With a best guess estimate of a release date sometime towards the end of 2018, City of Titans is a bit overdue. Largely do the fact that making a spiritual successor to superhero MMORPG City of Heroes is no small task. Particularly considering the developer, Missing World Media is made up entirely of volunteers.
Crafting a gameworld massive enough to handle the exploits of super-powered heroes and villains could be a huge time sink. Fortunately, Missing World Media has found a way to automate some of the process. A nifty tool they showed off in a recent Kickstarter update called ‘Builder.’
One of these took six hours. One took two minutes. Can you tell which is which?
With a world map roughly 16 miles per side, the developers needed a way to populate the world that wouldn’t require hours of modeling. Typically, building in games come in two distinct varieties; single object or piecemeal assembly.
Putting It All Together
Many studios opt to construct each building individually. This modeling process eats away at precious time and resources for developers. Usually, the same buildings end up being used over and over to justify the effort. Since each building is a full until it requires significant hard drive space as well.
The second approach is to model smaller elements and use those to create buildings of different varieties. This allows for more flexibility and diversity in buildings, but is still time consuming. Somebody still has to put all those pieces together.
With ‘Builder’ the team is able to feed parts and instructions into the engine and have the program put them together. The update shared a video of a street in the game’s starting district, Alexandria being created. Of course, they still had to do a bit of prep work; preparing terrain, drawing a rough town layout, and greyboxing the area to make sure everything would look right. After completing the arduous task of laying road work they were ready to generate some cityscape.
Needless to say this tool will be a huge help in getting City of Titans looking like a proper and thriving metropolitan area. Now let’s just hope all those spiffy new buildings have hero insurance.
