i'd like to see the trams having multiple cars with many more seats to make it plausible that this transit system has enough capacity for a city this huge. right now it seems way underbuilt and not plausible enough

This is probably the most impressive use of scale in a game since I saw the UR5 Matrix demo in 2022. One thing I would be interested in seeing but I'm not sure how doable it currently is since you mentioned in a previous video you were using squarified treemaps to generate the city but the thing I would be interested in the feasibility of is vertical density. Make the city extremely dense and vertical at the same time. Connect the buildings with sky bridges or elevated plazas. Something like Coruscant or Night City but with a scale that does those kinds of locations justice.

This is really cool! I never thought something like this could even be possible. One thing I noticed is that the tram lines all run at the same level, and create intersections when they happen to cross paths. It seems slightly unrealistic for the fictional in-universe City Planners to create all the tracks at exactly the same altitude. Perhaps the tracks should rise or dip slightly when they encounter a perpendicular track. For instances where an intersection occurs right outside a station, perhaps shifting the offset order would prevent the tracks from intersecting at all. (Although, based on how you're generating the tracks in the first place, it seems that this would rarely be a solution, as removing an intersection on one side would just create one on the other side. In this case, you could either have multiple levels on some stations, so that the station itself becomes the intersection point.)

Absolutely love following this project. And as a developer and hobbyist game dev interested in proc-gen I love that you do all these technical deep dives. Keep it up!

I had a thought. Perhaps you could justify the way the tracks work in game as being that they are energy based. They could essentially be literal light rail tracks. That would also help to explain why your tracks cross the way they do. You wouldn't have to worry about making multilevel tracks. It is a futuristic city, right? So the trains all run on rails of light projected from one tower to the next. It would also give you an in-game excuse for not building a single line that actually traverses the entire city. That way your track would be much easier to render as you wouldn't need to worry about loading in track in chunks that are not loaded. You would just need to load in the spline along the path you are taking. As the tram moves it would load in enough of the track so the player can't see the unloaded sections of it. That would in turn reduce your resource overhead when the game is active in system memory. In essence, the track would be part of the tram and only long enough to disappear into the vanishing point of the player's view.

This looks like a real passion project with tons of potential, I love how you're talking about your throught process too, I'm not a game developer but I do work as a programmer so I appreciate you talking through your reasons for doing things and the logic behind everything. Best of luck with the project ^^

This type of development is what the gaming industry truly needs. Great content, i subscribed!

One suggestion for the subtitles: A black outline would make it much more readable when on a bright background

"easy is boring" that's my motto now, thanks!

This is the coolest thing I've seen for a while! Like you, I'm also passionate about procedural world generation and have attempted to use it for puzzle games and 2d world generator. I'm so happy to find this project to follow, you made it incredible far with it already! I can see how many challenges you had to tackle to make this work and it blows my mind that you were able to! You're incredibly talented! 👏

Wow, this whole project is incredible! I didn't even know that this was possible with modern hardware! You're leaving AAA studios in the dust with this. I love the idea of floating trains!

This looks like a neat project. This isn't directly related to the trams, but I noticed when looking over the city that all the 'tall' buildings were the same height. you might look into adding more vertical variety, as currently it gives off an artificial air.

Really cool deep dive. Would it have been easier overall if you set station towers as anchor points for each grid, having the PG build the sector around those towers? That way you could define a "hard-coded" grid of stations (with known paths to each) and have the city just spawn everything around it. I know that isn't how cities will naturally form but cities do tend to evolve around transportation routes, especially if they've been there long enough and are vital enough. For instance, a train station would spawn businesses around them to take advantage of the traffic while residents would favor living near a station so they can get to where they need to go without having to take other transport (assuming they can afford it). Just a thought...

This project seems absolutely stunning and very interesting ! I'm following this !

