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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

I love GTAV so much, it's the most real single player world I've ever experienced. I once rear-ended an NPC because they suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. I got out of my car (because it's GTA and you have to shoot everyone, duh) I saw the NPC had stopped because he hit a cat with his car!

I'd be lying if I said OpenAI Universe / GTAV wasn't one of the primary drivers in me trying to learn ML.

Anyone know what kind of hardware I will need to play with this? The AMI page on github mentions an AWS g2.2xlarge (iirc a GTX 1060 is slightly better than this?). And it seems like GTA is actually running on a different system you use VNC to share the screen/input? Any estimates about whether a 1060 or 1080 on a beefy gaming PC could handle both at once?

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Hmpth. Conversely, while playing GTAV in completely innocent explore-the-world mode, I accidentally bumped a police boat with my jetski. Apparently this warranted being shot in the head.

Most reviews I've read actually complain that GTAV is a step back in realism from GTA4 (for example, body-part specific injuries were dropped), but let's not beat about the bush - no GTA deserves the title of "realistic", because as you say "it's GTA and you have to shoot everyone, duh". They're made to feel realistic, but in fact they powerfully reward violence and punish being law-abiding, in precisely the opposite way that the real world does.

> no GTA deserves the title of "realistic"

depends on what you prioritize to mean "realistic." I think most people would agree that the world of GTA V (and IV) is incredibly realistic by video game standards, to the degree that it's the obvious choice for this AI project.

That is right in everything, but shooting and taking damage, which is mostly irrelevant for driving AI.

Well, if it had imported the body-part damage bits from GTAIV (which it didn't), at least those are easily fixed by tweaking some data points.

Of particular relevance here, another aspect where GTA V is supposed to be less realistic than IV is driving physics (i.e. handling). I wonder if OpenAI is using one of the mods designed to address that.

I enjoyed GTA V because it was so hilariously over the top.

It didn't try to be realistic. The whole point is that the police response is always massively disproportionate to the crime.

It's a pastiche of society, everything is exaggerated: they have a legalize medicinal cocaine campaign, you can buy supercars online, rocket launchers and machine guns at your local gun shop, you can launch your car at 100 miles an hour of the edge of the highway and survive.

They even reference the outrageousness of it in a scene where Michael goes to the therapist and comments that he may have even killed someone on the way there.

>it was so hilariously over the top

Every animal in GTA V will call the cops on you if they witness you doing a crime -_-

I think it tried to be super realistic in many ways and deserves some credit for it. Its like they made a realistic world simulation, and then tweaked a few parameters so it would be funner to play as a game.

Like obviously no real person would be able to survive the injuries my character gets every 10 seconds. But if I was dying all the time it wouldn't be fun to play.

The one thing that really bothers me, as far as realism goes, is lack of persistence. Leave a car somewhere, walk 10 feet away, turn around, and it vanishes. Cars and NPCs vanish when you aren't looking. Damage you do gets quickly reset as if it never happens. And a number of small details like this. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it really limits what you can do with an otherwise awesome sandbox.

Still, I think the game that deserves most credit for realism is dwarf fortress. It will be a long long time before AIs master that.

You have to consider the technical limitations as well. It was designed to play on the PS3 and Xbox 360. I imagine the next generation GTA will offer more of what you are looking for.

The accretion of player driven changes in an open world in an interesting thing I'd never thought about from a storage perspective.

If the game randomly JIT generates all local phenomena while keeping just enough coherent higher level data to suspend your disbelief, that's only the storage size of the high level information.

However, when a player begins to specifically perturb that generated phenomena at the detail level, how do you prevent leaving an ever-storage-requirement-increasing trail back through the player's space-timeline? Reconvergence to normal over a reasonable timespan?

I assume this is a thought about problem, so links greatly appreciated!

Most video games do stuff like that. It is necessary to some extent for the reasons you say. My issue with GTA is they do it excessively. A car that I just parked, 30 feet away, should not disappear when I turn around. If it disappeared after an hour, or after travelling a mile away, that would be much less restrictive.

I'm pretty sure the reason why they prune the memory tree so aggressively is that the storage requirement is proportional to the "memory radius in spacetime" cubed (or worse).

Skyrim does it better in my opinion. It resets a block after 2 game days (144 minutes playtime, and waiting, sleeping and faster travelling make time pass faster). So you can leave the loot that you can't carry in the dungeon, and after you get back to it, it would still be there. So it feels more "realistic".

As far as I remember, Mercenaries 2[1] maintains your world destruction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenaries_2:_World_in_Flames

One of the limitations of GTA that I've found most frustrating is that the game is seemingly programmed to prefer red lights in the streets, I think this is to force you to slow down a bit and let the loading occur more seamlessly, but it's still annoying to just run into traffic jam after traffic jam.

