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Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

nilsbakker.nl

121–130 of 131 posts

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#121
post #21

As someone who worked at Realtime Worlds on the MyWorld project, this is very poignant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtime_Worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MyWorld

Interesting! Do you have some more details you could share, like screenshots or trailers/videos? Sadly the video link to the trailer on YouTube is not working anymore.

This is one of our demos from 2008, which looks very similar (though we aren't using Google Maps data, we're mostly using OS map data). It's also long before an art pass, so the textures, trees, building, road etc are just placeholder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfJwX_HnLpU

This is Mike (who did the first lemmings)'s test to se how many lemming-like things you could render in the world. He, myself, and Bill (GTA physics) went on to build a fun game out of this where you could run over them in tanks and blow them up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O6WS1VolKA

Blowing them up test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJHRdVaUtDs

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#122
post #21

As someone who worked at Realtime Worlds on the MyWorld project, this is very poignant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtime_Worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MyWorld

Hi Sam, I worked at Real Time Worlds on that too. Probably before it was called My World, then I think we were calling it Real Driving or something then. Small world! Cheers James

:wave emoji:

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#123
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Google Maps predates Google Earth and neither really relate to MS Flight SIM.

The Google Maps version that we are talking in this thread; aka Google Maps "Photorealistic 3D"

But that has been around for an age as well - it just wasn't available via an API.

Bing came out with 3D buildings after Google did and the coverage was a small fraction of that Google had and hasn't increased very much in the intervening years.

(I hope apps will offer both as data sources and maybe select the one with the best fidelity for a given region)

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#125
I remember working in this field about 15-20 years ago. And separately, in my spare time, playing video games like Crysis. It was quite apparent even then, that video games were generally light years ahead at visualisation.

Back then, one could - using professional, multi-thousand-dollar software, and expensive services like land surveyors - painstakingly, manually build up a small-scale 3D scene encompassing an individual owners land. The result would look average/generic, and the rendering performance and navigation limitations would be abysmal.

On that same PC, one could then load up Crysis, marvel at the vastly superior output, navigability, and point-of-view realism - covering massive land areas - and think 'Holy Shiz, if I could just get my data into this, it'd be a revelation, industry-changing'.

It's great to see how things are progressing.

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#126

YouTube video from the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cziz3qYT4Q

This is amazing - it will be cool when these models in unity can be turned into real buildings where one can design the interiors as well, and maybe use this in Hitman to play real cities.

what if you could own a build and the receive points on either survival or the other version points?

And you can build your own maps - and you set A and B and you win creds based on winner.

Fuck you Morgan Roberts at BLIZZARD you stole my legos

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#127
post #47

Lovely simple Unreal project. It's amazing how much can be accomplished with Blueprints when all the necessary functionality is at your disposal (although it can be hellish when it's not). I have such a love/hate relationship with UE. Sometimes it will blow me away with how some stuff just works with a few blueprints and other times (especially around physics) it just wants to do stuff its way or the highway.

UE looks cool, it's full of features, but it's also full of warts (especially when you realize how poorly designed and implemented certain parts are, and the huge mess they made with their C++). My major issue with blueprints is that they are always abused and turn into an unmaintainable mess in the blink of an eye.

The company I work at has a massive UE-base codebase and we've been working hard for months to purge as much blueprint logic from our it as we can because it's simply impossible to maintain them. Epic is pushing them hard but I just can't see them as more than a way for amateurs to mock up stuff.

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#128

I remember working in this field about 15-20 years ago. And separately, in my spare time, playing video games like Crysis. It was quite apparent even then, that video games were generally light years ahead at visualisation. Back then, one could - using professional, multi-thousand-dollar software, and expensive services like land surveyors - painstakingly, manually build up a small-scale 3D scene encompassing an indi…

This shows how insanely optimized game engines are, and game development in general.

All enterprise software is optimised in man/hours, as in the maximum amount of features for some given hours of work. Enterprise customers will then invest in the extra hardware, because "developers are more expensive than computers".

Games can't afford that, they need to run in many different kinds of shitty and good hardware, so it is optimised over and over, by very dedicated and underpaid developers. And they mostly code in C++. But games are sold by the millions, so it's a different market.

Re: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

#130
post #47

Lovely simple Unreal project. It's amazing how much can be accomplished with Blueprints when all the necessary functionality is at your disposal (although it can be hellish when it's not). I have such a love/hate relationship with UE. Sometimes it will blow me away with how some stuff just works with a few blueprints and other times (especially around physics) it just wants to do stuff its way or the highway.

UE looks cool, it's full of features, but it's also full of warts (especially when you realize how poorly designed and implemented certain parts are, and the huge mess they made with their C++). My major issue with blueprints is that they are always abused and turn into an unmaintainable mess in the blink of an eye. The company I work at has a massive UE-base codebase and we've been working hard for months to purge a…

Yeah, after my initial honeymoon I'm souring on blueprints fast. Working with them on a team using version control must be a bit of a nightmare. Not having a way to export them into a human usable formal (say a good quality Lua style DSL) means excluding all kinds of tooling that could be built by other parties for handling text based code.
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