New Biome Idea: City Ruins

You know, I'm being kind of meddle-ish here but, this could tie nicely into the lore, about how the progenitors emerged and how some of them stayed behind programmed to defend (the already dead?) homeworlds of humanity?

Kind of like CORE wanted everything to be non-sentient, hard, cold metal machines, yet ARM wanted to protect whatever organic, carbon-based life-forms were left?

Or atleast thats the feeling I get from each of their base-worlds.

Maybe the progenitors wanted to preserve whatever was left of the 'human age' as a tribute to their creators?

Yes, however in Total Annihilation, you also had the ARM - who were fighting to keep their human bodies separate from the machines. That doesn't exist in this, as (from what I understand) these are just machines carrying out their programming seemingly without end, since their creators have long since died out.

The Age of Dinosaurs ended 65 million years ago (or 6000 if you're a creationist ), yet their remains haven't "ground into dust" ... nor have the remains of numerous ancient human civilizations.

I personally loved the way TA handled city ruins, and agree it should be distinct from the metal biome.

maybe some metal biomes could have various structures as part of their greeble?

I may have clicked on this topic because I saw how well organised the title was compared to most threads and thought it was a dev's topic. >_>

In any case, ruined cities are a great idea.

From the lore perspective, if you tell me that human cities have long since been ground into dust, I'll tell you all about the new high strength, high resilience building materials humans were using before going extinct that wouldn't have been ground into dust.

I love the idea of city ruin with some wreckage to reclaim !

Reminds me of TA...

We would love to do a city biome at some point. The last remains of the progenitor cities...

Neutrino, roughly how much work is it to create a biome, apart from the art assets?

Eg, say you had a whole ton of ruined building models & props all textured and ready to go and you just needed to get them into the game.. Proportional to creating the asset, would it be a fairly simple matter to plunk it in, or ..?

Just trying to get an idea on how practical it'll be for us to make our own.

From what I gather they have some ground materials, some props, and some terrain shapes for the constructive solids, and then the system just randomly puts it together according to the biome map?

There are a couple levels of work. Building the assets is one of them. The other is plugging them into the system and tweaking the procedural generation. Then there is making sure the underlying system has enough of a feature set to actually make it possible.

Overall I would expect us to do this sometime post launch.

Im all for this.

sweet, glad this is on the radar for "post release add on"

It's not an essential detail, but man would it be great!

Sorry just to clarify - post release you're looking at allowing modders to create their own biomes, or post release you're looking at doing a city biome yourself?

I like the idé and don't se anyproblem with it. and i will to nuke the hell out of a City ruins xD

Someone must do a NYC expy so we can blow it up/ invade it with giant robots.

And by chance, city constructing bots have also survived.

Humans have long left manual labour to machines before they went extinct. Now, thousands of years later, huge fleets of superconstructors roam the galaxy, attacking planets and orbitals to build huge megacities on top of them for purpose long forgotten.

Chances for the evolution of new intelligent species on primordial worlds are brutally crushed as the ancient city builders deforest entire worlds to set up appartement buildings that noone will every use.

Commanders wage wars on the ground of burned out planets only to be destroyed as prebuilt shopping malls get dropped from orbit and crush them under the weight of a billion supermarkets.


(I want a commander with a hard hat. :mrgreen: )

Captured, Assimilated, Refined and Transformed.

As amusing as this was to read, I can't see (just continuing to think logically) that machines like that would have survived when Commanders and their armies are blowing up whole planets in an attempt to wipe out a (now long extinct) foe.

this will involve the player to use CQC units (close quarter combat) ^^; destroying buildings; perhaps that some bots could climb on skyscrapers like spiders

I really like the first image.

Perfect thing to not forget that their was something before the war, even if it was a very long time ago...

But if it was such a long time ago, wouldn't nature have started to claim back the ruins ?
Cities "A la" Enslaved (check here, or here) would be awsome !
But I suppose it would depend on how ravaged the planet was and for how long it has been left in peace !