I remember seeing the creator of the source material here posting tech demos experimenting with this technique years ago.
Like some googling shows it was probably a demo from at least 6 years ago!
But the style was so distinct that within moments of reading the title, it clicked that it was going be that tech demo I had seen, and that the tech demo had become a game called "Townscaper"
It brought back a lot of memories, and it's amazing to see that he turned it into what looks like a very successful game years later.
It's also a testament to how unique it was, I could not think of a single "town related" rendering I had seen that was worth an entire article replicating besides his after half a decade.
I never have time for games anymore, but I'm buying a copy just as a kind of memento. It's crazy how much has changed since those days.
I bought a copy shortly after it came out. I think I've played it twice for a cumulative play time of perhaps an hour. I expect I'll pick it up again here and there for some stress free fun, but even if I don't I feel it was money well spent.
Just a small nit, but the scroll event isn't blocked from bubbling up, so when you scroll down to zoom out, the browser scrolls the page down, which is kind of annoying.
https://bgolus.medium.com/the-quest-for-very-wide-outlines-b... mentions this trick, and provides an alternative approach if you want uniformly thick outlines in screen space rather than geometry space. Also geometry-based and screen-aside outlines generate different results when an object (like a curved roof) partially occludes itself.
A very old trick I remember also being already used by modders for quake 3 custom models because it didn't require explicit support in the engine, just the same model a bit bigger and with reversed vertex order.
I remember seeing the creator of the source material here posting tech demos experimenting with this technique years ago.
Like some googling shows it was probably a demo from at least 6 years ago!
But the style was so distinct that within moments of reading the title, it clicked that it was going be that tech demo I had seen, and that the tech demo had become a game called "Townscaper"
It brought back a lot of memories, and it's amazing to see that he turned it into what looks like a very successful game years later.
It's also a testament to how unique it was, I could not think of a single "town related" rendering I had seen that was worth an entire article replicating besides his after half a decade.
I never have time for games anymore, but I'm buying a copy just as a kind of memento. It's crazy how much has changed since those days.