The new lanterns - work in progress, no textures yet

In Dutch we like to say over smaak valt niet te twisten; you can't argue about taste. Similar ideas are repeated often. The beauty of architecture, the quality of music and the taste of food aren't objective facts that can be understood with reason and debated with logic, they're subjective. They're personal preferences, unique to individuals.

Yet, what is considered beautiful and what is not isn't 100% randomly distributed. Buildings like the Taj Mahal are considered beautiful by many people in different continents, cultures and time periods. A neighborhood filled to the brim with old Soviet concrete apartment buildings generally isn't a tourist destination.


Not a tourist destination

A couple of weeks ago, we found a great video by School of Life. It tries to explain why certain towns are considered beautiful, while others are pretty universally seen as abhorrent. One of their ideas is that we need a balance of variety and order.

According to School of Life, a town without any rules quickly devolves into chaos, and we don't like chaos. There must be recurrent patterns so we can make sense of what we're viewing. The buildings should have for example similar shapes or similar colors.

Looking at the Taj Mahal, it's obvious that this monument conforms to these rules. The entire building is painted in similar shades of white, the four towers are identical, and the building is very symmetrical.



But old Soviet flats also conform to those rules. They're mostly the same color and they're constantly reusing the same shape. Before we declare Soviet flats beautiful, we have to take a look at School of Life's second rule: we also dislike boring repetition.

If the same simple pattern is constantly reused, the result is probably going to be pretty ugly. Within the rules of similar shape or similar color established above, there should be some room for creativity. If all the buildings on a square have the same shape, the colors should vary. If the color palette is restricted, the buildings should have unique ornaments.


How do you fix spelling errors in YouTube's subtitles?

The video, titled How to Make an Attractive City made us think about Colony Survival - which essentially is a city builder. We realized that many people were using the same three building materials; planks, stone bricks and clay bricks. Which makes sense, because they're currently still very popular building materials, and modern construction materials like steel and concrete don't fit the theme of Colony Survival.

But there's a problem: every brick in Colony Survival has exactly the same color. Which is fine when you're building one house, but if you put 10 brick houses next to each other, they also have exactly the same color, probably causing your town to look uglier than it should. In real life, brick houses often have slightly different colors.


Amsterdam, the capital of our home country

So while in real life a row of old brick houses looks like organized complexity, and thus beautiful, in Colony Survival it looks like bland repetition, and thus ugly.

We want to solve this problem by offering players a range of variations on common building materials like clay bricks, stone bricks and planks. Stone and clay bricks can be crafted into a range of natural colors. Planks can be dyed in all kinds of colors, using new herbs similar to flax.

Instead of making new textures for every different color, we've developed a system that allows us to simply enter an RGB color code to paint an existing block in a different color. Because every block uses multiple textures (for normal mapping, height mapping, specular mapping, etcetera), adding dozens of blocks in the old system would require hundreds of new texture, which would quickly decrease performance. With the new system, we can add all those new blocks without the performance drop!

While thinking about the possibilities of the new ideas, we also decided to add a new lantern block. It's a full block that functions like a torch. In 0.5.0, you'll have the ability to produce lanterns that emit light in different colors! It really fits Christmas :)


According to School of Life, this looks like a chaotic mess and is thus ugly. I fully agree with them

Here's School of Life's full video;
https://youtu.be/Hy4QjmKzF1c
We hope you're all going to build beautiful cities in 0.5.0 during Christmas ;)

Bedankt voor het lezen!