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This was a project on my postgraduate degree, and tested my problem solving skills. The end result is a city that can be used as the base of a game or a mod, and has controllable events such as weather and time of day. These events can be set to automatic, so the weather and time of day change appropriately, or manually set to be permanently raining and at night, for example.

The environment and effects themselves were created in 3D Studio Max and imported into the Unreal Editor. This meant learning how the engine and its editor worked, and to research methods of improving performance so that it didn't need to be run by an unaffordable computer. A large performance increase was by using texture effects, particularly with lighting, so that lots of calculations weren't required by adding a large number of lights. Normal mapping was heavily used to simulate detail to limit the number of polygons being rendered on screen. Transparent textures were also put to good use, particularly in areas where players wouldn't be able to move through, such as wire mesh fences - which meant only having a basic plane with a transparent texture map applied, rather than modelling each individual strand of the fence.





An external program in Windows Forms using C++ was created to control these events, which output the user's selections to a text file from which the game reads from on startup to pass through the relevant information. Custom console commands were created to receive the variables and perform the necessary actions depending upon the selections made in the external application.





The main options available are the time of day and weather, with rain, snow, fog and clear weather effects created. The rain and snow effects are done in a similar way to in the Unreal game, with billboarded textures displaying a panning texture. To control their visibility, a multiplier is added to the texture flow (with anything above zero being visible), and this is animated in a maintee event, with a slider from 0 to 1 set to play over a few seconds, so the rain or snow slowly fades in or out when needed rather simply appearing and disappearing. A ground fog also appears at the same time so the rain and snow droplets don't vanish into the ground. The main fog is controlled in a similar manner.





For time of day, it can be set to dawn, dusk, midday and night, or leave it on its default setting, which is to have a dynamic time of day. The day length in this instance is possible to be altered, from 10 seconds (which was a setting mainly for me to use to demonstrate the passage of time in my videos) to 30 minutes. In this setting, the lights on the buildings will turn on at appropriate times, a sun moves across the sky displaying dynamic shadows, and the sky texture changes – the main difference being day and night, but the colour tints also change at dawn and dusk, and during weather transitions. The sky texture also has layers, so clouds can be moving independently to the main day/night effects.





A further option available is to enable pedestrians. They use a modified version of the Unreal bot AI, and randomly roam around the city, constrained to the pavements to allow vehicles to be implemented at a later date. As an additional option, these pedestrians can be made to be armed in the external application I created, in order to create a simple game, with the player needing to eliminate them before being targeted himself.

The files can be made available to download on request.

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