Grit, grime, rubbish and detritus

[frumbert]

I\'d like to see more rubbish lying around. The city is pristine. Apart from a few barrels, the ubiquitous creates and an occasional crumbly wall, the place is positively cubist. I\'d like to be able to walk into a new area and have a bit of an idea of what type of area it is by looking at what\'s lying around. e.g.:

- stacks of wood and stone near and around houses and crafting areas.

- big and little barrels, wagons & banners near and around tavern/inn areas

- long crates, wagons and hay bales around weapons / smithing areas. Lots of banners and flags and crests on the walls.

- food waste, paper, bags of rubbish, and chairs around social areas

- small bushes and shrubs, floweres, washing hanging on lines, etc in social/living areas

- crumbly walls, missing boards, half-collapses houses, broken cobbles, rats, bats, etc, in the \"old\" parts of towns; this could also be thought of as the \"bad areas\" where people go to gamble or buy things on the cheap..

- moss and vines growing on the \"shady\" side of buildings.. e.g. a large bush and vine growing up the side of the tower. This could hide a secret entrance.

- more variation in the cobble and stone textures to indicate \"main\" roads and \"alleys\".. e.g. alleys have a darker texture with more rocky look, while main streets have lighter texture with a more uniform \"flat\" look. This would help people navigate around.

- In caves, the rocks on the ground are cool. There needs to be more \"crumbly\" bits on the walls to indicate where these rocks might have fallen from. You could also put in the occasional \"bracing\" beam to hold up the roof; make the cave look more like a mine in some places. Put some digging equipment here and there (carts, picks, buckets, lanterns).

- In the dungeons, put some mossy bones here and there.. Use more reds and yellows in the lighting with big dark gaps between. Crystals poking through the roof or walls could let in shafts of bright light into key areas of the dungeon or cave. Break some of the pillars and collapse some walls, leaving broken stone on the ground to indicate the age of dungeons..

[Kixie]

semi good idea but your wanting to make the place look like a dump! there should be bones and moss in the dungeons and maybe crates and barells but trash is just not a good idea! this is supposed to be a major city in ylakium (or how ever you spell it) not some trasy town. maybe in other smaller towns there could be trash but this is supposed to be a grand city that shines, not trashy and crappy... :rolleyes:

[frumbert]

I hadn\'t thought of it like that. Maybe there\'s an NPC who goes around picking up garbage

There\'s a thread for cities. Maybe in THOSE cities and towns there could be garbage in the streets.

This is just a suggestion on how to make town and whatnot seem more \"lived in\" rather than huge inhabited spaces populated only by players. Towns should *seem* like towns; towns have their good and bad bits.

[lynx_lupo]

Nice thoughts. But I think many small objects stress grafic cards...which would increase the \"lag\".

And it would be nice to be able to trip on junk....people would get more environment friendly then. (assuming all that junk can be removed and is a product of player activity.)

Yeah and junk should be spawned dynamically eg. the more one crafts the more junk gets around his workshop.

[Kixie]

oh cmon you always talk about lag lynx... small objects wouldnt add that much lag and crystal blue will probally fix lag totally and even have reserves of memory for lag... crystal blue is thy savior...

[frumbert]

small objects  *shouldn\'t* stress cards. they are created as instances of objects in the cards ram is the feature is available, and then the same geometry is re-used in different locations - placed in the scene by the hardware *on* the graphics card. Scale and rotation can be done within the card\'s hardware. when using graphics card capabilities (not software rendering), the only details the engine needs to know about it are it\'s placement and it\'s collision sphere and the scene draw time (so the engine can tell the card which lod to draw to keep the framerate stable).

[frumbert]

actually now that I think of it, texture variations can be done the same way. you simply tell a texture (say the stone cobble/tile on the ground) to use a slightly different hue.. make a grey stone look like a red/brown stone.. the texture is the same object, you just recolour it using the graphics card hardware and some built in opengl calls.
You could probably also use multi-layered textures and turn layers on and off. e.g. a stucco wall might have two extra layers: one for grit and grime, and one for a window. By combining different layers in the texture, you can have up to 4 different looking walls, but it is still only 1 texture, and uses the same amount of texture ram.

[Vengeance]

whemyfield is right and frumbert is wrong.

[frumbert]

so it could be done, then... in theory? without \"lagging\" up the system or whatever the correct term is? I like the idea of \"junk\" spawning around a workshop etc as it is  used..