Has anyone used the Procedural CityEngine to generate levels in real-time?
It seems to get used in production or pre-production due to its sizable overhead, but has anyone tweaked it to run in real-time either in a test or in a game?
Edit: Please include the person or group who did this, the game or test it was used in and a brief description of how it was done.
my name's Matthias Buehler, i am content manager at procedural, inc.
to get an idea about the current way to implement the cityengine in a game pipeline, check out the following show case: http://www.procedural.com/showcase/showcases/destroyed-city.html
this is a game which was created from scratch by a few students. the guy responsible for the level layout used the cityengine to create all building geometries. the assets of course were of course modeled in an other 3d application.
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you guys are referring to a methodology to create models (in different LODs) directly from within a game ("realtime"), (without having to start the CE and export the models) by directly calling the cga shape grammar engine. this is currently not possible, but we have been asked about this many times already. some of our current development goes in that direction, since one of our main focus is the game market.
the workflow so far is - of course - to create a pool of meshes in different LODs and load them in dynamically (proximity based, ..), as it's done in almost all games today.
(sarcasm here)
But in all seriousness, I think your best bet at this time would be to contact the company regarding this usage of their product. It has been my experience that companies are very willing to support their product, especially if you are a customer or potential customer, and you would get the best answers from the actual developers of the product.
Best option would involve asking the creators if it is possible or anyone has done it.
Why exactly would you want to run it in game? Doesn't seem to have much of a point. Even if you could run it in game, the amount of watering down would be huge. Thus rendering it mediocre or worse.
