Welcome

"City In A Bottle" is an interactive project bordering between art, science and gaming, funded by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund.

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Procedural architecture?

This project is all about letting the computer do the work for us, and creating background scenery can be handled in the same way as creatures and plants.The first step for the background setting is to standardise some of the processes behind itscreation, so that, like the insect generator, elements ...

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May 4, 2008 | 1 comment

Creating the game world

As we are approaching the first milestone of the project, Ludivine continues to create new artwork for insects and plants, Tom and Frederik are progressing on the OpenGL/Python framework that will host the game world, and I am getting down to the business of creating the backdrop for the whole story ...

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May 4, 2008 | 1 comment

Competition

The world of City In A Bottle is based on the principle of emergence. This means that there is no predefined storyline or environment. The gaming world evolves autonomously, it's doing its own thing. A game is then played once you (the player) design your own creatures and plants and ...

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December 29, 2007 | 2 comments

An editor for fragment shaders

As our system heavily relies on hardware acceleration and the OpenGL Shading Language, we wanted to test out our shaders as soon as possible. In addition to RenderMonkey, we also use a custom shader editor that provides NodeBox-like editing of fragment shaders.The setup is pretty basic: output on the left, ...

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November 7, 2007 | 337 comments

Creature extensions

It would be interesting to see what happens if you put technology in the evolutionary equation. What happens when creatures develop a cultural tendency to enhance their body (like humans do with clothing, cars, cellphones)? And what if these mods have side-effects such as depletion of resources?  Creatures can use ...

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October 2, 2007 | 0 comments

Camera concept

City In A Bottle is not a real 3D world as you might expect from contemporary games - it is a 2D game that obtains its 3D look by using age-old visual tricks to simulate depth.The environment consists of different layers of artwork.  A background with painted trees and layers ...

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September 27, 2007 | 1 comment