← Back to Field Notes
June 25, 2026Field NotesCity ExplorerTooling

The endless city: 1m buildings

What if a city had 1 million buildings?

Source note: Originally published on Eric's Advisory Hour Substack on June 25, 2026. Read the canonical post or subscribe there.

City Explorer procedural city scene image 1 from the original AdvisoryHour post.
The million-building City Explorer stress-test view from the original post.

The procedural building system has many interesting capabilities. Handling escalating levels of detail (up or down) is one of them. You can see this in an aerial view of a scene. The textured buildings are a result of a viewport setting to handle progressive level of detail based on the camera’s distance to the procedural system. In just eyeballing it, I can see a dozen improvements already: supporting a dithered reach chief amongst them. Still, it’s possible to view so many buildings!

City Explorer procedural city scene image 2 from the original AdvisoryHour post.
A smaller procedural-building scene showing the system working at human scale.

It’s also quite possible to just do… 100 or fewer buildings. The procedural building system handles a far range, with a lot of features and capabilities. It can even generate little water towers at the top of the building, HVAC units and more.

City Explorer procedural city scene image 3 from the original AdvisoryHour post.
Another city-scale view from the procedural system: build the thing that builds the thing.

When building something, building procedural systems can take you a pretty far way. Build the thing that builds the thing.

Then do a million+ of it.

Related: This note belongs with the larger building-the-thing-that-builds-the-thing thread and the City Explorer WIP field notes.

Original source

This local copy preserves the article text, source link, and inline media for the Field Notes section. Canonical Substack URL: https://advisoryhour.substack.com/p/the-endless-city-1m-buildings.