That train looks accelerated & absolutely detailed tbqh. 👌

For the long stretches of track between stations you could add supports / pylons to make it more realistic and to make them seem more tangible from the ground.

a very cool project I recommend adding a black/dark outline to your subtitles as sometimes the text and the video have nearly the same color

First time watching a video in this devlog(?) and that project is INCREDIBLE!!!!

a lot of public transit on rails uses e-reader-displays in all their windows to switch them between transparent and nontransparent for privacy reasons when they pass by residental areas.

Really cool project, maybe you could put the "tram" lower and change the behavior of the interior generation system when the player is on a train. Also, please don't bake in subtitles like that, they are easy to enable on KZfaq and the plain white is also hard to read sometimes

Just found the video by chance. This was the shiny futuristic city of my childhood day dreams. Reminds me of the post y2k era cgi books I oogled over as a kid & obsess over, gunna keep tabs on this project🙌💙

Very interesting idea! I think it would be great to see other air traffic as things to look at, maybe like flying service vehicles that are circumventing the slower ground travel. Maybe devise some method of how these tracks are staying aloft as well, like some big rings that face downward and propel holographic neon pulses with some vibrating/humming sounds as you pass by them. Some basic birds or other perhaps "alien" flying creatures could be some nice sky scenery as well, and if you go this route I think it'd be easy enough to make flying decoration low-res detail to save on performance. Cool stuff!

I love the artstyle. Great work so far!

May I suggest something: Please don’t get me wrong I’m not undermining the fact that this city is absolutely stunning, however, at night it’s too bright. When it’s supposed to be pitch black skies, you can still see blue along the horizon. Can I suggest lowering the light brightness in low LOD chunks and chunks far away from the player to make the distant lights look dimmer. This and/or making the horizon pitch black instead of dark blue, and decreasing the amount of stars in the sky. I feel like these combined will create a better immersion for the player, especially when viewing from the railway. If you see this, your city so far is beautiful, and am just giving what, in my opinion, will make it that slight bit more immersive.

Hey, incredible video, really cool project. If I may add something, have you considered making skyscraper forests, that may even be empty and way higher than the tram line itself every so often, a sort of commercial district to your city, or multiple because the city is huge. Also, maybe make the trams faster and bigger as they already float above a track, and so that there capacity matches with the huge scale of the city. Anyway, what an awesome project !!!

I am certainly not an expert in UE and in general in theory it is feasible or not, but it would be cool to generate buildings (architecture) depending on the areas, in fact it is biomes of the city, such as shopping area, residential area, area of corporations, low density area, high density area and so on, just at the moment everything looks to me too homogeneous, this is just my opinion, good luck with the project!

Just now discovered this project! It's amazing!

Probably tricky but adding some elevation and vice versa might be a game changer for how it looks.

Thank you for another developer diary post! I'm enjoying the continued development of my new home. Purely theoretical - would it be quite possible to generate tunnels underground in the same way? Subways and undergrounds belong in a big city... It's a duplication of traffic, but... never mind. (I daydreamed about riding the subway in a glass tunnel underwater - just ideas as always; I know the destination is far away and the problem to solve infinite). Anyway, in the final menu the option not to change the time of day and just have night:) Good luck! 🍀

Are you gonna add a shader that emulates slight curvature to make the city feel bigger?

this is so impressive and such a unique concept - and it looks great too!! if u need custom music made for the game, let me know.

Looks amazing... wow! It's a really cool way to get around👏😎

Great to hear the breakdown of the tram logic!

Your city is beautiful!

really makes me think of star citizen, looks good!

in one of the spiderman video game. Even though you're web swing around city, you can still see inside of building from window. I believe they basically put parallax mapping inside the room to simulate the effect of 3d without actually spending resource rendering. The weakness of such technique is that if you try to view it from extreme angle, it doesnt work. But seeing if you're viewing it from far away with limit angle variation, perhaps such technique can work for you.

I don't think you should use sky taxis. The train tracks gives the player a sense of direction that the taxy would not. Only if you put huge skycrapers (like the twin towers in NY) sky taxis would be cool to see the size contrast of the buildings. If anything, you could add pilons and more stations along the tracks to give asense of the paralax as the train is going forward. Seen pilons passing by while the city paralax barely moves will give a sense of scale to the city.

