CityEngine with Unity

Unity Engine
1

I am new to CityEngine and frankly I have to learn CGA (absolutely sucks learning how to script when you are an 3d artist, but I am the lead art director so maybe I have no real choice) I was wondering is there any real quality examples out there of CityEngine being used to build City based MMO’s?? We are doing a cyberpunk MMO, so I am looking into this, and despite being a powerful app, it is both cryptic, and huge i.e. the files need to be broken up manually unless there is a way to break them up into smaller pieces automatically. Secondly the models of the buildings aren’t exactly what I can call “optimized” especially when doing more residential building types with window panes. if I have to manually select every building or sections of buildings, this tends to defeat the point of “expediting” the development process if I have to go in and click on every damn building since the UI tools aren’t exactly what I consider accurate, nor smooth.

So whats the word on CityEngine? Official or otherwise, I would like some examples of MMO’s that are in development that use CE to great use. THough being somewhat good for developing large amount of assets, lot of it isn’t efficient and I want to know how some of you got through this. thanx any information will help.

2

you should potentially ask at their place as they support Unity or don’t do so, not vice versa (Unity is just a technology and there is no integrated support for CE nor was anything mentioned to be planned in that direction)

3

hi … my name’s matthias buehler, i am content manager at procedural, inc.

please check out the “destroyed city” showcase:
http://www.procedural.com/showcase/showcases/destroyed-city.html

there are a few points that need to be mentioned in this discussion …

first, it is important to decide if the buildings are used only as backdrop buildings, if they are non-enterable or if they are able to be entered and explored.

here, i have to say that interiors have not been a focus of the cityengine [so far] and this is tricky since tools for procedural interiors are immensely complex and we just have not had tackled them yet. though it IS possible to create interiors - i am working on a little example which might be posted on our forum, http://www.procedural.com/support/forum.html.

scripting itself is a pain … i know … but we are aware of this and we are working hard on ways to be able to more and more free the user of the annoying scripting. this includes the visual cga or the facade wizard which were already released. we are now working on presets which will help additionally. [ the future looks very bright ! ]

the discussion about the poly count is a totally different one and i’d say that depending on how you describe the rules and the LODs of a building, you do have a very precise control over the poly count, since you precisely define how geo is split, where which asset is inserted.

of course you are free to use the ce just as an asset creation tool where you simply create vast amounts of variants of buildings without using the street system or any other methodology to place the buildings already in a specific layout inside the CE.

most of the times, games depend on specific interiors, which are given by the game’s story. in MMOs, this fact is relativated pretty much, of course, since depending on the type of game, each user might “live” in a specific building, with his / her specific interior.

i am not sure how the plans are to create interiors for 10’000 buildins, but i am sure you have a plan there.

as stated, interiors are not the strong side of the cityengine, but depending on which type of interiors you need, you might use the output of cityEngine’s “floor” polygons and use a modular system to furnish the interior, have it done by the user or by artists.

as the game industry is, all data and workflows are kept totally secret, so nobody really knows what the development is until a finished product comes to the market. that’s making the whole process a little untransparent.
trust me, if we had access to screenies of some of the developments of the big players who have CE licenses such as blizzard, thq, rockstar or square, we’d let you know !

by the way … what do you mean by breaking up the models into smaller pieces ? are you referring to the export ? did you try the “export one file per initial shape” setting in the granularity tab of the exporter ?

4

Or better yet, use the forums at procedural inc for these types of discussions. I sent them an email yesterday with some questions after reading this initial thread and figured it would be a few days before anyone got back to me. I was going to test if this worked in Unity at-all but unfortunately their trial license is useless because the exporting features are disabled, so we shall see if they respond to my email with the requested material. Otherwise, from what I gather, looking at the buildings, they are not double sided poly’s anyway so none of their buildings have a “interior”, even if you went into the building, looking outward would have no material associated with it and you would have to build up the interior from scratch.

5

Hi sgtkoolaid,

Have you taken a look at PixelActive’s CityScape? I am the marketing guy at CityScape (full disclosure), and I think you may find that CityScape will fulfill all the needs for your MMO. On top of that, you don’t have to learn CGA. If you can use Maya or Max, you can use CityScape.

http://pixelactive3d.com/Products/CityScape/

We recently launched CityScape Pro, which is a paired down version of CityScape Enterprise. I think it should serve all your needs. Several other people on this forum have used CityScape with Unity.

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=348763#348763

If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly at jyoung@pixelactive3d.com.

Regardless of which tool you choose, good luck with your project.

Joseph

6

Ha, just watched the video on your sites page, damn that thing looks like stupidly good fun to use lol!

Can you use your own assets with it? Buildings, objects etc. This would be pretty important, wouldn’t want this to end up a joke like Poser where everyone and their aunt create the same looking stuff.

How does it fair for exporting to Unity? What limitations are there (please be honest, even if it’s not a happy answer).

7

Hey Oblivionfeet,

Thanks for the positive feedback on the video.

With CityScape you can import in any Collada, fbx, Maya, and Max files. It also takes in CAD and other files. We want CityScape to be the tool for anyone who wants to make a 3D city. Video game developers, architects, simulation developers, etc.

