as for lighting, wouldn’t it make sense to have one light for everyone? like, the sun perhaps? 
I want it to be realtime :x I want it my way 
Also, can you start it off with a 3d landscape? So it’s a little more interesting?
Hey, If someone can make it realtime, with a url that you can enter into another file with (I’ve never done that), I’d love it. Plus, if you all do it, I have a 500 mb website and am not using that much space (not even close) so I’d be happy to host it via the plugin, what do ya think???
Oh, and my favorite thing to do is Architectural walkthroughs, I’d love it to be realtime!!!
Also, there should be a business district, vs residential and park grounds, LOL This could be really cool 
(Parklands could have an entrance with a hint of what it would be like inside, but the acutal park would be in another file, like any other interior???
I REALLY love stuff about hypercubes (4-D cubes), and like the idea of the house in “And He Built A Crooked House.” (For those of you who don’t know that story, a guy builds a house that looks like an unfolded hypercube, but it folds up 4-dimensionally via an earthquake and him and two other people get stuck in the house.) Could I model three houses: One looking like an unfolded hypercube (eight cubes, four of which surround the second from the top, like in “And He Built A Crooked House”), another looking like one version of a hypercube (one cube inside of a bigger cube, connected), and another that looks more like another hypercube (two equal-sized cubes that are connected)?
The thing about a 15-unit-tall thing wouldn’t work for me with the unfolded one, though. It’s got to be 4 rooms tall, each equally sized, and 4 cubes surrounding the second from the top. They would each be like at least 2 rooms tall.
Also, I might come up with more ideas for Blender City that would be hard to describe. I don’t like to describe things in detail, so I would like to do them myself. But if I’ve already done one, and the rule of “one building per modeller” goes into effect, then I’ll have to describe them!
And, shouldn’t we have some stuff outside the city (i.e. forests, mountains, caves, etc.)?
Plus, if we have models for characters or vehicles or stuff like that, could we submit them for a seperate file: “Blender City Inhabitants And Their Things?”
With all these ideas, it wouldn’t just be a Blender City; it’d be a Blender Universe! Hey, maybe we could make a pseudo-NASA place where people can blast off!
Maybe we could make up stories for short films in the city. Maybe we could give the city a better name. (How about “Matobenmur,” an anagram for “Motabunmer,” “Tomanubrem,” and “Not A Number?”) Maybe we could stop coming up with silly ideas! (How about an amusement park?)
I’d better stop. The time limit is coming soon.
Ooooh, I just had an idea. It could possibly be infinately large (ie as big as you like) if we could just have a link from the “city” and allow people to share their files anyway they like, so you don’t have to download everything each time you visit the site. Like have a location that you have to put the files in, say c:\blendercity or equivalent for linux, and the “plugin” would find it there and not have to download. Would this work?
Isn’t it awful the way you can put an idea forth, and everyone twists it up their own way? LOL
The whole idea is fun though 
CubeFan973:just curious,are you a cubes fan?
30 metres high?! Guess I’ll have the space out back for that launch pad gantry I’ve always wanted :o
What’s the policy on packagable things (bitmaps, fonts, etc…) and plugins?
To avoid object/material/etc… name clashes (and to make life easier for you ) should residents have their own namespace? For example, when someone applies for a block of land, you asign them a three letter prefix to be used for all of their objects/materials/etc…
How deep can we excavate? Moats, car parks, dungeons…
Any zoning regulations? 12,000 cubic metres can make a pretty tempting apartment building…
Neighbourhoods? Standard houses in this area, medieval there, futuristic over there, etc…
Particles? Limited?
Separate libraries of occupants/other things sounds good too!
Ok pofo!
Great.
I DO agree in making it non real time.
The 10x10x15 unit limit is nice but it will create tto much a standard city.
My suggestion is:
You prepare a 64k vertex plane landscape, with smmoth hills, a river, and roadmap already there. If you don’t want to do this, I can
Don’t do streets the American Way (Or the Roman way, for that) that is, not only straight roads, crossing perpendicularly, be more creative.
The vertexes of the landscape blocks so defined should be duplicated and separated from general landscape.
You select the blocks where public building/monuments should be.
To every participant you pass a blend file wit the land block, chosen at random, and the height limit you choose for that part of the city (central can be higher than suburban).
