Ambulance Simulator, development, projects, website / January 4, 2013

Planning and Generating the City for Emergency Ambulance Simulator 2014

One of the earliest phases of the project was planning the city in which the game takes place. After a couple of tries, we decided to focus on a few goals:
•    Build a realistic city with different areas and many different buildings and streets
•    The city must have one emergency medical center and at least one hospital
•    All the missions must be located within five minutes of the EMT station (to make it more realistic)
•    There are should be missions in different areas: city center, residential areas and perhaps an industrial district
•    Avoid work on parts of the city that players won’t see (there just isn’t enough time)
We also wanted to have a river in our city – we think it’ll make the game more interesting.

An early draft of our city in EAS 2013

Please note, this isn’t the final map of our city – it’s just a draft that we made with Nevigo’s articy:draft (a handy game design tool for game developers and story writers). Some of the annotations aren’t in the right locations. But it’s enough to give you a taste of how the city will be laid out.
The next step was generating our city’s network of streets and roads with CityEngine. Here’s an example of a road system generated with CityEngine:

Part of a road system generated by CityEngine

Once we had some roads, we could start constructing buildings. It takes longer than you might think to generate buildings for the whole city. The goal is to generate enough buildings to make our city feel realistic. We want it to feel lively and authentic when you drive through it. A realistic city requires a lot of variety, so it takes a lot of time to generate all the assets. Here are some screenshots that show some buildings from CityEngine:

Here’s a composition combining buildings, roads, characters and vehicles rendered with Cinema4D. It’s also posted on the EAS Facebook page.

Rendering of the EAS-2013 city. Render and edit with Cinema4D and Photoshop

Of course, creating roads and buildings aren’t our only city-building tasks. We also need a lot of different props and vegetation to ensure a realistic look. I’ll write more about that aspect later.

Comment(s)

  1. Dear manufacturer!

    I ask you, this is to listen to ,that the curative mode that you want to apply the image Do not hang out,and the patient must be approximated to be also,because, unfortunately, the 2012 version may not be.
    I sent images, and sounds ,that the Hungarian incident units unless otherwise specified but can be used by mod.

    1. einWikinger says:

      Hi!

      We’re actively trying to improve the simulation of the therapy for the next version, Emergency Ambulance Simulator 2013. We’re working together with professionals from a German humanitarian organisation which will ensure a great degree of realism of the accidents and therapies present in the new version.

      Still, we’ll only be providing German-themed vehicles. But the new game will be extensively modifiable and we think people will easily be able to provide additional content for the game!

      Hope this answers your questions!

      – Oliver

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