Development time for creating a city

  • Dear reader/developers,


    Although I first need to buy the game and play in it (and I plan to do so in the near future), I eventually want to develop the beautiful city of The Hague (The Netherlands) in this game.

    From what I can see in the forum some of you are already developing cities in the game and I would like to ask those a few questions:

    1. Is it doable if you're on your own in the project?

    2. If so, how long would it take to create 81 km2 of land in this game? (rough estimates are fine)


    Thank you :)

    Greetz,

  • 1. Well, it's a question that I can't answer because I can't even understand it.

    2. Roughly years. I think you don't even know how much time it takes to recreate a simple building, because you don't have experience yet. Think small first, for examlpe learn how do modelling ssoftwares work, how to recreate a map in LOTUS, etc. but don't start with a whole city because you will be disappointed in a few hours/days.

  • I think it's possible to build a city on your own but how Wilson wrote it's need a very long time.

    I can show you our progress after one year of work (click here)

    Progresstime currently arround 1 an 1/4 years (or arround 1.200 hours) with two people, complete length of line is arround 14km.

    So I think 81km² is to much as one projekt by one person.

  • Complete city is not doable, considering most people also have a life outside lotus.

    A single line may doable by your self. But it takes lots of time, every building needs to be recreated.

    I think a good example of a similair size project will be OMSI Manly. It has been in constant development since years. (started in omsi 1)


    Only doing research and gathering resources you need to build a real map can take ages. think of taking photographs, obtaining drawings, charts etc.

    Then you need to construct all buildings along the route in blender or similair software. Constructing a single building easily takes a full day of work if you're experienced and have good source material. So do the math the hague has allmost 5000 adresses per square kilometer.

    Currently developing:

    :flag_net: - RVV1990 - 40%

    :flag_net: - RVV1966 Addon - 0%

  • I'm currently working on 4+1 old Budapest lines, which are I don't know, about 20-30km long at least. In the last 10 months I finally managed to build all of the necessary rail tracks, but many of the roads are still missing. And there's very few buildings done, even the finished ones are mostly from my older OMSI projects.


    To build a building (let's say, you extract textures from google streetview and don't visit every single building to take a photo of it), it can take quite a few time. If you have to work even on the photos much (deleting trees, people, signs from the photos) and then build the building, it can take at least a few hours (4-5). If you have to build a more complex building (like old Parliament buildings, castles, big malls...etc) it can even take days.


    And just think about how many buildings and other stuff (eg. poles, lamps, signs, roads) you have to model to make the map look real.


    So yeah, to build a big map alone it takes at least 2-3 years.

    Also remember, LOTUS doesn't really produce optimized maps, so if you only reserve the needed area (with DEM for example), alone it takes gigabytes of data. I reserved a few kilometres of mountain map area for a new line, and it added another 600MB to my map, even if I didn't even touch them... My map is almost empty (only roads and tracks are present) and even like that, it takes up 2,6GBs...

  • You could try to see if it possible to team up with a few people. I think there are atleast 2 or 3 people who might be willing to work on the hague too.

    Making buildings in blender and gathering source data can already be done before you buy lotus btw.

    Currently developing:

    :flag_net: - RVV1990 - 40%

    :flag_net: - RVV1966 Addon - 0%

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