This is awesome. I've always fantasized about creating a procedural world generator that generates actual varied, interesting and plausible worlds.

They look really cool. I did wonder, though: If you had tram lines up high in the air like that, wouldn't it make more sense to have them duck over and under each other a little bit instead of crossing at the same height? Lines that cross at the same height IRL would have to ensure there aren't collisions at the crossing, but I imagine it wouldn't cost anything extra for a real city to have the height of the lines able to vary enough for them to not have intersections like that. Also is the occasional hitching/dropped frames/stutter in your video from the game itself, or just a recording artifact? Anyway really cool project. This is my first time seeing it, and I'm definitely subscribing.

I love this project. I have been following it for a while. It will 100% pick up in popularity

I love this! Commenting for engagement!

this is so cool

Very cool!!!!

i like how you call them trams and not pods, but they should probably be more tram or train-like, pods just aren't dense or space efficient enough for mass transit. it obviously doesn't matter for a game where you only really have 1 person who needs to get around. its an artistic decision, but i like when games make sense for their reality

Wait what? That's your reason to make it so higher? I don't add s new condition to load the interiors? A "more grounded " train line can be so much more immersive!

Could’ve added Maglev trains that ( with a bit of work ) travel though some building (and is at lest 2-3 stories above the ground) also perhaps since you said the building’s interior gets loaded when on said ( travel device) could try to limit it to a bubble around it ( what can actually be seen from it) or have a set of preloaded information that when it travels to a point the next is auto loaded with the last one deloades ( idk I’m not a programmer but - like (deloade) ( past ) (train) (fore) (pre-lode fore)

It is a shame that it seems technical limitations prevent generating these off in the distance as that seems like it would add a lot to the city to see the crisscrossing tram network extending out above you as far as you can see

Wouldn't it be easier to simply disable interior generation while on a tram? Or at least only generate a simplified version of the interior that is fast enough? The lack of supports for the tracks looks bad too. It would be nice if certain buildings or roads had the possibility of being an endpoint for a support, or even if certain plots of land could be dedicated to a support column, and then you could use a similar algorithm as for the towers to join tracks to supports.

You could try with suspension railway so the track doesn't obstruct the view of the city

This looks very wrong. Far too tiny and also how do these tracks keep in the air? And if such technology exists, why isn't the city more vertical in that case?

for the tram path collision I wonder if you could do something like making a grid on the tram's level that has empty spots where there are buildings in the way and then try to do some pathfinding algorithm although I don't know how you would get the path to curve in

I hope you add seasonal settings that affect the city's environment, such as Winter, Fall, and Summer.

Wow ! this is a serene and unique train that is large and explored. 와우! 이것은 크고 탐험하는 조용하고 독특한 기차입니다.

This reminds me of Cloudpunk.

This is very interesting. I have been wanting to play a game where the player can enter any building in a huge city. Just a question: Why did you decide to use an elevated track trains instead of a underground tracks (subways)?

Oh my god, this game seems amazing. This kind of game is exactly what I always dreamed of being able to play one day. I can't wait! Will this be VR only or be for normal PC too?

Wow

If it fails all the iterations, maybe just pick one that takes it directly through the center and put a building tunnel in?

Have you heard of a game called Shadows of Doubt? It’s an investigation game that takes place in a procedurally generated city. You mentioned in another video that the gameplay will probably have something to do with investigation. Will there be similarities between this game and that one? Also is this meant to be vr exclusive? Or can it be played from a pc? Either way I’m excited to follow the development of this game. It looks fascinating! Good luck on the project!

Gosh this is so cool!. I do have a few question. Will it be possible to change the world seed at some point? And also are staircases something that is technically possible or is it too hard to configure in your engine?

woooooooooooooooooooow

Is this VR only? Im excited to play this soon

wow, the city looks a lot larger than i expected. is it endlessly generated? it doesn't seem to end at the horizon as it keeps loading more

This is a really cool project, just found it while scrolling KZfaq. If you need any help with 3d modelling be sure to let me know.

