This is the first time a city has been made faster than a baby. I'm sure of it.

Now this is just badass, and too good not to share with you all. Through the medium of Twitter I stumbled upon a YouTube video called Pixel City which was, according to the video description “a program [written] to generate and fly through a dynamically generated city”. That’s serious: generate an entire night-time city, textures and all, on the fly, and then give you a whistle stop tour of the whole thing.

Sounds too good to be even technologically conceivable. Then I gave it a watch, and it got me thinking. Check it out over the jump.

Pixel City is the work of one Shamus Young, from the States. He spent around 50 hours single-handedly creating textures and shapes for the program to work with, and the result is an executable that can generate a random night-time cityscape in around 5 seconds.

Words can’t describe how awesome it is to watch, so simply watch it instead and that should describe it well enough.

So much of this is simply amazing to watch; buildings, windows, signs, even telltale red and white car lights, all viewable from on high as long as you’re on a computer of relative newness (around 5 years old at most).

What’s the secret? It’s all very rudimentary; there’s no super hi-res texturing going on here, and no extraordinary lighting tricks. It’s all very basic geometry and rendering, with our brains working to fill in details that aren’t even there in the first place and making it all look more impressive than it actually is.

Not that it isn’t impressive: after all, what you see each time you boot up the program is created entirely from scratch, at random, every single time. I’d love to testify that it works but I’m sitting on a netbook with a gig of RAM to go round and a non-existent graphics card, so I’m afraid it’s not something I can personally comment on.

That said, the utter awesomeness of this sort of technology – procedural tech, where things are generated randomly using nothing but a dedicated algorithm – gives me a little bit of a nerdgasm. With Pixel City specifically in mind, imagine what this could be applied to; infinte levels in HAWX, say, or a limitless world in a flight simulator.

Naturally, if you take this sort of tech to a machine that has the power to procedurally generate landscapes during gameplay with hi-res textures – say, a PS3 or a 360 – the potential is even bigger. And more awesome.

Procedural tech is in its infancy and the chances are we’ll see it being applied more and more in future. But to see something like this come from one guy with 50 hours of work speaks volumes for the potential that tech like this carries.

You can read Shamus’ development diary in its entirety here, or download the Windows screensaver file here. Oh, and thanks to the dudes at @DenkiGames for pointing out Pixel City in the first place!

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