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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

#73
post #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 / re…

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

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

#74

'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 ).

Man, I just posted this same comment. 'Vette was the first thing I thought of. Ever since playing it way back then, I wanted a better SF open world game.

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

#76

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.

The photogrammetry appears to be from Apple Maps.

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

#77

I lived in SF for nearly 20 years, though I mostly spend my time in New York now. And genuinely this made me emotional. Was weird as hell walking around my back yard. Going to the spot in Dolo that I used to haunt in my 20s. My favorite tennis courts and hill bombs, walked the entire disc golf course, etc.

Happy to hear someone else say this. Similar story. I could never live in SF again but roaming around it was nostalgic in a way going back now just isn't

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

#78
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...

If that second link is an in-game map, it is far from accurate to the real world. Unless it’s from a timeline in which Golden Gate Park is connected to the Presidio, and half of SF has fallen into the ocean.
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