Archive 2009

[GVNY]

I saw this division of SSC and figued I wish I could create a city that was perfect for me. So, I went about mapping it. Here is what I have created.

Please give me tips if you feel it can be improved.

My metropolis is called Amherst. I don't like to create settings, so I use real locations. Amherst is on the site of the city of Charlottetown, PEI, Canada.



Now, a map showing topography, and a little more city detail.



And now the detailed map of city center. The red lines through the water with nothing between them are harbour tunnels, while the red lines with white are bridges.

The large white areas are either park spaces, industry, or commercial.




Well, what do you all think?

[noRTH1212]

I like maps. Even in the past I liked to draw the maps on the paper. Anyway the city reminds me NYC.

good work.

[Onur]

Hmm... It looks Istanbul.

[3tmk]

Nice job GVNY!
I feel like there are some NYC influences in your downtown

[GVNY]

Absolutely! My favorite feature (and area) of Manhattan is the bulbous tip of the Finance District.

[eventhorizon5]

Note - this is a very old post, and I have an updated post here:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=865188

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I'm the creator of the Skyscraper Project, an open-source building simulator. It's currently being rewritten from the ground up, and I'm wondering if anyone here would like to help out with this. The original program was somewhat basic and simulated a single hard-coded building, but the new engine design (called the Scalable Building Simulator or SBS) calls for an extremely flexible framework for simulating every type of building imaginable (or at least every building that it possibly can haha). The original version (1.0) was written in VB6 and used the TrueVision3D graphics engine; after that I started doing a basic rewrite with VB6/Truevision but abandoned it (I had about 25% rewritten) - I'm now starting over and writing it in C++ along with the Crystal Space graphics engine (and brushing up my C++ skills along the way).

The original version and the current one (which barely works at all) simulate a building I designed in 2002; the 138-story Triton Center. The rewrite will include a building designer app (possibly like a simplistic object-oriented CAD program) and will store buildings in data files, which will be loadable by the SBS simulator. Also, multiplayer gaming support (including deathmatches) is planned, along with single-player stuff (possibly like SimTower/Yoot Tower, etc). I'm posting my Skyscraper 2.0 Prospectus below which gives an in-depth description of what the rewrite will eventually be. I'm also planning (with the help of a few others) to recreate the Glass Tower from the movie The Towering Inferno with this.

First, here's the website:
http://www.tliquest.net/skyscraper
My email address is in my signature at the bottom of this post.
There are also 2 cvs repositories; one on the local server here, and one at Sourceforge:
http://www.tliquest.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/skyscraper

Pictures of version 1.0 (VB6/TrueVision3D) - you'll notice that the FPS count is very low; that's because they were taken on my laptop, which has a crappy video chipset:













More pictures are on the website.


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Skyscraper Prospectus
Ryan Thoryk, 5/29/05

The Skyscraper Project originally began with the simplistic design of a 138-story skyscraper called the Triton Center that I completed on May 4, 2002, using the MyHouse for Windows 6.5 architectural designer application. Later that year I started tinkering with the TrueVision3D graphics engine through Visual Basic 6, and made a small building with a simple but working elevator. This became Skyscraper versions 0.1 and 0.2. I then continued to enhance it, and decided to try to simulate the entire Triton Center. I eventually finished the entire external structure of the building, and still had only 1 elevator. A single shaft bank was made, which housed 10 elevators (5 on each side), and then I eventually duplicated it to increase the number of elevators to 40, divided into 4 shaft banks. All the other parts of the program were made and enhanced, and I started to hit limitations that were not only in my program design, but also in the Visual Basic language itself. So after version 0.96 I forked the code and started redesigning the core of the program, but it became too unstable and needed a great deal of work (this was originally going to be version 0.97); so I took 0.96, fixed it up, and released it as 1.0. I renamed 0.97 to 1.1 alpha, which is the current development project. I rewrote somewhere around 25% of Skyscraper, and then after long periods of other stuff going on in my life, I decided to stop the VB rewrite and start porting the entire program over to C++ (I considered the C# and Java languages before choosing C++). The new C++ version is now at the beginning stages, and I am mainly brushing up on my C++ knowledge before continuing development.

