What's the best way to represent towns?

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KipperUK
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What's the best way to represent towns?

Post by KipperUK » Tue Jan 08, 2019 5:43 pm

I've been having a think, and if you are placing a small-ish village in a landscape, it seems quite appropriate to model it with a few individual houses, since that's what it would contain in real life.

When you scale up to even a small town, it seems as though trying to represent it by placing each house would be time consuming at best, and problematic for performance at worst. From the air, even small towns are surprisingly big, and there are even some small cities in some landscapes.

What would people recommend as the best way to represent a larger settlement? Perhaps create rows of houses/shops representative of streets?

I'm not for a moment advocating replicating the exact layout of a town - I've thought about this and I think it would be too annoying to do, and wouldn't be of much value since people recognise towns by rough shape and their proximity to landmarks such as hills, rivers, roads or major buildings rather than at street level.

The question is more about finding a balance between manually modelling and placing numbers of objects enough to represent rough size and scale.

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wickid
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Re: What's the best way to represent towns?

Post by wickid » Tue Jan 08, 2019 6:11 pm

Have a look in the World folder of the default Slovenia2 landscape.

The objects starting with C are towns. They fit on different generic street textures used to create the towns.
PH-1504, KOE

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EDB
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Re: What's the best way to represent towns?

Post by EDB » Tue Jan 08, 2019 7:59 pm

Only objects higher then 15-30 meters make sense. Smaller then that will look flat anyway from 1200 meters of altitude.

KipperUK
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Re: What's the best way to represent towns?

Post by KipperUK » Tue Jan 08, 2019 9:39 pm

EDB wrote:
Tue Jan 08, 2019 7:59 pm
Only objects higher then 15-30 meters make sense. Smaller then that will look flat anyway from 1200 meters of altitude.
The luxury of always having 3500' ... quite a lot of the time that's cloudbase here!

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EDB
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Re: What's the best way to represent towns?

Post by EDB » Tue Jan 08, 2019 10:40 pm

Wait till you see how most tasks are made... (although there are many people that want more realistic tasks... good task-setting isn't easy)

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