Current version: 1.5
Version 1.5 changes include new lighting for the demo scenes, normal and specular pass, and completely rewritten shaders which results in a large performance increase on mobile devices. Full changelist located here: http://qt-ent.com/UCP/Documentation/new-in-v1-5a/
When creating a large urban space for a game, you will eventually encounter the importance of balancing performance vs. art quality vs. variety. It’s important to tackle that in the beginning since any imbalance will cost you greatly the further you get in production. You may end up reworking significant portions of the art, or throwing it all away if it’s too expensive to render or just not high-quality. Things get even more tricky when developing for mobile devices. This is where the Urban Construction Kit comes in.
Art and Design Considerations:
5 architectural styles, each with 3**-5 premade buildings**.
Each style also includes its own large set of modular “Wings,” “Caps,” and “Floors.” This is where you’ll spend most of your time. More detail here.
4 Modular Wall sets, long, short, and end caps. From free-standing to lower-level support walls. Use these for visual variety, or put them at the base of any building for lower-level access.
5 different sidewalk types; 2 of which include curb and drainage to be lined up next to the…
Modular Road System: Single lane road to two lane busy street complete with custom shader for road lines. Short turns, long turns, T and + intersection shapes that you can also link it up to the…
Modular Elevated Highway System, complete with exit ramp and on ramp, long and short turns,support beams.
Traffic Light Event System: place traffic lights near your intersections and use the provided script to make them change naturally, or blink yellow.
Custom Highway Signs: signs for routes, exits, streets, all with the correct palette and font.
Custom-made Emissive and Non-Emissive Signs: Place these on your buildings for nice visual variety. Unity Pro users will appreciate the emissive lighting cast from the illuminated signs.
Traffic Signs: stop, do not enter, no right turn, fallout shelter, etc.
Poles, stairways, overhangs, doors, light fixtures, planters, and more.
Everything was made to be snapped seamlessly on a grid.
For Performance Considerations:
All buildings, doors, walls, and many sidewalks use a single texture and a single material, sourced at 4096x4096. Most mobile hardware supports 2048x2048 and it looks excellent.
All signs and street props use a single texture and single material, sourced at 1024x1024
As a result, for a complex scene of hundreds of draw calls, Unity Pro users will notice their scenes reduce to 30-40 draw calls. Unity Free users aren’t left behind though, they can use the…
Custom Mesh Combine EditorScript which supports various gameobject settings, including generating lightmap uvs on combine, in-editor.
And, as an added bonus:
1 photoreal 2048x2048 skybox optimized for mobile devices to 1 draw call.
Everything is 100%, except for the watermark on the big atlas texture. You can see it on walls, floors, and buildings. There is of course no watermark on the textures when you purchase the pack.
Basically I have a tiny black texture scaled up to cover the entire screen. I also have the text placed in the editor, but i wrote a script that uses iTween to ramp in and out the alpha values of the text and black screen at specified times and lengths. Both the text and black texture are sprites in NGUI.
Here is the c# script. Attach this to a sprite in NGUI. You’ll need to download ITween from the asset store. It’s free. If you need more help, just PM me.
fadeinWaitTime - the sprite will wait until this amount of time has passed until the fade-in starts. fadeOutWaitTime - the sprite waill wait until this amount of time has passed until the fade-out starts. fadeOutTime - the sprite will fade out over this amount of time. fadeInTime - the sprite will fade in over this amount of time. alphaTarget - from 0 to 255, how visible the sprite will be when the fadeIn is done.
using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
public class QT_NGUISpriteFadeIn : MonoBehaviour {
//public GameObject NGUISprite;
public float fadeInWaitTime= 1.5f;
public float fadeOutWaitTime=3.0f;
public float fadeOutTime=4.0f;
public float fadeInTime = 1.5f;
public float alphaTarget = 255;
private float tweenalphatarget=0f;
// Use this for initialization
void Start () {
if(fadeInWaitTime>0)
TweenAlpha.Begin(this.gameObject,0f,0); //make it invisible instantly.
