Very detailed city in my game

I just got into Unity and I love it! I want to make a game (just for fun).

The game is going to be a zombie survival game with quests and puzzles to solve. Now what I've never seen before is a game with a very detailed city, where every building and floor is accessible.
So if you see a 50 stories high building in the distance you know you can explore every single floor of it!
(the interiors of the building aren't gonna be super detailed, just enough to not make them feel empty)

I would guess there would be needed some clever programming to achieve that without sh*t performance (which is not a problem for me as I'm a C# developer).

What are you guys thoughts on it? And any tips to help me achieve that?

 

Yes, you'll need to use procedural generation to generate all that internal content on an as-needed basis.

There are some great assets in the store for procedural buildings — you should check 'em out!

(Sorry this is so short — I have to go cook breakfast. Will check back tomorrow and see if I can contribute more, if needed!)

 

You could make it an ASCII art roguelike. Or you could just play 7 Days to Die. Afaik all rooms in all buildings are accessible in that game. It's a Unity game too, so you could maybe dotpeek it.

 

You could also build all your content manually instead of procedurally -- not that I'm against procedural generation, as you can tell from my signature. But you'll want to stream pieces of the game world in and out of memory using SceneManager.LoadSceneAsync(). since a 50-story building would be too much to keep in memory (and to render) all at the same time. There are some excellent products like SECTR Stream that can help you manage this.

However, since you're just getting into Unity, you might want to start with a smaller prototype first to get the hang of all of Unity's little quirks and caveats. It'll give you a lot of insight when you tackle your detailed city game. Even a single floor of a single building covers a huge number of topics, player controls and physics, lighting and occlusion culling and postprocess effects, AI and world interaction, UIs and HUDs, saving and loading, etc.

 

Adding all your extras(trash, furniture, various deco) will get very frustrating during this 50 story building, but if this is your can of worms, id build the city in blocks. The engine itself, and PCs, consoles, possibly mobile could load an entire basic low polygon "frame" for long distance views, and you can load details like wads of paper, and televisions, etc. as cells to load when you need them.

 

Thanks! I will be looking into that.

Right now I'm making smaller games that cover pieces of what I actually want to make. That way I can mess around with different technics and eventually start on the actual game.

 

This reminds of the game Criminal Case. Good luck and looking forward seeing its output.