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Comment by stackbutterflow | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool. Seeing these beautiful colors I realize how much how I imagine the ancient world is shaped by museum artifacts and photos in textbooks, which show raw and brown/grey/white stones, rusty tools and weapons. I've grown thinking about pre-medieval times as a landscape of ruins. It would be like if future humans were picturing our current world as nothing but bombed cities.

It's a really cool project. Now I want a VR game where I could simply walk around ancient cities and watch people go about their day.

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Now imagine for a moment if we painted our modern marble statues and architecture as they did. The ruins mentality is a big part of neoclassicism, to the point where the designer of the Bank of England building made a sketch of how the building would look in a thousand years' time:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Ae...

Crikey the Royal Exchange is a crater.

Speaking of painting sculptures, I wonder why they never try to re-paint Greek and Roman sculptures. I've read some articles that show what the statues would have looked like back in the day and paint makes them look spectacular.

Assassins Creed has a standalone series called Discovery Tour. It is extremely similar yet has freemode, way more historical points of interest, and has people walking around. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...

Thanks for sharing this, never knew these existed - gonna be great to go through them!

When you visit Persepolis, you can rent a VR headset and see certain parts of the site reconstructed in VR. It's really impressive and drives home the scale of what was built.

Interesting! I went five years ago and didn’t see it there. It’s a great idea though. Did you go more recently or did we just miss it?

The nearby Naqsh-e Rostam (tombs of Darius and Xerxes among other things) was also stunning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Rostam

I visited Persepolis (and the tombs) in Spring 2019.

I was thinking the same thing, "I thought these civilizations only built ruins".

There won’t be much left of our civilisation. I was told recently that concrete is acidic and attacks the metal netting in reinforced concrete over the long time. None of our structures will still be up 500 years from now.

But we'll still be using XML.

That's not quite correct. Concrete is basic and prevents/slows the rusting of metal reinforcement, but not forever and it's made less effective with rising CO2 levels.

Assassins Creed gives you that everyday historical vibe very well. Highly recommend.

I couldn't agree more. I'm currently playing AC Odyssey and it's as close as you can get to being there. Lots of artistic license but they definitely did their research.

Can recommend Origins as well, riding past the pyramids has something pretty cool about it...

Not exactly what you're looking for but if you're just into aesthetic look up Talos Principle. By itself a fantastic game, but they have a VR version as well that is incredible to walk through.

> I've grown thinking about pre-medieval times as a landscape of ruins.

Jimmy Carr joked about that in QI once, how movies and series set in ancient Rome and Greece also tend to do this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58rbknKBJvc

In aegyptus they'd be sort of right. The Egyptian ruins were as old to them as Roman ruins are to us.

"This video contains content from Fremantle International, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds"

Sorry about that. I looked for official clips (it's just before a relatively famous segment) but they don't include the Jimmy Carr joke

They do say that about the Acropolis where the Parthenon is!

It's cool indeed. But I find it sad that such a tremendous piece of architecture is not listed on the world's 7 ancient wonders while the Temple of Artemis and other Greek structures are on the list. No surprises there, given that the list was created by the Greek historian Herodotus.

Pretty sure the canonical list of Wonders isn't due to Herodotus, as several of the items on it were built after his death.

(apparently Herodotus also had a list of wonders, but it didn't survive. Given his interest in Persia though, I suspect it would've had several Persian monuments on it)

That's why any colors that have been preserved looks so great. Whether it's the temple of Medinet Habu in Egypt or the tombs of the builders, it blows your mind when you realize all those decorations in the temples were not only carved, but painted too.

I am convinced that one day you visit an old ancient site. You put on the AR/VR headset and the real-life ruins change into fresh newly constructed buildings with NPCs from that time. The headset/lenses have a pair of 32k displays with a vof wider than your eyes. Graphics are rendered with 100 trillion rays per frame at 240fps. About 10.000 times faster than current hardware.

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