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Comment by bitxbit | Hacker News Reader

How long would it take to model out the entire world in reasonable detail? Something similar to open world games such as GTA V?

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It’d be kind of amazing if GTA 6 was using this kind of tech to create its open world environment when it releases.

Sadly though, I expect it will need to have a free to play mode with micro transactions to support the ongoing investment into keeping the infrastructure up for delivering the open world imaging.

Moreso if they donate resources to OSM to make such data more reliable and accurate and then they just freeze a snapshot when they contribute to make a game from.

Considering GTA V has made literally billions of dollars I doubt they'll need any free to play mode.

“Making lots of money” does not seem to suppress companies from trying to make more money. See, Apple and App Store.

I think their point was that GTA 5 was not free-to-play and still made billions. It could be sold at full price up until 6 releases and then 6 could be sold at full price for years and people will still be interested.

GTA 5 has an interesting revenue model, the game itself has to be bought, and you can play all the single player with just that. Once you get into multiplayer it’s much of a free to play model, with the usual choice of grinding through to acquire resources or just paying real money for in game money.

GTA is supposed to be satire on the real world. That's why you have your Cluckin Bells and Ammunations. If it was just a 3D environment based on the current world it would be pretty boring.

Generally speaking, mapping out an area in high quality requires imagery that was captured not only relatively close to the subject (flying at a few thousand feet vs on orbit) as well as capturing objects from multiple oblique angles. This requires intensively flying a "waffle fries" pattern over a subject area of interest with a plane with a bunch of cameras on it pointing in multiple direction. E.g. https://www.sanborn.com/oblique-imagery/

So - many orders of magnitude more expensive than just capturing satellite imagery.

Depends on how much money you throw at the problem. It's a problem that's easy to parallelize.

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