The only reasons why the artifacts and buildings look like they do is because:
A. I lack the budget to do everything I want, with a horde of artists to make the vision complete. Really, this would be a completely different game, in terms of art, if I could just be like, "yo, I need 100 buildings, to this scale, cannot be larger than X or smaller than Y, use these styles as references, GO".
Unfortunately, life isn't that simple for me
B. Right now, it suits my purposes as a game designer- they look sufficiently "other", so new players will be like, "oh, there's a cube floating over the map! I should capture it with my Engineering Teams".
Originally, I wanted them to look more like human artifacts. However, there are a lot of limiting factors here- once they look human-designed, players naturally are going to be like, "why are these things on an otherwise bare map?", etc., etc. Which leads to all sorts of madness. Easier, imo, to just keep them "other", and invoke a sufficiently miraculous technology that kept them from falling apart.
After all, these devices were humanity's crowning scientific achievement... and their doom... heh... backstory...
I could lower the frequency at which the skyscrapers are generated, and thus show more medium buildings, with a small scattering of big ones, or a "core" of high rises, for example. The real issue there is content for World Builder, not practical problems.My only gripe with the city is that it looks a bit artificial (yeah, I know that's an oxymoron). By that I mean, urban centers like that should be surrounded by sprawling suburbs and one, two and three story buildings that stretch for.. well, miles; especially a downtown "core" like that. Just having skyscrapers suddenly rise out of the ground like that is a bit odd.
I have a very small handful of buildings. World Builder is a GPL project, and is not integrated with P.U.R.E. per se (although World Builder expects a few things to be set up in your games, mind ye, but I'll get to that when I release it) so it's mainly down to getting people to actively contribute content that doesn't suck.
Making the city full-scale... well, it could certainly be done, but... it'd involve some practical issues, in terms of how much you want to see at a given moment, even with the hack-arounds I'm using. The Spring engine really does need a much faster map format than it has at present, to really deal with these kinds of scenes efficiently, and almost certainly needs a renderer that's using modern hardware properly, before we can expect to show these scenes in full glory.
Actually, from overhead, it looks like well-baked asphalt. But I'd be the first to agree that it doesn't look like a complete, realistically-developed city- the limitation there is artist-time, and I hadn't settled on a scale yet. I never really intended for this to be more than a technical demo for World Builder anyhow, so I've pretty much done nothing with the map since I demo'd it, what, two months ago? The only thing that changed there was the scale of the buildings, pretty much- and it made a surprising level of difference.Well, also there are apparently no roads in his city either. I'm betting that he's got more stuff in mind.
The other issue, which is actually somewhat severe, and I will probably need to correct it before release, is that the map should have been smoothed more, to lower its real polycount- I wasn't aware of how bad of a drain that was, until I did some tests. Flat maps render a LOT faster than maps that are covered with oodles of detailed bumps. I'll probably smooth that heightmap a bit before making the final version.
