



After The Sinking City releases, the team plan to give the tool away for free for others to use.

"Hopefully once The Sinking City comes out, we can release the tech for free so other devs, educational institutions or even hobbyists can use it. The tool has been invaluable to our game's development so I can only imagine what others could potentially create with it." - Wael Amr, Frogwares CEO

More information.
 
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These chicks get hired to boost morale in companies. Every game developer company I worked at, knew of or visited as a journalist had multiple young attractive female employees. Either in developer or in HR-administrative positions. :]
 
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Dude, quit that shit, she got hired because she's a designer.
 
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Pretty cool technology. I can imagine modders using it to create a city and then porting it for use in a different game. Certainly a battle royale game could use such quickly created new maps to play in.

The girl reminds me of Eva Green.
 
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It looks pretty good, but there's a few of these procedural generation tools around now for cities and landscapes. I don't think there's anything particularly novel in their software.
 
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Agreed the girl is much more interesting than the tech.
 
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Funny I was just watching Ancient Cities on PBS (co-produced by BBC) and their last episode is a lidar scan VR of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul's most important monuments including the Hagia Sophia. There were so many tourists there were "ghosts" on the floor level however. I guess the city refused to close its doors for this project - or didn't let them shoot at night.

http://www.pbs.org/ancient-invisible-cities/episode-3/

I can't view it in my browser, probably due to ad-blocking, but I saw in the episode they were using Vives. I think its rendered because the host had no control of where he went or his size.

I think what is fascinating, is not only is the Hippodrome still there, for 1000 years it was used as a cistern. Even more fascinating is part of the harbour chain that kept the Turks at bay is still intact, but its not viewable by the public.
 
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It's a sad day when I, of all people, have to lecture some here on sexism.

1Dq9.gif
 
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This isn't even about sexism, it's just plain silly to think that a little studio like this one has the budget to hire and pay people for being "sexy".
 
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BoboTheMighty said:
It's a sad day when I, of all people, have to lecture some here on sexism.

I think that we would see different comments if "real sexists" would come here. And dont ask me what "Unreal sexists" would say about the video. ;)


it's just plain silly to think that a little studio like this one has the budget to hire and pay people for being "sexy".

Of course not, but its not uncommon to hire some nice girl(s) for PR or community manager positions. Funny is that Frogwares is not exception. They created dev diary about Sinking City with their community manager Maryna. :) Here she is…



You can see her together with Katerina at 0:13. Maybe they should create video about "girl power" in Frogwares instead of "tech power". ;)
 
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The fact is attractive people -- men and women, though I wouldn't be surprised if it happens more with women -- are hired more often than ugly people. They also make more money, statistically speaking, as well as having an easier time of things in general.
 
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Me, I'd like to boost the morale of some female designers with my attractiveness, too ! :biggrin:
[Says someone with 20 years of Sociophobia behind him.]
 
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You guys make it sound that the odds of being attractive and also being skilled are slim. I've met a number of women in the gaming industry and they were without exception skilled in what they did, regardless of what they looked like, which makes my experience opposite to the response of our regular sunbeam in this thread.
 
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I've met a number of women in the gaming industry and they were without exception skilled in what they did, regardless of what they looked like,

Thats what I meant by "girl power". ;)
 
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