Vuntra City: A WiP Unreal-Powered Game Featuring a Gigantic Procedural City
Each building in this enormous settlement can be entered by the player.
Indie Game Developer known as Lara_the_dev on Reddit has recently shared a new mind-blowing demo showcasing Vuntra City, a WiP Unreal Engine-powered game for PCVR featuring a gigantic procedurally generated city with hundreds of buildings, each of which can be entered by the player.
As stated by the developer, the project started out as a "chill city walk/drive sim", and as the 3D environment made for the project grew, the creator decided to turn it into a fully-fledged game. At the moment, Vuntra City contains only the city itself, with the developer planning to add NPCs, vehicles, quests, interactive items, and other gameplay elements further down the line. According to Lara, "It'll be at least two more years" until the game is complete.
As for the demo itself, it was captured on Valve Index, a consumer virtual reality headset created and manufactured by Valve and runs on a PC. With it, the developer showcased the game's map, noting that it utilizes a Minecraft-like seed system to generate its myriads of buildings. "Everything is generated on the fly from a seed, so it's the same every time," commented the developer. "Only the player's modifications are saved."
"I didn't really plan this project as a game initially. I just wanted a chill city walk/drive sim, that's why I started with the environment. And once I made it, I just knew I had to add more stuff to it," added Lara_the_dev. "Greyboxing works for games where the gameplay is the main focus and the environment is adapted to it, for me it's the other way around, as my planned gameplay will mostly consist of interacting with the city's objects and inhabitants and finding ways to access its coolest areas."
The developer also commented on the project's performance, saying that Vuntra City "makes sure to only render whatever is most visible, so you may notice that anything that is slightly above or below what you're currently looking at disappears."
"There are sprite impostors at a certain range (~180 meters away), which then turn into cubemaps like Spider-Man at ~300m range. Which then turn into a flat texture at ~700m. And the far away buildings turn into flat sprites themselves at ~3km distance, with the exception of tall skyscrapers, which keep their models and neon lights to act like landmarks at any distance. That's how I render a 20km draw distance."
And here are some of the earlier shots shared by the developer:
We highly encourage you to visit the Vuntra City VR Twitter page to check out more amazing scenes and learn more about the project.
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