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I'd like to start a community project trying to capture the architectural zeitgeist of the 20s - 40s of the 20th century (those guys had a good taste ).
I picture a city with a strong focus on art déco buildings - mighty skyscrapers, like the chrysler building (above) in the city centre and some "smaller" builds in the outskirts, like the Eden building below.

to get a feeling for the architectural style I recommend to browse through this forumthread on skyscrapercity.com.
If that's not enough, here's another one.

In order to mix it up a little we could add some buildings of different architectural styles which also express might and megalomania.

eg gotham sience fiction:

As "huge", "large" and "massive" are central elements of this architectural style we'll need a large map to keep the builds detailed. I request a 512x512x512 map for the project - either named "Art-deco" or (underground) "mall" open to mason+ by default. Builders and Veterans can apply in this thread if they want to participate. However I'll be quite picky, as I want to keep the quality of the map high - It would be awesome if we manage to build a showcase for the fcraftserver in the end.

512x512x512 is waaaaay big. That's twice the size of contest/mason maps. People struggle to load those and you want it twice as big? ~60-70 million block volume is about the max people can handle, especially for a community project.

The World Trade Center map is also 512x512x512. It was a guarantee crash for the majority of the people who attempted to join it.

Imperial City is 512^3 and I've never had performance issues with it. If it's a team project and not main, I don't see a reason not to do it big enough.

Hehe, what's fun is to try to load a FULL 1024^3 map. Tends to take a few minutes.

edit: Do people really struggle to load mason/contest maps? I feel sorry for anybody with a $200 computer.

Do you know what exactly causes those crashes? I didn't notice any performance issues so far and my PC is far away from the high end (I doubt that you can buy any of its parts in stores anymore). The 512 height is required to keep skyscrapers detailed (especially when using realworld models), otherwise the whole project would be quite pointless.

i like the idea you could also add some older german(pre ww2) builds to it or prehaps english castles

and yes i may be able to help if you needed it im not a bad builder but not a great one either

As far as crashes, the only thing that SHOULD cause it (That I'm aware of) is very low system memory. But unless you only have like a gig, I can't imagine that being a real problem most of the time.

Oh Bollocks. I love Sky scrapers. You know I'm in and all for this right?

You can totally just allocate more memory to the already memory hogging java. It has fixed many other players woes with ImperialCity. Remember that the dimensions can be multiples of 16 rather than powers of 2. Also if you aren't using the underground it's possible to cut away the ground and save memory and all that.

tomsplz3 wrote:i like the idea you could also add some older german(pre ww2) builds to it or prehaps english castles

and yes i may be able to help if you needed it im not a bad builder but not a great one either

Do you think about something in particular? I don't know alot of german buildings built from WW1-WW2 and before that Jugendstil occurs to me.
English castles is a wide topic too.

Pemalite wrote:Oh Bollocks. I love Sky scrapers. You know I'm in and all for this right?

hehe, I was afraid you might not like the style. It's good to have you on board

Ollieboy wrote:You can totally just allocate more memory to the already memory hogging java. It has fixed many other players woes with ImperialCity. Remember that the dimensions can be multiples of 16 rather than powers of 2. Also if you aren't using the underground it's possible to cut away the ground and save memory and all that.

I thought about a groundlevel of roughly 20 - allowing minimal landscaping (maybe a river if anyone wants to build bridges, or subwaystations).
Does it actually save system resources to use multiples of 16 instead of next higher power of 2 with empty airblocks at the top?
Anyways while significantly exceeding 256 blocks, I personally don't aim to reach block #512 with my first built for the project (chrysler), but it'd be nice to have that space for projects by other builders, personal future projects, etc.

Fair enough. It's also not just height either, width and length also support multiples of 16. They do leave pretty ugly chunks of hacked out space either end of it though, as shown in ImperialCity, which has some pretty funky dimensions these days.

I can load imperial city, but not other maps of the same size. Like citybuild8 (I think).

The more shit that's in a map, the harder it's going to be. IC is really mostly empty air.
Also, as far as performance goes, you're going to be most greatly affected the map height; the other dimensions matter far less.

On my very first server there was a map that was 1024*1024*whatever max height can be.

You should go for the full 1024*1024*--- if nothing else, it would look cool.

While crashing 10% of the time it ran perfectly for me, and only took about 1 min to load.

A map with large skyscrapers would probably have to be a bit larger than 512*512*512 since it looks silly when buildings are taller than the map is wide. I mean its only 320m tall the chrysler building, i dont think anyone is gonna go higher than that.

I would definately help although since i pretty much became the sole member of the hogwarts project, i mean i dont even like harry potter. After i said all their buildings sucked people have lost interest so i've been a bit tied up. But this would be a superb idea since the current citybuilds are mismatched jumbles of different styles. Hope you get the map. You can paste my building from citybuild10 as a start.

Trepvalkyrie wrote: I would definately help although since i pretty much became the sole member of the hogwarts project, i mean i dont even like harry potter.

Its funny how that's pretty much how large group projects go these days. People get excited and want to build something awesome, then expect it to build itself :/

Trepvalkyrie wrote:I would definately help [...] this would be a superb idea since the current citybuilds are mismatched jumbles of different styles.

Great - It looks like we'll have a promising team right from the start

regarding the performance issues neither pema, trep nor me have been able to join citybuild8 without crashing, while we're all able to join imperial city.
I've googled a little and found 2 potential workarounds. 1st: WoM 1.6 - I installed it, didn't touch anything and I was able to load the world .

2nd: memory allocation... however I've found a ton of sources for how to do it with the beta client while I haven't seen a source for doing the same stuff with the WoM-Client.
I've tried to globally raise the allocated ammount for java applications via controlpanel->java, however that didn't seem to work out (It's likely that I've done something wrong, as I didn't really knew what I was doing )
can anyone help us with the memory allocation?

I think having a 512 height is ok.
If you make each floor 3 blocks high plus a block for the floor and ceiling below, then you can make a tower with 128 floors.

Not if you want to embed lights in the ceiling that dont show up from the floor above.

I love Art Deco

feel free to join us!

Status update:
- HolyShebang has joined the project and calls dibs on the Eden Teatro (the 2nd picture in my initial post)

- I've finished my first skyscraper for the project (well, there are still some inaccuracies to fix): Now I just need space to assemble it. I intended to do that on builder8 in order to post better pictures. However trying so I've noticed that more than more than half of the map is filled with generated terrain - including alot of water... which might explain the difficulties many players have when trying to join the map. Anyway.. as I didn't want to dig giant holes into the terrain the building will stay split into two parts for the time beeing.

Nice work Wunds.

As it got requested, here's the link to an older WoM version which allowed me to load huge maps without crashing:
WoM 1.6.0
probably not a trustworthy source but jotty says it's ok

I'll lock it, just for you.

<3