A Gamer Spent 200 Hours Building an Incredibly Detailed Digital San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

A Gamer Spent 200 Hours Building an Incredibly Detailed Digital San Francisco

citylab.com

153 pointsmisnamed42 comments

This reminds of the first time I ever went to San Francisco from Australia. My hotel was near some famous tourist spot (oh, Pier 39 - it's mentioned in the post!). I went down to see what was there, and was struck by the most intense deja-vu I'd ever felt. This was my first time to the US, but for some reason I knew this place. It was like I had astral-projection traveled there or something crazy.

Walking around the pier I instinctively knew where everything was: store fronts, stairs... I knew that if I went down I would look out and see Alcatraz? Yep, there it was. And if I went left I'd see... sea lions?! I even said "sea lions?" out loud to myself. I'd never even seen a sea lion before, but yep, there they were!

I was freaking out until I turned around and saw a flight of stairs with a bright red hand rail and realised: Tony Hawk Pro Skater IV.

I've had the same incredibly intense deja-vu from walking through a certain building the first time at my university in South Australia, realizing soon after I had played a custom map/level of that same building years earlier in the Half Life 2 engine. One of the weirdest feelings...

I fully expect many such moments in San Francisco after so many hours of teenage youth spent playing GTA: San Andreas online! :)

There's something off. Someone used the Berlin Reichstag (parliament building) [1] as the model for the SF City Hall [2].

http://i.imgur.com/s2MmJ8B.jpg

[1] http://footage.framepool.com/shotimg/qf/252862096-reichstag-...

[2] http://www.aerialarchives.com/stock/img/AHLB3555.jpg

Reddit thread where the individual who created this answers questions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/593auz/san_fr...

Cities:Skylines is a great game for this kind of thing, because it has tremendous support for mods. It even has a built-in "asset editor" that lets you define buildings, maps and road junctions. All of which can then be shared on the Steam workshop.

You do need quite a few mods to remove restrictions on road and building placement, and then allow manual control of buildings rather than letting them "grow" according to the game mechanics.

A friend of mine works for a company doing something like this with vehicle-mounted scanners. It's like street view on crack - I want to say something like centimeter precision on the measurements, and then they skin it with the photos? It's pretty impressive.

This is also impressive, but for other reasons.

with radar and lidar equipped cars, these models will become a commodity quickly

Fixed wing drones can do the same, but it's hard to get the necessary permits. (In fact the data could even be merged with truck mounted lidar)

I know they merge with aerial scans, but I don't know if it's drone-based.

Before 'drone' became a buzzword, they were just called remote-controlled airplanes.

To me, "drone" has some different connotations. It usually seems to mean either:

- Ability to operate out of the pilot's line of sight (through streamed cockpit video or autonomous operation)

- A lazy term for a multi-rotor (3 or more) aircraft

How does the drone know its exact elevation? GPS is only accurate within like 10 meters

One option is to use Real Time Kinematics (RTK) GPS, which can provide accuracy close to few centimetres, see e.g. http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/navio-rtk-demonstration

Coool! Thanks.

I've always wanted this kind of thing in Gran Turismo, or some other racing sim, just so that I could do my various commutes over time with no traffic and fast cars.

I wanted it so I can learn to drive around downtown Boston at my leisure and without stress of getting lost, finding parking, getting honked at, etc.

Just go out any time after 11pm...

Images - http://m.imgur.com/a/xzZoa

Can this kind of map be used for GTA? Would love to run around the famous cities of the world with a rocket launcher.

Within AAA "cinematic expriiince" fetishism would prevent it, perhaps some indie-semi indie or GTA modders can do it. Also I'd love to see it cause main stream media to throw a fit over such a "terrorist training sim".

Try Driver San Francisco, The Crew or historical L.A. Noire, these are somewhat more realistic than the GTA series in real world street network mimicry.

Not SF, but I recall True Crime: Streets of LA using a true to life map of Los Angeles.

Totally forgot about Test Drive Unlimited's Oʻahu, mostly because I have no idea how that island looks like in real life. And TDU2 had Ibiza as well (Yet that game was somehow unbearable otherwise).

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/fvjnv/which_video_g...

It's fan made game maps even work with google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=15SpJFVht9kXZ0yVMIz...

It's a shame Euro/American Truck Simulators didn't go for more accuracy :) (Probably would have been on par with X-Plane install size however.)

You can get the rocket launcher as long as I get the Killdozer(TM).

The problem with realistic maps is that distances are much larger than a game map. With a lot of repetition of buildings that would get a bit boring.

But I am completely with you on looking for a new GTA5 map.

I wonder if the city is profitable if the map is loaded with the normal game mechanics. I suspect he wouldn't have strategically placed the municipal resources around the place.

I wonder if RL San Francisco is profitable loaded with normal government mechanics. :-)

Response from the creator: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/593ei7/san_francisc...

"Traffic is ok, thanks to tram, cable car and BART. I play in sandbox mod (unlimited money mod on) because if not, it's impossible to build a city like this. It does not avoid to deal with services such as garbage and deathcare. I have huge deathwaves, and I had to hid my landfills because they are not existing in the area I built IRL."

other data source:

OpenStreetMap : "San Francisco Building Height Import"

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Building_H...

Some people also spend weeks and months in Minetest (this one fictitious): https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6642

my question: if this takes '200 hours and 1 gamer' then what are people at AAA game studios even doing?

Building an incredibly powerful engine and flexible modding system to enable one person to do this in 200 hours....

yeah i mean usually thats a fixed cost right? like is that actually a cost of AAA titles? do they make a new engine for every game? i dont think they do.

Where are the homeless people and needle exchange signs?

wow! it reminds me a Microsoft game - Midtown Madness :)

I'm surprised this only took 200 hours. Said gamer must have imported a large bit of the data automatically. Could be copyright issues with Google.

There are mods for the game that let you easily import height maps. I want to say it's done from Open Street Map, but it's been a while since I've tried it out.

http://terrain.party/ (currently down): lets you turn freely available geodata into a PNG that the game accepts.

It doesn't handle the roads, that was almost certainly done by hand.

In the reddit thread they say they took a screenshot of Google Maps and used that to lay out the roads.

There is a mod to import OSM data though, I guess it isn't heavily maintained:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=41606...

I was going to say, my brother has logged considerably more time than that on any version of Mass Effect.

Coming soon: Fallout 6 $YourHometown

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