Scalability and expandability factors were considered as early as summer 2003, but were postponed until later (and they’re now part of the design plans of the C++ version). In 2003 many people were complaining about how Skyscraper only simulated a single building, and couldn’t allow people to design others. I explained to them that Skyscraper was still in an early stage, and that the ability to load other buildings as data files is nowhere near easy. Many people also were practically drooling over the thought of having multiplayer deathmatch support in the program, but I explained that I needed to finish more of the main simulation before I start working on multiplayer features. For a while I also had the idea of creating a building designer applet inside the program, which would allow the user to create their own building and save it into a data file, which could then be loaded by the simulation. The original ideas called for a simplistic CAD-like interface that would allow the person to visually create what I had manually coded. I expanded on that idea recently by planning a single player portion of the simulation engine, which would allow the user to create the building during the simulation, and would make it operate very similar to both Sim Tower and Yoot Tower (sequel). All of these ideas will require a massive amount of coding, and so a team of developers would greatly help out.


Skyscraper version 2.0 (of which 1.1 alpha is part of) calls for a highly realistic, real-time, 3D first person simulation of buildings loaded via data files. It also calls for a building designer application that will allow users to create their own buildings and simulate them, single-player elements similar to Sim Tower and Yoot Tower, and multi-player elements such as deathmatch or capture-the-flag scenarios. Everything possible will be simulated, including all the regular parts of buildings (rooms, elevators, stairs, etc), but also crawlspaces, air ducts, elevator shafts, elevator escape hatches, breakable windows, pipe shafts, and lots more. The Visual Basic version of 1.1 alpha currently has an abstraction layer for the 3rd party 3D graphics engine, so that the current one (TrueVision3D) can be replaced by another (CrystalSpace 3D) with very little effort. The entire building simulation system will be contained in a series of DLL files, and is currently called the Scalable Building Simulator, or SBS. The program’s application file (EXE file) will only be the graphical front-end for SBS; everything else will be either handled internally by SBS or by other DLL libraries that would use the SBS API. This way, the program becomes an actual backend simulation engine that can be linked with other applications. It will use the wxWidgets library as the GUI toolkit, thus eventually allowing it to be seamlessly multiplatform (for Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, IRIX, etc).
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-eventhorizon

[PotatoGuy]

Originally Posted by noRTH1212

I like maps. Even in the past I liked to draw the maps on the paper. Anyway the city reminds me NYC.

good work.

haha, me too! i love drawing maps. wen im bored i just get a piece of paper and a pen and i draw out a little city or w/e, i find it entertaining.

[PhilippeMtl]

Originally Posted by PotatoGuy

haha, me too! i love drawing maps. wen im bored i just get a piece of paper and a pen and i draw out a little city or w/e, i find it entertaining.

I'm not alone!

[Macca-GC]

^hey, I do that too. My largest city is 25-A3 pieces of paper.

[sjwmoore]

yes, does look a lot like NY in the street view. Potato Guy and Phillipe, you are certainly not alone, used to draw all sorts of fantasy maps, now work in GIS so it all looks so much more professional

[Urban Dave]

I also draw maps of cities, and fiction countries. With roads, railways, airports, etc.
Even maps of cities, like a satellite picture drawing streets and buildings!

[AmherstMan]

I live in the real Amherst. Its the largest suburb of Buffalo, NY.

I like the street grid

[DetoX]

This would be the greatest stadium ever.
I cannot find the entire picture.. only a part



Someone have this image?

[Pelha]

this stadium?

[The Concerned Potato]

Originally Posted by Pelha

this stadium?

that would be pretty cool but i think he might be referring to the one that comes up in the little Champions League intro thing

which looked more like (basically a curvy dish with the stars as a flat roof)



i'm very embarassed with this quick effort btw

[Cunning Linguist]

the one that pelha posted was the one you're both talking about.

[skaP187]

what about the michilin stadion (the tire...) I cannot find a picture but I quess you know what I mean.

[vij]

u mean continental

[Giorgio]

I think that 'design' has been used for inspiration in a 2010 WC stadium...

[skaP187]

Originally Posted by [Gioяgos]

I think that 'design' has been used for inspiration in a 2010 WC stadium...

I was thinking of it when I wrote it.