Participant can do whatever he/she/it want provided that he stays in the limits.
Further suggestions:
at least 10k faces, this makes 1Mfaces for 100 building, but with a decent detail…
Only blender built in procedural textures! No images at all allowed (or your .blend wil burst)
Every building object names should contain a progressive number chosen by you so that you can easily identify them.
All building objects should be parented to an empty placed below/above the building named accordingly to the participant
All for now
Stefano
Those are all good points S68. It would look more alive that way. Not so constructed and overly planned.
You prepare a 64k vertex plane landscape, with smmoth hills, a river, and roadmap already there. If you don’t want to do this, I can
Would you? I’ve got alot on my mind right now. It would be very kind of you. I’ve started on a landscape, but it’s only got right angles between roads and so on, not very interesting at all.
Only thing I don’t agree with is the random choosing thing. It’d be more fun with a map with numbered blocks so one could at least pick what part of the city one would like to build in. First come first served.
- pofo
I pick the hollywood hills 8)
I’ll try to send you a landscape within today
Stefano
That’d be great, thanks
- pofo
What about having the local governemt provide a few approved images? Like a grass image or two, and brick/tile outlines? For low-poly models, something like this is going to make life a lot simpler, and also reduce the need to sacrifice precious faces for simple brickwork.
I think you’re right. Mind if I use this?
Grass can be made to look decent with the procedurals (I usually use some squashed clouds on stucci) but if you have any other general outlines, like roof tiles, that might be good to have too.
It seems like around 20 people are interested so far so I think we’ll stick with S68’s 10000 faces. It’ll be needed if textures are limited to procedurals (I never thought of that since I seldom use anyting but the procedurals)
Some definite rules will be up before we start giving out the land
- pofo
I’ve a first scratch of land ready…
<edit>
I mean that I scratched the layout of the city as promised in my previous messarge I’m wating from pofo’s feedback
</edit>
Stefano
Sure, use it. Here’re a couple of others (probably most useful for paving): hexagons and octogons n squares
Sorry, no roof tiles
<edit> the “Sure, use it” was for pofo </edit>
I am loving this idea, look forward to seeing it get started. And while most if not all the suggestions made are very good, it’s too much to consider at this point. Save it for blendercity 2.0. There are far more important things that need to be ironed out so the project will work at all to be concerned with details. Perhaps, limit blendercity 0.1 beta to a small number of people (like the 15-20 who have expressed interest already) so we can make something happen, and have something to show people when they ask ‘what is this…’. Will also give us more practical experience in limiting plot size, faces, textures, lighting, zoning, and such.
Just my 2 cents
Yes, I am a “Cube” fan (or are you talking about cubes?). In fact, it’s the best movie I’ve seen! (Hint: The reason I like hypercubes is because there’ll be a sequel soon that takes place in hypercubes, and I’ve been looking at lots of sites about them!)
A few more ideas:
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A sign on the “outside” of the city saying “Blender City, Population: Undetermined.” I actually made this the night I came up with those other ideas! (I’ll have to remake it, though; I did something that made the text and Blender logo completely unmovable! NEVER size something at 0.000 in SizeX, SizeY, or SizeZ.)
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Government buildings, i.e. a library, a capitol, a school district, etc.
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Hidden areas (i.e. different layers or scenes that give you more things to play with).
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A continent (I wish we could).
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“Unlimited” license to have it be in anything, personal or profitable. (I don’t think they should have to pay for it…)
Plus, I really want to do an anthology series online (as soon as I get a web site, if ever). Could a lot of episodes be used in the series, supposing it ever happens? (Note: Some parts don’t take place in a city, so it wouldn’t be called “Blender City”.)
We tried this about 2 years ago, with the theme being a futuristic floating city where everyone would make a building under the geodome in this model:
http://members.yourlink.net/gruff/filez/citysky.jpg
The only problem was we couldn’t get everyone to agree on a scale, so try and setup the parameters of scale and poly count before anyone gets started.
I forgot, we should put in a jail and a cube for putting innocent people in! (Kidding about the cube thing.)
Seriously, here’s an idea for “credits:” In addition to a text box saying who built what (and if we DO make a 434-foot cube, credit it to “Unknown,” if possible), underneath the buildings are the names of the modellers, in addition to any extra buildings.