01.
For initial testing i created a very simple white boxed environment with 2 lamposts I quickly modelled placed either side.
I chose this as the environment to mimic the streets and plazas present in The Man of The Crowd. I read a book on the situationalist international and ‘unitary urbanism’. There was a quote from Guy Debord about how the city should become a constant carnival
I wrote a simple C# script that, using Unity’s nav-mesh behavior extension, means that the ‘pedestrains’ would navigate towards their set destinations, avoiding obstacles in the way. I also created a separate behavoir for a fleeing npc (non-playable character) that would run away from the player if they were in a certain distance range. By attatching audio sources to the npc’s it already created an interactive sound environment.
02.
I’ve decided to shift from the street location to the idea of a train station, in particular one based off of London Liverpool Street. While working in the library I came across an older book called Railway Architecture of Greater London that had some nice sketches it it that I found visually inspiring.
I started creating assets in blender based on old images of London Liverpool Street.
At this point Ive been focusing on creating the visuals of the environment as I find that having a visual aesthetic to work with helps me develop the sonic aesthetic too.
03.
Above is a recording of the environment in its current state (no sound)
there are currently 200 cylinders (representing passengers) spawned in when the games launched, the framerate remains above 140fps (frames per second) most of the time, with a few spikes where it drops lower. I’ll likely cap it to 60fps, so its currently performing well.
Ive added cubes representing trains to the platforms what will eventually act as the goals for the passengers, as well as where they spawn in. When I implement the sound plugin I aim to time the trains arrival and departure in synch with the rhythm of the patch.
04.
This week ive been experimenting with implementing OSC into the environment to see if its possible. I found a library called OscJack that allows your unity project to handle OSC messages. Ive tested it by sending co-ordinates from unity into max, and send messages from max into unity – the next step I need to test is to see how multiple people can send messages into unity in order to control individual pedestrians – I also need to consider how this interface will look to them, will it be like a joy stick? in this case how would they know what they are doing, where they are walking – perhaps instead simpler buttons would work better such as setting the goal of the ai to navigate to.