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Posted by centrosphere 5 hours ago

The entire city of San Francisco as a video game(sf.thijs.gg)
https://twitter.com/cdngdev/status/2091909073038082139, https://xcancel.com/cdngdev/status/2091909073038082139
260 points | 88 commentspage 2
gjenkins 3 hours ago|
We got GTA SF before GTA 6.
metadat 2 hours ago||
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...

dcrazy 2 hours ago|||
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.
metadat 7 minutes ago||
I checked some obscure buildings and I found every one of them in-game, but you're correct that it's not 1:1 topographically.
ViktorRay 1 hour ago||
Gotta shout out to the city of San Fierro in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

San Fierro was based on San Francisco of the 1990's. Lots of good memories playing GTA San Andreas and exploring 90's San Francisco.

JKCalhoun 2 hours ago||
'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).

pimlottc 1 hour ago||
Screenshots of Vette! at MobyGames:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/799/vette/screenshots/dos/

beej71 2 hours ago||
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.
forthwall 5 hours ago||
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)

HanClinto 4 hours ago||
Very impressed with the Watch Dogs series of games for this purpose.

We recently used Watch Dogs Legion to prep for a trip to London to get more familiar with the city. Set the game on peaceful mode and just walked around and did virtual sight-seeing instead of playing missions. It's a surprisingly good recreation of the city, and we really appreciated getting some familiarity with the place before we visited.

jermaustin1 3 hours ago||
I did a similar thing for the UK when prepping to drive around. I hooked my steering wheel up to Forza Horizon 4, and just drove slow cars on the wrong side of the road through Edinburgh, following as many of the road laws as I knew.

It wasn't perfect, but it did help a little. The streets are way narrower, and the traffic is much worse, but muscle memory to stay on the left side of the road was nice.

striking 4 hours ago|||
I do adore San Andreas but I think San Fierro is one of the weakest areas. My metric for how accurate they are is a sense of "oh I've been here before" and I really only get that in a couple of spots, as compared to Las Venturas (Las Vegas) and Los Santos (Los Angeles) where I could actually go to the cities in real life and feel like I knew where I was going because I'd played San Andreas enough. Compared to those two, San Fierro feels like a Backrooms-style dreamlike compression of the real thing, where a lot of stuff has been moved around. But parts of Haight-Ashbury, Pac Heights, Nob/Russian Hill, Polk Gulch, Ocean Beach and so on are still fairly distinguishable and correctly arranged.
Stevvo 3 hours ago|||
Depends how you define fidelity. The mesh resolution in MSFS isn't any higher resolution. Looks about the same.
why_at 3 hours ago|||
I'm still holding out hope for a modern Fallout in the bay area.
jrm4 2 hours ago|||
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.
Apocryphon 4 hours ago||
Not bad, though based on the screenshot Lake Merritt in Oakland looks not to scale.

https://watchdogs.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Bay_Area

Aboutplants 1 hour ago||
At some point someone will integrate actual interactive models of buildings and houses, based on Zillow pictures and whatnot, and then the entire thing will be interactive in a disturbing way
recursive 4 hours ago||
Loading information just goes forever.

Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.

Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.

recursive 2 hours ago|
Update: Restarted firefox and it's working. Computers...
ironqcold 2 hours ago||
Looks like an atmospheric explorer kinda thing. Low-poly SF where you can just wander around and take in the city, pretty chill. I dunno, I really enjoyed it
asdfman123 3 hours ago||
I believe we're getting the hackernews hug of death.
er4hn 1 hour ago||
very fun game. I don't live there any longer but I "ran" the commute from my apartment to work. It felt very nostalgic to go through this.
K0IN 3 hours ago|
funny timing, i was exploring the same, some friends and me play alot of geogussr (a game where you put into streetview somewhere on the world, and have to find out where) lately.

I want to make it more video game like, cause the jumps of google maps make me motion sick.

I used google streetview as image source (cause you need to read signs, cars, see geometry) and colmap to reconstruct 3d chunks.

But it never really worked that well, jumps in time (cause the google car does not always continuously scan) and the image density is just too low, but was a fun side project.

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