Now that the game could display photos and the player could move around to recreate them, I wanted something to photograph. The weird snowy test map with its bright primitive shapes wasn’t doing it for me. But what landscape could I create that would have cool landmarks and not be too hard to navigate. Well, remember the toy I made back on day 1 that had no relation to this project?
Burning Man is a geometric city on a flat plain. It can’t be too hard to generate radial and concentric streets, right? Man in the middle, temple in the gap where the roads don’t touch. Simple, right?
Yeah, it’s pretty simple. I’m approximating the concentric roads with straight segments between the radial roads, which mostly works. After defining the roads, I defined “blocks”, spaces between roads where structures could go. Most would be basic tents & shelters, but a few would be landmarks.
A mistake in the code that rotates the blocks into place created something that looked like the solar collectors from Blade Runner 2049. While cool, that’s the wrong sci-fi alternate universe.
The block in the center will eventually be the giant “Man” statue, and the large cylinder will be the “temple”
These temporary assets are already more interesting than the old landscape. The shape of the city creates pleasing leading lines. I did increase the height of the player character and the AI photographer to 6 meters so they can see over the camps, but are still shorter than the landmarks. Maybe they are piloting quadcopters. If so, I’ll have to remove the footstep sounds that came with the FPS controller.