CITY PLANNER

• THE IDEA
During this group project we built a city builder tool where our goal was to explore and implement spline based systems and procedural content generation (PCG) all within an intuitive, user friendly product. We wanted functionality to place and edit buildings, create road systems, greenery, parks and waterways, and tools to modify the terrain.

• WHAT I DID
During this project I worked on the following parts:
- Navigation controls
- Place-, edit- and pickup-system for buildings
- UI
- Functionality to edit splines in runtime
- Assembling the main-project

Creating a function to edit splines in runtime was by far my biggest challenge, since the spline points in Unreal Engine doesn't give off mouse hit information in runtime. To solve this I built a system where spheres spawns at every point. Since the spheres give hit information when clicked, I could lock the spline point location to the sphere location, making it possible to move the points around during runtime. This was used in both our road system and our PCG system.

• FURTHER IMPROVEMENT
An improvement we want to explore further is a tool for the user to import custom heightmaps to change the terrain. We tried a couple of ideas to try and make it work but never got the whole way. This can be achieved with dynamic meshes combined with plugins (such as Easy File Dialog) that allow the user to import files from the browser at runtime.

Another thing we wanted to have was procedural mesh based buildings, so that instead of stretching when being transformed, new parts of the building would instead be spawned. I worked on a prototype for this that didn't make it to the final build, but a demo can be seen below.

In addition there are a lot of minor improvements we would like to add, such as a visible grid for the road snapping system, runtime spline point tangent transformation for smoother road curves and the possibility to add or remove points on an already existing spline.
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Group members:
Frida Gottwald, David Dehi, Olof Björn, Pontus Carling