You adhere to the traffic regulations in GTA? :)

No but the NPC cars do, creating little hard-to-pass blobs of traffic

"seemingly"

Look into confirmation bias

Men in suits also correct damage in Westworld. Sorry, I am obsessed by this new series! :D

When they killed Mark Zuckerberg was also interesting. Reality is GTA is a parody of American Culture. The developers aren't even American, at least not originally. They were all from Europe, that's why Vice City is basically a Scarface spoof. Then you got San Andreas which looked and felt like I was watching Boyz N Da Hood / Friday, and other movies.

This might be getting way off topic, but I noticed that one of the corrupt government official at one point in the game said "I'm glad I don't pay tax", which is something an American would never say, we say "pay taxes".

I think a lot of time outside observers are better at parodying something than someone who is inside of it. They just nail the ridiculous culture in the US. I remember GTAIV had a television you could watch, and "Republic Space Rangers" was one of the funniest shows I've seen anywhere.

I agree. I interpreted GTA V as a bitter satire of American society and culture, set in a technologically marvelous video game (which is pretty 'meta').

> They're made to feel realistic, but in fact they powerfully reward violence and punish being law-abiding, in precisely the opposite way that the real world does.

You're right, realistic maybe wasn't the best word. I think "believable" would have gotten my point across better. It's true that GTA V mimics the real world pretty terribly, but it's game world and AI is so incredibly internally consistent that it feels less like a game and more like a another world.

> I accidentally bumped a police boat with my jetski. Apparently this warranted being shot in the head.

Were you playing as Franklin? The GTA V devs have denied this, but from personal experience and plenty of online reports, the police in the game are racist. More realistically, it's probably because they're unable to pathfind to a state where they can arrest you (because you're both on boats on water), so they just go guns blazing.

I saw a video not too long ago that determined that the police in different parts of the game's city were more/less aggressive to each of the three player characters.

>they powerfully reward violence and punish being law-abiding, in precisely the opposite way that the real world does.

Except if you're into politics.

> Hmpth. Conversely, while playing GTAV in completely innocent explore-the-world mode, I accidentally bumped a police boat with my jetski. Apparently this warranted being shot in the head.

I don't know--these day's I'd believe it.

Once I was driving normally, and a cop car drove into me. So of course the cops immediately got out and started shooting at me, even though it was 100% their fault. Definitely broke the realism.

(I had right of way and they didn't have lights/sirens on)

Physics, particularly vehicle physics in GTA IV was considerably more realistic. I enjoyed it more, but GTA V physics are probably more fun for the vast majority of people and honestly, I don't mind it either.

Were you playing as a black character?

Great point about it being not realistic, although I think it is no doubt this is a game, so it promotes people to go wild in the virtual world. I rarely hear people say GTA brings realism, instead it is a virtual world where players can do things they can't do in real life.

Sounds like Westworld! :D

I agree with you. When i was younger (until 25 years old), i played a lot (GTA, WOW, Counter Strike ...) and i have this inclination to think that games always have some realism inside then.

In fact it's quite the oppose. What makes games fun is taking what we call reality and make it "closer" and "unreal" at the same time. Like ... "hey, look, i'm shooting a RPG ...". But it's does nothing to do with shooting a RPG, you are just pressing a key and seeing something shining in a block of glass.

Problem with games are that they trick you mind to think something is real. But it's far, very far away from the real. It's just you, sitting at there, imagining things.

Exactly, reality is boring -- my favorite shooter always was Unreal Tournament. :-)

These days I play an undead thief in Dark Souls 3. (But maybe it is realistic, I have no idea how professional thieves live.)

It's technically possible to run everything on one Windows machine (using VNC loopback mode), however we expect most people to run ML on Linux / Mac so that is the best supported configuration. Before Universe, I ran a modified version of Caffe in Windows along with the game on a GTX 980 and there were more than enough GPU resources for that. Running ML / ROS / other self-driving software in Linux is much more ideal though.

Thanks for this info. My gaming PC has a 7950, so I'd need to buy a Nvidia card anyways to do this. I was hoping to avoid the need to put together a second PC for ML, but I think I have enough spare parts lying around that I could do it cheaply, and I believe you about Linux being ideal over Windows.

Sounds like a 1060 should be a good start for me to play with Universe then.

I don't remember if GTA V had this same feature as GTA IV, but I remember being impressed in GTA IV by the cell phone interference through the radio when you had an incoming call and the radio was playing. I just absolutely loved the attention to detail that game had. It was truly the small things that added up that made you want to figure out what other details they put in the game.

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