I wish more games, any even, simply provided a "walk around as a tourist" mode. At this fidelity, it's enjoyable. I spent 6 months living in Amsterdam, it brought back memories. A short walk down from here is the back of the Hotel Grand Kraznopolsky. I can smell the weed from "the British bulldog" Cafe as I type.
That mode was especially enjoyable in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, walking around a simulation of antique Athene is (for lack of a better word) something.
The natural history museum in Montreal (where ACO was developed) had a mummy/Egypt exhibit and they actually had computers setup with that sim running (pretty sure Ubisoft sponsored the exhibit).
i loved midtown madness because i was able to drive around san francisco. ten years later when i first visited, i was able to recognize many of the landmarks because of the game.
My friends and I spent a good chunk of time playing that game right after we all finished college and moved away for jobs. One of us actually moved to DC and playing The Division 2 actually helped him learn the area! Really fun game, your work is much appreciated!
Really enjoyed Division 2! Having visited DC during the Last Administration, your apocalypse was much nicer :)
On the GIS side of things, didn't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to make other real world locale into games for educational purposes? Can't remember the details, but I used to work for a museum and my boss wanted us to do something like that. And I was like that'd be nice, but we're not Ubi.
It would be awesome to read about your production pipeline, like did you go from drone footage to photogrammetry to dozens of artists manually fixing things, or? Was there much ML involved?
No ML. We templated some common architecture patterns and placed things in the world.
I wish I could show you our internal demonstrations of it. Basically we would plot the map in snowdrop using GIS, then raise cuboids from the shapes on the map. Then we would manually try to match google street view with something in our template library, and modify the object to match reality.
It was a very manual process, but we based the map on the real thing so distances should be 1:1.
I've recently taken up photogrammetry mapping with my drone. I'm quite amazed at the textured 3d output you can get from that by capturing buildings just by flying around them. I imagine it won't be too long that we just fly a drone over a city and entirely map it in 3d with very high resolution and detail. It's accurate to within a few feet unless you use RTK and ground stations which can bring you within centimeter accuracy. Lidar is also making things easier/cheaper.
"[F]reely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."
Why are small alleyways not interesting in a shooter? Many area to hide. Though perhaps it would stimulate camping, but I wouldn't call them 'not interesting' :)
I didn't find The Division too interesting, just couldn't get into it. I also don't really understand why they keep going on with that Tom Clancy label. The guy's been dead for almost a decade. If they feel the need to badge his name all over it, it feels like it's just B-content and they need to stick such labels on it to sell it.
I think his early books were pretty good but the later series were just drivel IMO. I don't think he even wrote them himself.
I live downtown in Manhattan: the "Gangs of New York" update on that title was interesting to play... First thing I did was go find my condo building with a mountain of trash piled up against the door.
Some of the geography has been futzed with for gameplay purposes, which was incredibly confusing as someone who could navigate the area without a map!
There's the "walking simulator" genre for that. I didn't care for the story, but I recently played Dear Esther, it's absolutely stunning on a 4K screen.
GTA IV was my favorite for this. I'd expect this to be hard to achieve since verisimilitude is expensive, but manageable if your character is only going to go down a fixed path.
It did an excellent job, and considering the amount that was cut out it was still extremely easy to navigate from the east to west end along entirely recognisable roads.
The pub over the road from Parliament was a bit jarring but understandable.
Ironically one of the earlier CoDs had a great semi-stealth mission in Pripyat (Chernobyl). City was modeled so well with all the iconic eyesights, really gave you a feeling of being in an abandoned post-nuclear town.
You're likely referring to COD4:MW, aka the one that made the franchise what it is. That game was outstanding for the time. Real cool locations, renderings like from the spectre gunship camera system, etc, made it special. The gameplay hasn't aged that well tho, it's easy to see the cracks now.
If anyone is interested I put a list together last year for someone who was looking at VR for public speaking coaching due to social anxiety and not sure what the current state of the art is or where these folks are now other than the web sites are all still up. In no particular order:
Wouldn't simulated environment cause similar anxiety effects? Like I'm very scared of snakes IRL, I'm confident i won't enjoy looking at them in VR either
The idea is to do this in session with a therapist, or at least under guidance. By exposing yourself safely to a trigger reducing the effects (like a fight or flight response for example)
