Tag: he who is tired of london

and I am nothing of a builder

On By brosencrantzIn Blog postsLeave a comment

After a previous creative endeavour I’d been planning for this year (a webcomic!) fell through, I’ve picked up the ol’ 3d modelling again  – but this time, rather than Tinkercad it’s Blender, rather than Tudor castles it’s late 20th century London housing blocks, and rather than making them for 3d printing (although… I could…) it’s actual mods for Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic.*

Ethelred Estate in the late 1980s (Baltimore House, I think; you can get part of the same view today here.) I found the photo on the University of Edinburgh’s “Tower Block UK” project.

WRSR is set in the 1960s-70s and playing the game involves building many residential blocks (from Resources, to house your Workers). The Ethelred Estate in south London is from exactly the right period and felt like an ideal place to start with my project: it’s got an interesting variety of structures on the “brown residential ziggurat” theme, a striking palette of chocolate-brown bricks, white window frames and – a lovely unifying thing throughout the whole estate – the same royal-blue on all the doors, fences, bollards.**

The artist’s very first Blender creation.

TinkerCAD, my only previous modelling experience, is very simple and designed to be easy to pick up. Blender, by contrast, is a professional piece of software, monstrously capable and complicated, with a bewildering array of buttons and hotkeys. Happily, a youtuber going by OffTheRailsGaming has made a tutorial series designed specifically for WRSR modding, which was very helpful in getting started. The approach I’ve taken (similar, it seems, to the actual architects!) – is creating a variety of 2.5×2.5m segments which can then be assembled together.

A first set of untextured building blocks.

That, with placeholder textures based on photos I snapped, combined with the simple but desperately tiresome process of UV mapping to get me to this.

First attempt at Michelson House, with (UGLY) placeholder textures.

Having mostly modelled the building, it was time for MORE UV MAPPING with some better textures, based mostly on actual photographs of the estate I took. There’s a neat, albeit clunky, tool called Shoebox which is great for turning photograph elements into textures, and someone else on the WRSR modders’ Discord server had been going through the exact same journey as I had so I could copy their own experiences.

An early set of textures – I subsequently got a lot better at laying these out. The roofing texture and the window on the right are taken from existing WRSR files, the rest is based on photographs I took around the estate.

Then, actually getting it into the game! This is a whole, tedious step-by-step process of loading files in one format into specialised bits of software and extruding them as others. I benefited from another tutorial by Chris Brammer, a list of documentation by LovelyPL on the Steam workshop and a lot of fiddling around with scripting – the (very) basic programming to make sure the game has the information about which files your building is in, how much it should cost to build, where paths come from it, etc. The game will automatically generate costs, but you can set them manually; I changed mine to cost more bricks and concrete but less steel than average for a block of flats (partly because they’re low rises, partly to encourage people to use them – steel is a pricey resource and takes a lot of investment to make yourself.) At last, into the game!

MY GOSH THAT’S UGLY AND CLUNKY AND OVERLIT AND A WEIRD SCALE

This immediately showed a bunch of other problems. It turns out I needed to create things called mipmaps (which paint.net does very handily) to make the textures look less horrible when zoomed out, and to adjust the script files to make the building less overlit (I also changed the textures to darken the greys and whites.) Most complicated was scaling – I built these at actual size, but WRSR’s internal scaling is a bit odd and my blocks looked too small next to other buildings. I had a long discussion which involved horrifying several modders from ex-Soviet countries with how tiny UK housing stock actually is (the segments here are 2.5m square; in 1960s communist Poland the standard was 2.7m, later increased because that was “too claustrophobic”). I settled on resizing my creations to 110% so they didn’t look too outlandish.

All my segments (so far), in slightly updated textures. The black parts you see are alpha textures which will be transparent in game – these are for railings.

Finally, I had to upload it to the Steam workshop, so here it is! Almost 400 people have downloaded it at time of writing, which is lovely. To follow up, I’ve made a few more – some of the different Ethelred buildings (which turn out to be really quite varied when you look closely), a gym based on the nearby Vauxwall Climbing Centre, a car park and power substation. There are many more things I can and probably will end up doing when the game comes fully back online – a shopping centre based on the old one on Lambeth Walk,*** monuments based on the Ethelred TMO gates and the flowerbeds. It’s been a fun project both in terms of learning more skills and in encouraging me to really look closely at my neighbourhood. But now, alas, I keep seeing interesting 70s tower blocks in London and thinking “ooh, YOU’D do well in WRSR…”

* At the exact time I started to get into this, WRSR has suffered a horrible attack from a deranged former fan using frivolous lawsuits to… well, I don’t know exactly what he intends to achieve at this point except to hurt a small games studio. So the game’s Steam page and its site are currently down due to frivolous DMCA takedown requests. I have every confidence they’ll win in the end but I’m going to hold off adding new mods until it’s back up.

