GTA GeoGuesser | Hacker News Reader

GTA GeoGuesser

gta-geoguesser.com

335 pointspopcalc68 comments

One of the things that keeps me just pottering about inside GTA V is just how good Rockstar's map is. It's a brilliant piece of design and tonally perfect too, whereas I'd say something like Night City is well designed but the wrong kind of cyberpunk.

The wrong kind? That's a bold claim. It was developed with the design oversight of Mike Pondsmith; based on lore, maps and art from his original source material.

Doesn't mean it's a good map for a game.

Good thing it's a good map for other reasons, then.

"We had a good team on paper. Unfortunately, the game was played on grass." - Brian Clough

It reviews positively among users on Steam, now. Release problems have long since been patched, and the game is fun.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, I have it and did like it, I just thought it was a missed opportunity in many regards.

For the people hoping that it would be the Greater Toronto Area. You can just play this map on the original GeoGuesser: https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/601ad726f59c050001a53a2b

Here is one for Fortnite covering every different map from every season https://www.whereinfortnite.com/

I've never played Fortnite, but I just got a perfect score (without time limit) there. The Fortnite map designers did a really good job at creating varied biomes and recognizable landmarks.

Depends really. Early season maps (Chapter 1 Season 1-4) had barely any changes and they were all the same green forest-y style, so it's much harder to guess just based on the geography and flora.

Am I too old if I expected a San Andreas version instead?

San Andreas was released almost 18 years ago - you be the judge.

The last version I played myself for more than 5 minutes at a time was GTA III

Released 2001. Wow.

For me it was Grand Theft Auto, released 1997. Fun times.

I reinstalled it using Wine last year. It ran well (only the cheat codes didn't work), but it didn't really transport me back to my youth the way I expected it to (I played it a lot at the time, so thought it might the way other games from my childhood, like King's Quest VI, do) and I grew bored of it after a day or two.

GTA III was the first one I played for more than 5 minutes! The last one being San Andreas.

And the latest game this website uses (GTA V) was released nearly a decade ago.

I recently got back into playing GTA V (Well GTA Online really). On the one hand I wish that Rockstar would put out GTA VI and set it somewhere like Vice City again, it's clear that GTA:O is their cash cow and they don't want to give it up and ties into some generally scummy behavior from Rockstar/Take2 Interactive (devs and publishers of GTA).

On the other hand though, for a game that is nearly a decade old, it has aged like fine wine. You would think a game that is nearing a decade old would start to decline in popularity but with the constant updates, it almost feels like an RPG or an old school MMO nowdays, and content updates as well as general graphical updates for new generation consoles make this game look like it came out just 2-3 years ago.

Last I heard, the rumors are exactly that. They're working on GTA 6 and it may be set in Vice City again

Well, I was wondering why none of the examples showed the Liberty City and Vice City I remember from Grand Theft Auto.

I was kind of hoping for a mix of different GTA games, but GTA V makes sense. I'd love to play a San Andreas version but I'd probably only do well on the initial island.

I don't play GTA and I was able to get a decent score by just correlating the visual features with the outline of the map + prior visual references from previous rounds.

Someone should create an arbitrary environment generator and render the 3D image + map outline. I could totally see a variant of GeoGuesser for unknown worlds. That would be trippy.

For me the same, plus I have visited LA, which also helped. But I like the idea of a procedural generated GeoGuesser. Maybe in Minecraft worlds? Although you do not have roads, which makes it a lot harder

Here's yet another for old school runescape https://www.osrsguessr.com/

best mmo of my time

15k points without movement (not disabled, just not used, don’t know if that matters for points) on first try, best 53m off. I guess I actually know GTA V better than the real world :D

Maximum always seems to be 5k points, played two rounds on Hard and Medium. Hard is a bit goofy because you might just look at a hill roadside and that's pretty generic in GTA. Closest was 2m. Worst 1200m in the hills. I actually think there is no real place that I know as well as Los Santos, and I haven't even played GTAV for years.

Real places are more difficult because they change over time. And some of them seem just as full of seemingly copy/pasted objects as the games... (or worse? Games have come a long way since the ubiquitous crate, on the level of production standards of GTA they probably go deep on generative variations)

Someone should do this but for Halo. And every shot is one of those angular Forerunner structures with Covenant/Flood everywhere. That'd really narrow it down...

"Ah yes, the sort of hexagon shaped hallway with a turn to the left followed by a turn to the right. Only like seventy places that can be."

Weird game, but I do have fond memories of GTA :). Rusty ones, apparently.

I was hoping for games other than V.

24955 points on my first attempt. I think my worst one was about 60 metres off. Probably couldn't have done as well if you gave me one for my local area within a 5 km range of me.

