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Comment by jvogt | Hacker News Reader

I have dreamed about a pipeline that can take elevation data, building data, maps, and streetview imagery to process a city into all the components you would need to build a proper map for one of the GTA engines, including all the other objects like trees, fire hydrants, signs, light posts, traffic lights, etc.

The building textures could be recreated from the low-res streetview imagery using a pipeline to scale / relight them using image-to-image models. Building shapes could be rebuilt using generative models for 3d mesh components. Road & sidewalk quality (how clean, how faded lines are, etc) could be inferred from imagery as well to be applied to the map.

Super cool project, hoping it continues to evolve!

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I have shared this dream for 15 years https://lifebeyondfife.com/follies/real-games/

Finally got round to vibe coding something in Godot this summer for my city. It used GeoTIFFs on AWS S3 at s3://copernicus-dem-30m/ for elevation. No authentication required, each tile covers 1°×1°. Combined this with OpenStreetMap. Was enough to get started and satisfy curiosity. As you state, lots more that could be done.

Check out 3dep instead of Copernicus. 1 meter resolution elevation data vs 30 m. May need LOD and culling to support it though.

I feel like the closest we've gotten to that so far has been the flight sims.

I've long wanted to make a fun milsim game using 3D map and environmental data, pretty much since the moment I tried out Google Earth VR in 2019. I'm not passionate enough about it to do it on my own, but if anyone else ever gets taken by the idea and wants to make it happen, I'm game.

I'd prefer something like The Crew but whatever game it ends up in, it would still be awesome!

Eh, something with enough sliders to tweak the sim into other types of sandboxes seems most obvious

Then players can shape entity generation, gravity, to their vibe

Not quite Blender level turn teapot into a unintelligible smear of geometry range of tuning

The baseline being Earth world model then tweak entities individually, and such changes spread through the entity population over subsequent ticks of the world loop

Even include ability to speed up and slow the diffusion of the new parameters

This exists, saw a high res demo just a few days ago

Different approach than OP’s

I think it can do the whole world and just using webgpu

Dont recall name or more details, probably saw it on m3taverse account on ig

GTA games require a lot of effort outside of this, but the concept of mass-producing a GTA style open world game for any given environment is very compelling. Probably frightening to Rockstar themselves but such is the course of technological development.

Actually- real world maps do not make for compelling play.. they tend to produce traffic jams.

Traffic jams can be a feature, if it's the game Prototype where you could barrel through cars like a freight train.

Whoa, totally realistic xD

I doubt it would be frightening for Rockstar since Ubisoft has been mass producing repetitive open world games for over a decade.

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