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ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

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Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#61

Post by skore »

mcrider wrote: post #55
skore wrote: post #22

Crossing my fingers real hard for somebody to pick this up eventually to make a no-nonsense FOSS SimCity clone out of this. Please, please, please.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately -- What's most interesting to me is the implications for urban data modeling and prediction when the end user has full control of how the data is used. Remember that article a few weeks back about the fellow who used the new SimCity to model his town's traffic problems? Imagine if you had full control over the model and can tweak the city at any level you want, not just what…

> Another interesting idea could be turning a city into a sort of MMORPG where each user has control over a smaller section of the city [...]

There are indeed a number of ways this could make for an interesting multiplayer experience. I'd particularly prefer it if it was fully P2P and networks would emerge by people offering and making connections. Oh one can dream.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#62

Post by superqd »

chime wrote: post #16

> Unfortunately, in our efforts for global domination we quickly discovered the performance limitations of the project as it stood, as well as my personal knowledge with Three.js and WebGL. In short, the expanded version of London ran at a horrible 20–40fps depending on the system you viewed it on. You got a lot farther than me when I tried Three.js before hitting performance problems. I was trying to make a WebGL 3d…

Not sure if this is feasible for you, unless you are comfortable with getting your hands dirty, but I decided to forgo the use of a 3rd party library and write the WebGL code myself for my latest project. Other folks mentioned geometry merging, and for me, that has been the single biggest performance booster on my current project. We were hitting a wall with some models that had 30,000 individual objects (several million verts, 10 million indices).

But since we were writing the WebGL ourselves, I just added a bit of code to batch up all the objects into as big a bucket as WebGL could handle (up to 65k verts per draw call), thereby reducing the number of draw calls (drawElements). For our larger models, we went from 1100 ms per frame, down to 1-5ms per frame. We've done other things as well, but none had so large an impact as merging the geometry into larger chunks.

But I can't speak to doing that in Three.js, since I didn't use it. But you should easily be able to handle the geometry you've got at 60 fps.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#64

Post by batgaijin »

chime wrote: post #16

> Unfortunately, in our efforts for global domination we quickly discovered the performance limitations of the project as it stood, as well as my personal knowledge with Three.js and WebGL. In short, the expanded version of London ran at a horrible 20–40fps depending on the system you viewed it on. You got a lot farther than me when I tried Three.js before hitting performance problems. I was trying to make a WebGL 3d…

I feel like webgl is an advertisement for nacl

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#65

Post by dirkk0 »

superqd wrote: post #62
chime wrote: post #16

> Unfortunately, in our efforts for global domination we quickly discovered the performance limitations of the project as it stood, as well as my personal knowledge with Three.js and WebGL. In short, the expanded version of London ran at a horrible 20–40fps depending on the system you viewed it on. You got a lot farther than me when I tried Three.js before hitting performance problems. I was trying to make a WebGL 3d…

Not sure if this is feasible for you, unless you are comfortable with getting your hands dirty, but I decided to forgo the use of a 3rd party library and write the WebGL code myself for my latest project. Other folks mentioned geometry merging, and for me, that has been the single biggest performance booster on my current project. We were hitting a wall with some models that had 30,000 individual objects (several mil…

This is exactly what you do in ThreeJS.

   THREE.GeometryUtils.merge
does that.

Re: ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL

#66

Post by gmac »

robhawkes wrote: post #19
gmac wrote: post #18

Looks awesome. The Kinect could be a fun way to explore your visualizations -- seen here hooked up to Google Earth: https://github.com/jawj/pigeonsim Also, I'm sure http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa would love to hear from you.

Thanks George. I replied on Twitter but worth saying here also… I saw Pigeon Sim via Andy @ CASA the other day, it looks like awesome fun! We'd also like to play with Leap Motion and create something similar to the Google Liquid Galaxy stuff. Quite keen to work with CASA, I'm sure there is a tonne that we can help each other with. I told Andy about the project a while back but that was before we had anything visual.…

Yep, @digitalurban is still your man at CASA -- and @frogo (who now maintains Pigeon Sim) too. I'm now only honorary there, but keep up an interest.
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