Hello again! I have some good news, and some more good news.
First the good news, I have reexported my city after discovering several networking bugs in my city due to some unintentional network view components. This bug would have made it impossible to play with other people. The floating street-lamps have also been taken care of (thanks to Gub for pointing this out).
In the following days I may consider adding little objects around the city (such as news stands) and maybe even a central park. No guarantees though...
In case you haven't already discovered, Mars is fully operational again with the Master Server and NAT Facilitator behaving normally. In the event that it doesn't seem to be for you - empty your cache and restart your browser. If Aubrey decides to make an official announcement about this, I'll edit out this section of the post to prevent duplicate content.
What are you waiting for? Go join a server! :D
Sincerely,
Achilles
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Hello everyone! This is the first release of my City of Dreams - a super large mega-city that can support a variety of activities. The City of Dreams has a couple hidden secrets. Feel free to explore around and test things out. Suggestions, comments, and critique is very much appreciated. This world may be a tad laggier than most, so please follow the suggestions below:
Suggestions
1) Do not modify the server settings (visibility & minimap) as they were fine-tuned to reduce the lag. If your computer is running fast, you can opt to change the visibility (and make it higher) though this is still not recommended.
2) Go into full-screen mode. Full screen reduces the lag very noticeably and in some cases has increased the FPS by about 50%. You can access full-screen in Mars Explorer by tapping 0 (zero) once. I highly recommend that you go into full screen mode BEFORE starting or entering a server as the starting camera swooping effect is quite graphics intensive.
Things to do (single player and multi-player)
Once Aubrey gets the master server list up and running again you can do a variety of activities with your friends in the City of Dreams. Below is what I quickly came up with:
1) Drag Racing. You can drag race down the main street (you should start at one of the ends where the cones are, and race to the other side). The main street is marked by one central yellow line, and two white lines on either side (it is the largest road in the city).
2) Hide and seek. You can turn off the badges (camouflage badges) and play hide 'n seek around the city. There are a lot of places to hide on the roofs and in the alleyways.
3) Skill-flying. See how long you can last without crashing into a building while weaving in-between the buildings while flying.
This can also be done during dogfights as an added tactical maneuver.
Feel free to make up your own and post it below if you want.
A few statistics
- Number of buildings: 400
- Approximate polygon (tri) count: 6,000,000 -- 8,000,000
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The URL
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4704910/CityofDreams/Whirld.utw
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Some high-resolution images
Here are some high-res pictures I took of my city. The quality setting was on "Beautiful" and I was in full-screen.
