Well, although quite interesting, it isn't the only project using math to save artists some time by generating entire cities from scracth. Even Nvidia has its own precedural city, using OpenGL and PhysX
In this case, they're not only generating the buildings, but everything inside as well: stores, rooms, stairs, furniture... and you can even interact with it, and destroy everything.
But, if you think these tools can only be used to create "square" modern-looking cities, just have a look at what Procedural is doing; perfectly recreating a mediterranean-looking city.
(You can even use a street and height map as basis for the generated city.)
If the iPhone was good for the lat couple of years, no one doubts the extra speed of the new 3GS to make it even better.
Besides raw CPU power, the new 3GS has an improved 3D graphic accelerator: a Power VR SGX instead of the previous MBX.
Now, for the first time, someone got a OpenGL benchmark program running on the iPhones and get some numbers about just how much faster the new 3GS is.
The results are simply astonishing: the new iPhone 3GS blows the competition away - even when compared to the previous references, the "old" iPhone 3G and the Nokia 95.
Some developers have already found that in their tests, with the new 3GS being about 4x faster in OpenGL.
Real Racing has up to six cars on the track at any one time. Since the game uses a high fidelity physics engine, adding cars is a good test for pushing the hardware. We started our tech demo with 8 cars on the track, then 10, 12, 16 and 20, and the 3GS still didn't break a sweat. We finally stopped when we got to 40 cars on the track at the same time, still with no perceptible drop in frame rate. We think the results are mind blowing.
If you were asked to create a virtual city withou using a single photograph or stock texture, how would you do it?
This PixelCity shows you how it can be done, using just procedural methods. And as you'll be able to see in the following video, the results are... amazing.
