Kicking off 2010, here’s a new release of Basilar, my C# procedural city-building from-web-pages experiment.

Read on for more pretty pics, video, and binary/source download.

In 1982, William Gibson coined the phrase Cyberspace in his story Burning Chrome. Today we speak of home pages, web sites, we follow links, we talk in chat rooms. As Flavia Sparacino wrote in 1997, the way we talk about and imagine the web isn’t really the way we experience it.

This project’s an exploration of one possible vision of that non-space, landscape crafted from information. If you’re into this sort of thing you should check out Martin Dodge’s book An Atlas Of Cyberspaces, one of my original inspirations. The book is now a free download!

A city is constructed procedurally, starting with a road network made from a Voronoi diagram. Then the city is zoned by Mayor Perlin, who decides which areas should be park and which should be valuable real estate.

Every URL entered results in a building being added to the city. The higher a building, the higher that URL’s Google PageRank, which is checked in the background before signing off on planning permission.

Every so often billboards will be added to the city, showing live images (webcams, etc) pulled from an Image Of The Day bank.

Major changes from the last version:

• Massive performance increase by packing lightmaps and building textures
• Better building design and decoration heuristics
• Buildings are synchronised
• Removed app updater engine and integrated browser (more hassle than they were worth)
• Recursion – you can now iterate through a page’s links to build a lot of buildings from one root
• Prettier roads
• Terrain

This release includes full source, and the codebase has less dependancies so that you can tweak and recompile it yourself if you’re so inclined.

The codebase includes the source for my little C# OpenGL 3D engine, so serves as an example of one way to construct such a beast. The engine features light mapping, frustrum culling, terrain, skybox support, a caching texture manager, mesh loading and various other features. You’ll find it in the AF3DE subfolder in the source tree; I’ll leave the acronym to your imagination.

Full instructions are given when you start the program, which you’ll find in the bin folder when unpacking the archive.

Download here (Source and binary, 3.5Mb RAR)