Ürban PAD
City-building middleware hits version 1.1.
Building better cities faster: this has been the quest of French middleware developer Gamr7 for the past two years. They've recently taken it live with the release of Ürban PAD 1.1, now available in test version at http://www.gamr7.com.
Ürban PAD offers a middleware solution to what founders Lionel Barret de Nazaris and Bernard Légaut call "the city problem" : creating rich urban content that contains thousands of objects. As gaming expands into more complex and detailed environments, manual city creation can prove long and costly.
Ürban PAD is also adaptable to a video game production pipeline and can be directly integrated into game engines.
Gamr7 has inversed the city creation logic with a rules-based, as opposed to an object-based, approach. Instead of moving and placing predefined objects, Ürban PAD accelerates city creation by using procedural technology based on user-specified rules. Ürban PAD is comprised of two software components, the Parcel Editor and City Designer, which can produce a 50k-object environment in under an hour. The software can be used for prototyping, and the same city can be generated at a different level of detail with no additional work.
Gamr7 has relaunched its website, http://www.gamr7.com, to coincide with the release. A trial version offer and RSS flux are among the new features.