Our Unity exporter is pretty good, but could use some love. There are some workarounds that you need now, but we’re working on getting better export all the time. I will say that we do a lot of feature development based on customer needs. If we started getting more customers that are using CityScape with Unity, the exporter would be much improved. We went from no support of OpenFlight (a simulation file format) to full support for OpenFlight 16.3 in a matter of months.

Do you think you would use it on your project?

Joseph

8

I have to tell you that while CityScape looks to be a stellar product, at $19k per seat it’s far beyond the means of 99.99% of Unity developers.

:shock:

9

Quietus,

We have CityScape Pro that sells for $3,500 as well. We’re in the process of updating the website, so that’s why you don’t see it. That seems to bee in the Unity developer’s price range.

Joseph

10

CityScape’s FBX and Collada exporter are both pretty robust. For FBX, we currently do not support instancing or external references. Last time we tried to implement it, the feature wasn’t fully supported.

Our Collada exporter works well. If you have specific questions about it, please post them here.

What is your preferred import file format for Unity?

Joseph

11

May I also suggest Gamr7’s Ürban PAD as an option for creating a city for your MMO? (Marketing department here.) You can build a city without having to script, and you can use your own assets to build whatever kind of city you like. You do need a workaround to use the final city file, exportable in XML or Collada, in Unity, but we’ve had good results with test cases. We recently released a new trial version, available here. Good luck with your project!

12

Is there any temporary page or anything that shows new licensing pricing with comparisons?

13

I would not use CityEngine nor CityScape, they both have zero sales support and zero desire to sell or answer questions. As I had stated earlier on in the thread, I sent emails out to each after reading about both and the questions in this thread and neither were responsive, especially CityEngine, they frankly do not care apparently, not unless you are some major corporation. I have no tolerance for any company that has a ‘sales less’ environment where you send in product questions and they do not bother to respond after a maximum of 3 tries. If either are interested in selling their products, they would bother to respond. I know for a fact I won’t be using either of them in the future, even if they bothered to respond now, it is dead in my eyes.

I had originally thought about one or the other for beyond personal use to the business use which would extend beyond 50 seat licenses, but there really is no point in it on either product, regardless of how “functional” they look or “IF” they work with Unity, they both have a complete and total lack of communication skills.

Going to see what Gamr7 is now, see if it works with Unity or if they have any decent communication skills.

IMHO, junk the other two “city” named products, forget ever having any human interaction with them, it simply is non existant.

14

http://arnaud.ile.nc/sce/

free blender city generator!

those commercial city generators look very nice, but they’re obviously priced for big enterprises; still way too high for indie devs. It’s interesting to see folks chiming in from these high-end middleware vendors - guys, get your price points down under a thousand bucks (better yet, under a hundred) and you might catch some of the Unity wave. Or maybe you can do like Beast and Umbra, and cut a licensing deal with UT. But I expect your focus will remain on the big customers, until somebody drinks up your milkshake.

15

@zumwalt

I’m surprised to hear that you have bad customer service from PixelActive. If you look at our forums (DEWIRATU212: Ayo Main Bersama Situs Slot Pasti Gacor Hari Ini), our responses are usually within 24 hours (often within the same hour). I also posted my personal email address (jyoung@pixelactive3d.com) so that anyone can send questions about CityScape to me. I’d be happy to work with people on their problems.

@polytropoi

We are definitely looking at the indie market, and trying to figure out what feature set and functionality indies want most from CityScape. If you can list your top 3 features, I can do my best to make them a reality. What I hear now is:

  1. Price
  2. Unity support

What else is important to the indie developer?

Joseph

16

My email basically encompassed anyone here that would want to try the product, to have a version downloadable that can export in a format supported by Unity out of the box, exporting is disabled in the trials, and never heard a word back. Use of the product is pointless if you can’t export out and test in Unity, that goes for anyone trying your product that wants to use it in Unity, unable to export out objects to try them in Unity really makes it a pointless venture. My personality type is that I try 3 times for a response from a company, at the end of the third try they go into my DND bucket for a year, so I am not really going to bother sending another email, it is not worth the effort now. If you want to respond here with how people can get a trial of your software that includes the export ability to try with Unity, that would be a good step forward.

17

How about Unity integration, as a plugin? It would be awesome to load in a vector layout for streets, point to some prefab models, and whomp out a whole destructible city. Hell yes it would.

you’re only in zumwalt’s DND bucket for a year, which will go fast.

18

I had continual followup from the CityEngine guys…

19

Anyone know how to handle instancing with CityEngine? We got an eval with export capability but it expired before we could try out instancing. Has anyone done large cities in Unity with it? If so, can you please pass on lessons learned / screenshots / demos? CityEngine support has been great.

20

Check out that zombie city video. I’m pretty sure there was instancing going on there, where they set up several building types (in CityEngine) and had it use those rather than unique buildings per block, which is pretty cool.

The downside is that everything but the full version only exports to .obj, whereas FBX has support for instances and all that fancy stuff.

I really wish the Indie version had FBX export… :wink: