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Comment by kebman | Hacker News Reader

Here I am, and all I ever wanted was a decent car driving simulator. Not racing. Not off-roading. (And no, not GTA either...) Just following various traffic rules, dependent on which country you're driving in, and following along digitised roads of places I once knew. Partly because I don't have the driver's license yet, partly because I still can't afford a decent car anyway, and partly because I kinda like the thought of being able to try out so many more different brands without needing to have car collecting as a hobby. I mean, sure, I really liked Gran Turismo, but then that's racing again. Is there just no market for this thing?

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Creating a realistic driving simulator would actually be much more difficult than creating a flight sim. Creating a virtual globe with ground details and buildings that look even moderately acceptable when viewed from ground level is very hard. This is as compared to flight simulators where terrain detail is mostly focused on accurate height maps and orthographic surface textures (which are readily available from USGS and other sources). Most of the urban environments in flight sims are poor quality procedurally generated structures - poor from a general game quality standpoint, they're fine for their usage in flight sims. For the most part, flight sims only bother to manually model and place the objects in major cities and landmarks, as well as around airports.

Promo material says that MSFS 2020 is using Bing maps to accurately generate models for 400 cities, but is using procedural generation for the rest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnithCa-H5w&t=1m55s

I don't buy that. I think procedural programming could do the trick, with details only for key buildings, for instance (which is how Google Maps started their modelling anyway). Yes, that would necessarily mean that you won't recognize your own house, but it would mean that you could drive along in a virtual world that is very similar (simulated even) to the real thing. As before mentioned, Outerra^[1] already did this for the entire Earth. It's a great project. Check it out if you haven't already! :)

[1]: https://outerra.com/index.html

All of the screenshots for outerra on the web site only show terrain with no urban environments.

This video shows urban environments, but the buildings seem to be low poly structures. Okay enough for a flight sim, but I doubt it would be pleasing driving simulator where you regularly see these buildings up close. https://youtu.be/YV9eAN7RVOU

The fundamental problem is that the buildings aren't procedurally generated - they're discrete models. They're procedurally placed on the map, but it still cycling through a fixed list of buildings. It looks similar to the real world from the sky, but if you were to go down and drive around you'd see the same apartments and stores again and again.

I think those are valid conserns. And I also think it can be handled, for instance by fractal algorithms. Most houses are just subsets of a general style, so I'd be quite interested in seeing some work done on procedurally modelled houses. I think doing it in a believable way completely feasible with todays technology. Hell, I could even take a crack at it myself, with POV-Ray^[1] lol. But given that it's an old ray tracer I don't think it would translate very well to modern game engines. It is entirely script driven, though, which makes things a lot easier when it comes to generating procedural contents.

[1]: http://www.povray.org/

TBH, I wonder why there wasn't a product like that sold to the K-12 market at least.

When I took driver's ed in 1998 or so, the class had 20 kiosks with steering wheels, LED-bar speedometers, and panels of lights for out-of-range behaviour. We were supposed to follow along with the same canned video being played for everyone. Nobody took it seriously-- people tried to just christmas-tree the warning lights.

I'd expect putting each student on an individual screen would be much more educational-- you can see dangerous situations as they develop and compensate earlier in their lifecycle, rather than just discovering you were fully out of lane when a light goes on. That seems like the skills they'd want to teach, and I'm sure they could have done something with Wolf3D level graphics running on a 386-class PC and got it to an affordable price point by then.

City Car Driving has a commercial license (https://www.citycardriving.com/products/commercial).

It was either Mafia or Mafia 2 that was famous for having oddly realistic traffic laws to follow -- cops would pull you over for running a red light, or speeding. American city.

The original first Mafia, as far as I know, is the first and also the only GTA-style game with strict road rules and realistic manual gearbox behavior (you could switch to neutral and roll downhill).

There is probably a shared reason why Mafia and proper flight sims (I fly Cessna in X-Plane) are appealing to me; to an outsider either one is like watching paint dry though.

I remember Driver on the original PlayStation. Cops would pull you over if you went too fast, but the gas button was digital, so there was no way to constantly drive at the speed limit. Very annoying.

In original Mafia cars behave quite appropriately given time period, so they accelerate slowly. You can also switch to a high gear to drop acceleration further.

They are preparing original Mafia remake to release this fall, which I’m extremely stoked but also slightly cautious about. The update seems to be mostly concerning graphics and I really hope they leave car handling alone.

In think it was Mafia 2. Great game.

There are the fantastic Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator.

It is not precisely a car simulator, but everything else is spot on.

I kinda liked it, but you're right, it's not a car sim, and its world is kind of limited. It should be possible to make real driving routes with todays tech, for instance. Outerra proves it.[1]

[1]: https://outerra.com/

That page says they use fractal algorithms, which would imply to me much smaller memory and storage requirements than a faithful recreation of real maps.

Honestly, to me a completely faithful representation isn't necessary. I want to learn to drive a car, or enjoy a very realistic car driving experience in simulated traffic. While having a one-to-one representation of the world would be great, it's not strictly necessary for that goal. To that end, car physics, different driving condidtions caused by weather and surface, and realistic modelling of traffic charachteristics (including law enforcement and the odd drunk driver) is far more important to me.

(But ummm.... Right now I just want to say sorry for hijacking this flight sim thread with car sim posts... :p I never thought it would get this much traction. No pun intended.)

City Car Driving [1] is a simulator that I have seen used in a driving school.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/493490/City_Car_Driving/

> Is there just no market for this thing?

Well, I know of at least two people who want it. I’d probably even be willing to pay a monthly subscription.

Make that three. I still don't have my driving license either, and I wanted such a game ever since I started learning for the exam.

Well, Microsoft needs to bring back [0]Midtown Madness!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midtown_Madness

I have sunk countless hours into this game during my high school and college days =)

beam.ng on steam is exactly this-ish

Seemed really off VD-wise last time I looked.

What's VD?

I'd guess vehicle dynamics

Yarp

beamng recent released traffic ai tries to follow traffic rules and as far as driving simulation go is not bad, but it's best experienced with an analogue input device as a wheel or a joystick

not real world locations however and maps are on the smallish size

Huh, I didn't know I wanted this until you mentioned it. Now I want it too.

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