This is awesome. I am that person ie. I know GTA map more than my real city's map.

I flew my partner across the planet to propose to her in New York City, shortly after GTA IV. There was a bit of a stumble early in the trip when we were walking somewhere in Manhattan and I blurted out that it was all so incredibly familiar. Then excitedly told her that this exact spot was where I'd murdered a helicopter pilot and got into a massive shoot out with police. From that point on, I'd randomly laugh at various other locations we walked through, remembering other crazy GTA capers.

I had the same experience after playing Watch Dogs extensively before a trip to SF. It's a weird mix of familiarity and deja vu.

Test driven marriage?

Had this in Boston after Fallout 4, my ex wasn't amused.

Same experience visiting LA for the first time. It's like I knew the city more than the locals

Thanks for sharing this haha. I had somewhat similar experience visiting LA (and probably my biggest motivation for visiting lol)

yeah I was also surprised about myself, first pin I set on the map was only 20m away from the real location.

Lots of GeoGuessr themed games recently, including my https://wheredle.xyz

It would be cool if there were multiple games within a geoguesser game. Doom, Witcher, Battlefield, Red Dead.

I'm still pissed that there is no Mac release of GTA V. Enjoying San Andreas on the iPad instead.

I had no idea this exists.. is it actually good? Considering buying it for the iPad Pro.

I'd say it's an excellent port. I'm only playing casually using a game controller and was able to complete all missions.

My favorite pastime is using the Monster Truck to drive over the edge of a car waiting at some crossing. If you do it the right way, the car will bounce up in the air 10s of meters and catch fire when it comes crashing down. If it lands in a good spot, the final explosion will set surrounding cars on fire creating a chain reaction. Presto, multiple explosions without getting pinched by the police.

> I had no idea this exists

Yep, discoverability in the AppStore is abysmally bad.

DarkViperAU has a bunch of videos where he does this. Very fun.

This is absolutely amazing. Just donated some too :)

This is pretty cool! It's been ages since I have played, but actually did pretty well, some of this stuff is just burned into my brain

I thought this was greater Toronto area geoguesser

Making these kinds of apps is the reason 12-year-old me got into programming in the first place. So cool, kudos!

how do you make 360 images from GTA?

Just like you make 360 images with real photo's? Take screenshots looking in all directions and use a panorama stitching tool.

I initially thought this wouldn't work, since you can't take pictures in all directions simultaneously in GTA V, and moving the camera in different directions might add artifacts from moving objects and/or cause items out of view to despawn entirely.

A Google streetview car can take pictures of all directions simultaneously, thus avoiding the "stretched dog" or "double person" panorama problems that can happen from stitching shots together. And things tend not to despawn in real life, though there are plenty of examples of anomalies on Google maps.

It turns out you can follow the same car over a long stretch of road in this GTA Geoguessr, leading me to believe your intuition is correct.

It might be possible to automate taking the screenshots so that a single hit of a key will quickly move the camera while taking overlapping scerenshots, reducing the amount of moving artifacts.

https://www.gta5-mods.com/tools/panoramic-view-screenshot

I wonder if automating something like Nvidia Ansel is possible. It stops the gameplay and allows to take various screenshots and even 360 views.

If this where the Morrowind map, I'd be right at home...

This is fun, but I got the same image like 4 times.

Cool!

I was hoping it was for Greater Toronto

Why? Real world GeoGuesser exists…

Just because "GTA" is also an abbreviation for Greater Toronto Area.

just hijacking this thread to ask a question:

We are seeing in Germany an increasing numbers of Vehicle-ramming attacks[1]. Some of them were committed by people that were mental ill, some of them were used to play GTA hours non-stop. The question that a friend raised and I forward to HN: Do you think that GTA can be a bad influence for people which have problems distinguishing virtual from reality? There are any known studies in that direction?

References: https://www.thelocal.de/20220608/one-person-dead-and-several...

EDIT: To people down-voting me like crazy, I'm not saying that games make normal people violent. Just observing the fact that we always had mental ill people and we always had cars, but none had the idea to drive it in the crowd back in the days. My friend is a professional psychologist working in a psychiatric facility in Germany.

> Just observing the fact that we always had mental ill people and we always had cars, but none had the idea to drive it in the crowd back in the days

Unstable people were driving recklessly and with homicidal intentions decades before the videogame industry existed. Road rage was a thing in the 19th century.

> In 1854, a satirical article describing a hell-bent railroad engineer named "Joe Smashup" intentionally ramming other locomotives appeared in U.S. newspapers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_rage#Historical_Anteceden....

This is hilarious and cool, but bad logic.

Road Rage and Vehicle-ramming are totally unrelated things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com