if(alphaTarget>255)
alphaTarget=255;
else if (alphaTarget<0)
alphaTarget=0;
tweenalphatarget = (alphaTarget/255);
StartCoroutine(DoFade());
}
private IEnumerator DoFade()
{
yield return new WaitForSeconds(fadeInWaitTime);//wait to fade in
TweenAlpha.Begin(this.gameObject,fadeInTime,tweenalphatarget); //fade in
yield return new WaitForSeconds(fadeOutWaitTime); //wait to fade out
if(fadeOutTime>0)
TweenAlpha.Begin(this.gameObject,fadeOutTime,0); //fade out
}
}
I’ll look closer at the bridges. Probably t-vertices. Witha modular approach, some t-vertices are unavoidable though. As a workaround, you could throw down a giant black plane under the world to get rid of the jiggles that show up on the ground level…
I’ll adjust the coplanar polygons so there is no zfighting, probably by just meeting the edges. No triangles will be added.
Good suggestion on bringing the support edges in. I’ll do that as well.
Houses,more roads, suburban stuff? Not a bad idea. I have some high-impact, low time investment ideas yet to explore before committing to more new content. Thinking about a damaged pass on Atlas_Architecture_D for the future.
I’m not too familiar with DX11 features. What would you like to see?
I plan on providing ongoing support for UCP with fixes and features. I’m looking for all kinds of suggestions too. I don’t believe in the typical “fire and forget” mentality that is standard with product development, be it gaming or whatnot. So expect things to come.
Night skies are tough because of compression artifacts that happen where there are low-contrast pixels. That’s why you don’t see many natural night skies in games. They always look terrible, so the best approach is the “hollywood night” which is a darker blue cast. You can fiddle with the skybox color and fog in the material to get a night feel from a day sky. This should alleviate compression ugliness. I’ll add this to the list of things to look into as photoreal skies are a project of mine.
Thanks for your purchase too! If you don’t mind, please provide any positive feedback in the asset store.
Is the webplayer any indication of what you would get on a mobile device ?? also how different is it compared to the standard versions on mobile devices as compared to the pro versions ?
If it’s a pain to fix, what about a very simple retainer? It simply follows the contours of the bridge piece (for as much as the artifacts are visible), and it could be snapped to the underside of one piece, then eye-balled on one axis to be centered between the two bridge pieces, thus hiding the issue. Works like a charm
Nice!
Nice!
I’d be very interested in that damaged textured pass…
Oh, I meant, so that if I want to work in a DX11 project it doesn’t conflict with, what I believe to be, your shaders? When I first imported UPC it was in a DX11 project. 75% of surfaces were pitch black, including thumbnail previews.
I thought I had hours of troubleshooting ahead of me, but I went right to disabling DX11 in the player settings, and this fixed the problem. The only catch is that I can’t use any other DX11 assets, if UPC shaders don’t work in DX11.
Great to hear!
Thank you for the suggestions. And I’d certainly be interested in hearing what future skybox options you might have to offer. Maybe a dusk into evening, as a compromise?
And I plan to leave feedback as soon as I’ve built a simple test scene, so I can properly assess the package. And props for the great documentation on your website! That’s pro.
Hmm… The DX11 issue concerns me. I didn’t know that would happen. I’ll have to test.
As far as the other issues: The asset store currently has a back log of items to approve, so submissions are taking longer than usual. I’d like to hold on these fixes until I get a larger change-list. Then I’ll do an update. If I get a DX11 fix, I’ll do submit that asap.
Lightmap and texture compression is different on mobile devices though, so you might see some red and green patches in the darker areas of the map.That’s not a problem with UCP, that’s just a common texture compression issue.
Basic versions of mobile unity most notably lack postfx capability and occlusion culling,which is a big performance optimization that reduces draw calls at runtime. Both are a big difference. The webplayer has these enabled.
I’m building an Android Basic demo and will post it soon.
For people who like the Introduction but do not have or want NGUI
Here a simple package i done wich do exactly the same introduction with GUIText and itween + a simple script
It include a prefab just drop it in your scene and test it !
… now about this package … it looks very amazing i would like to have it but unfortunatly i cannot buy them since im very very under my budget at the moment
So expect things to come.