Hey everyone! There was some interest in Aeon City after I mentioned it in the Project Skyscraper ARG thread. It is, by far, the most complex city constructed in Galactic Hub space. It focuses on providing visitors to the city with actual activities - the majority of buildings are not just empty decorative structures (I’d say maybe 10 - 20% are inaccessible interiors).
It also has 400+ lines of original dialogue ‘linked’ to the base via third-party website WrittenRealms. That site is designed for text-based RPG’s but I came up with a method to connect it (informally) to No Man’s Sky bases using certain techniques, both in NMS and on WR.
@DevilinPixy had also asked about the technical side of city construction. This was created using a mixture of Blender and in-game building (as some things are actually easier in-game). The concept is to rely heavily on occlusion culling (or whatever similar feature NMS has) - instead of using 100 modular wall panels to create a 1,000u tall wall, I scale a single prefab tunnel to 1,000u and place it on its side. No Man’s Sky has no problem whatsoever loading massive objects (up to a certain point anyway); it only struggles to load a great number of objects at once. So the bulk of the city’s exterior consists of these massive parts, which has the added benefit of massively saving on the complexity budget…
Which is used for the interior decoration, which is much more complex. Most of it is hidden within buildings, however. This creates an almost Bethesda-like approach where the inside of the building loads only after you enter its door, but more seamless, no loading screen necessary.
It’s not flawless, you still see pop-in here and there, but overall it performs very well and with very little lag. Usually it’s completely smooth except for seemingly-random lag spikes which occur then pass.
The city has 20+ multiplayer activities and attractions, including a casino, a PVP arena with functional capture points, a starship race, an exocraft race, a history museum, an art museum, three different areas honoring interlopers from the Galactic Hub for their contributions (Honor Garden / Ark Park / Chapter Towers), a goth club with a Bytebeat rendition of Bela Lugosi’s Dead, a NipNip dispensary, the aforementioned NPCs found throughout the city who you can speak with, and more.
…and now the less-fun part: access is available only by approval. This is because our previous city, New Ziki City, was ‘buried’ and had persistent visibility issues due to unapproved bases being uploaded in the system. It mostly wasn’t malicious, it was just people who watch a Youtube video which fails to mention our rules (or they skim it), then they come to the NZC system and build a base, not even knowing they’re ruining it for everyone else. Sadly, due to that reality of how our beloved simulation works, it’s necessary to keep the location of Aeon City private.
Ordinarily only established members of the Galactic Hub are permitted access, but I’d also be happy to grant access to any ETARC members with an established history of activity here. I just want to keep out the trolls and people who don’t care about rules.
So let me know if you want to come by sometime!