Instead of floating tram tracks you could always put them underground?

Would it really be that difficult to manually disable interior loading when on the tram? Is it an engine limitation? Obviously it would add some complexity but I think it would be worth it.

I haven't watched all your devlogs, having just discovered this channel and project through this video, but it sounds like there's a lot of uncertainty in your generation. Is it being done truly randomly/pseudorandomly, where you can't tell what will be at a position until it generates? If so, have you considered a seeded approach? If you can input a seed at the start for your city, you can theoretically abstract your generation enough that you can query positions anywhere in any chunk and tell what type of building will generate there without actually generating it, letting you have your transport system plan for objects and destinations that don't yet exist. I would also consider the use of a noise map for city generation. True randomness can lead to some cool things, but I'd be really curious to see what the city would look like with several noise maps determining where buildings of different types and heights will generate, plus a bit of that seeded randomness on top for unpredictability, but consistency between seeds. You could even have a dedicated noise map for these important towers, interfering with the other maps so nothing generates in their spots, and letting you tell the position of a tower even faster than querying building positions. Or, at the least, do the reverse of what you're doing now. Instead of generating rails and trying to fit them to the towers as they appear, generate a set of points for each chunk where the towers _will_ be, generate curves going through them all, and then force the towers to be in those positions, demolishing other buildings in their way? That way the entire line can be known at once, you could have virtual trams that load/unload as they come in to view of the player, and they'd be consistent. You can have incoming/outgoing, name them and their towers pre-emptively for the to/from text, have actual information boards at the stations (Arriving in x, Departing for y Tower in the z District, for example), even have recognizable trams as they do their circuits. Maybe even a real map of the tram lines in motion? If you use noise maps for building distribution, you can even make the rail line itself interfere, capping the height threshold to below the rails, which would also allow for spectacular views if the rails were brought down a bit, allowing buildings directly adjacent to potentially reach higher than the rails if they pass through a particularly tall area of the city.

If this was to be incorporated into a multiplayer system (say hide and seek games across the city) where would each player's instance exist within the overall network and how would two intersecting players instances merge together to keep NPCs and other environmental objects valid within each others' perceived realities? Scale this up to three or more players instances merging into one perceived reality instance (For example a finishing line in a race) how would they exist on the network and bleed into each others instances? Bringing distances and times into play within the overall network reality how would two (Or more) instances going in opposite directions on a line past each other work? For those few seconds of shared proximity passing each other would there be less assets loaded overall or would it be based on speed and distance Rather large questions, I know, but if we had flying taxis going past train users going past other train users as we approach a station with other players present it could all get a bit messy. I'm not looking to cause trouble, this is just something that jumps out to me if the fully immersive world is to be realised as beautifully as it is in single player to multiplayer. Removing the ability to look outside of the train (Or see into it) would reduce the processing load but not be as atheistically pleasing as having no other players to integrate into any instance. As always, keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing it when it finally gets past all these hurdles that you are dealing with so well! :)

how about you add some slums? or just a busy market area

Is this game only VR exclusive or will this game also support keyboard and mouse gameplay? Will you also eventually introduce RTX graphics?

Why did you use pods?

Will this game be free once it gets released? Since I don't see much of a reason to buy a game where there's less to do than a realistic simulator game.

can you show an fps counter pls?

:D

I love the idea of this game, but the buildings honestly look very flat. Is that possible to change?

Do you have an email address that would be best for business inquiries? Thanks!

bro check citybld

Wait is this vr

this is so siuck

bah grid cities are the worst

Hi, I came accross this channel not long ago and was instantly intruiged because I'm in the process of starting to make a city generation project as well (with a unique angle). My motivation is quite similar in that I've always been in awe of the beauty that modern cities can have. And I'm excited to see how your game will turn out, I have wishlisted it :) If you would also be interested, I would find it fun to chat with you about our approaches, implementation etc. I think it would be nice for inspiration and motivation. Let me know if there's a way I can contact you, and good luck further with your project 🙂