** Although from older photos it looks like this – much like Tower Bridge – was originally chocolate brown. Much like Tower Bridge, the blue is better.

*** The earlier Ethelred Estate included developments on both sides of Lambeth Walk, and a fully pedestrianised shopping precinct, like a sort of downmarket Brunswick Centre. Half of it has now been torn down and the road reopened – you can see the same view of the “then” here and the “now” here.

*

millbank headwind

On By brosencrantzIn UncategorisedLeave a comment

Returning to London as a cyclist is like coming home. When I was little we’d often cycle as a family – down to Dulwich to visit grandparents, or every week to the Sumics music group off the Caledonia Road; every school morning for two years my dad would put me on the back of the tandem and take me down to Essex Road station, and my mum had taught me to handle the Old Street roundabout (killer of a dozen cyclists a year) aged about ten (which was, on reflection, genuinely insane.)

However, as an adult doing his own thing fifteen years later, this is a new and exciting world. Lessons learned among the Velocipede Squad:

  • The “cycling superhighways” are actually genuinely fantastic. My first ride from Paddington down to Vauxhall had maybe five hundred metres of road shared with vehicles; all the rest was segregated cycletrack, almost all of it offroad. It’s an approach I’ve never seen in Britain before, done properly: cyclists are treated like actual people. No, better than people. Like cars.
  • A lot of London cyclists take it seriously. The cult of spandex is in full force here, and its adherents are everywhere, dolled up in fetish gear and humping two grand of carbon fibre at warp five. The Millbank peloton makes me feel small, slow, afraid, low-vis and unreflective. It stings.
  • Fortunately, the Dutch/Danish baseline approach of “it’s too far to walk and too nice a day to get the metro, let’s use this legitimate method of two-wheeled transport with our normal clothes” isn’t extinct. Boris bikes (which should really be named Ken bikes, but what the hell) are a very important and very visible enabler of this, and comprise maybe a quarter of the bikes on the morning commute.
  • Probably due to a lack of proper hills, many London cyclists have no clue how to use their gears. There’s always some dipshit standing on his pedals. Always.
  • The Millbank peloton forcing its way onto the MI5 roundabout, against right of way and in the face of actual motor vehicles, by sheer force of numbers and overwhelming impatience, is a bizarre and terrifying thing to see.
  • There are some truly superb calves and arses on display on my usual route to work. Given the unisex nature of cycling cult gear, it’s often hard to ascertain the gender of their owners, which probably badly confuses and upsets some people.
  • HGVs on London roads move gently, tentatively, clearly very aware of the terrible damage they can do. People are surprisingly polite to buses, and buses are surprisingly polite in return. There is an intense, passionate mutual hatred between cabbies and cyclists.
  • There’s a neat little initiative Lambeth Council are running, creating cycling spaces out of parking spaces with custom-made lockable sheds you can ask for a space in. I registered a request when I first moved here, was told to expect a response soon, and several months later haven’t had it. Apparently there’s a vast backlog because the contractor doing it is the only one in the UK capable of building lockable sheds, and Lambeth are utterly unable to compel any sort of performance out of them. Classic public-private partnership.
  • There are still far, far too many prick cyclists who think they’re too cool for red lights and will sail through in full view of everyone, including across surges of moving traffic and through pedestrians crossing the road. Annoyingly, they usually survive, so I move for a programme of public crucifixions.
  • My boss pointed out that most drivers in central London are professionals: chauffeurs, bus drivers, van drivers, taxi drivers, lorry drivers. On reflection, it shows. Private vehicles are actually in the minority, which is a blessing. I don’t want to be either in or around a regular car.
  • I’m not really frightened of cars hitting me, because in the tight confines nothing goes fast enough to do any serious damage. I am however terrified of being crushed between them, and the godawful lanewreck around Parliament Square requires being between lanes for most of it. Not fun.
  • Either the lanes on the southbound side of Whitehall heading onto Parliament Square need better marking, or they’re putting something in the water, as there’s not once I’ve followed it without five idiots in the wrong lane indicating and trying to shoulder their way in.