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The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

sf.thijs.gg

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Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#62

We got GTA SF before GTA 6.

That was actually Watchdogs 2. Great game, basically GTA but you are a hacker in the Bay Area. The SF portion of the map was accurate down to every building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_2

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbDzFt...

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#63

Kinda funny game, though if you want a bit more fidelity, but less control, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a pretty good version of SF. Though as for games that use SF (but not 1:1) Watch Dogs 2 is a pretty good proxy, though my favorite video game interpretation of San Francisco is from GTA San Andreas (San Fierro)

Ha, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most uncanniest valley thing I think I've ever played with; I'm from Tallahassee and it's weird to fly around a very high-fidelity, realistic, inaccurate version of a city I've lived in my entire life.

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#64
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!

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#65
post #62

We got GTA SF before GTA 6.

That was actually Watchdogs 2. Great game, basically GTA but you are a hacker in the Bay Area. The SF portion of the map was accurate down to every building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_2 https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbDzFt...

[deleted]

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#66
This would maybe be a pretty good opportunity to use some of that "upscaling" AI tech: given this weird results of spatial scanning, produce something plausible and much higher definition. There are some dangers of doing so, of course. People will believe details that show up in it because it's taken from real life, and AI loves adding fake details, but for a little game it seems like detail beats ground truth.

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#68

my first experience with San Francisco in a video game was through the City Escape stage in Sonic Adventure 2. and I didn't even know then that it was San Francisco (I had never been there when I played the game). only realized this when I visited the city many years later.

I was just thinking, this game needs a snowboard I can use to jump, do tricks, and smack around people's cars.

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#70
'Vette was a racing game from the 90's (I think?) that covered San Francisco. "Released on 3 floppy disks", ha ha. Obviously without the rich dataset we have now. (Clicking on the following link ignores the trailing exclamation point in MacOS Safari for me.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vette!

I did a voxel (ray casting) lunar lander that used actual NASA moon data (https://mooncraft2000.com).

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