This reminds of the first time I ever went to San Francisco from Australia. My hotel was near some famous tourist spot (oh, Pier 39 - it's mentioned in the post!). I went down to see what was there, and was struck by the most intense deja-vu I'd ever felt. This was my first time to the US, but for some reason I knew this place. It was like I had astral-projection traveled there or something crazy.
Walking around the pier I instinctively knew where everything was: store fronts, stairs... I knew that if I went down I would look out and see Alcatraz? Yep, there it was. And if I went left I'd see... sea lions?! I even said "sea lions?" out loud to myself. I'd never even seen a sea lion before, but yep, there they were!
I was freaking out until I turned around and saw a flight of stairs with a bright red hand rail and realised: Tony Hawk Pro Skater IV.
I've had the same incredibly intense deja-vu from walking through a certain building the first time at my university in South Australia, realizing soon after I had played a custom map/level of that same building years earlier in the Half Life 2 engine. One of the weirdest feelings...
I fully expect many such moments in San Francisco after so many hours of teenage youth spent playing GTA: San Andreas online! :)
Cities:Skylines is a great game for this kind of thing, because it has tremendous support for mods. It even has a built-in "asset editor" that lets you define buildings, maps and road junctions. All of which can then be shared on the Steam workshop.
You do need quite a few mods to remove restrictions on road and building placement, and then allow manual control of buildings rather than letting them "grow" according to the game mechanics.
A friend of mine works for a company doing something like this with vehicle-mounted scanners. It's like street view on crack - I want to say something like centimeter precision on the measurements, and then they skin it with the photos? It's pretty impressive.
I've always wanted this kind of thing in Gran Turismo, or some other racing sim, just so that I could do my various commutes over time with no traffic and fast cars.
Within AAA "cinematic expriiince" fetishism would prevent it, perhaps some indie-semi indie or GTA modders can do it. Also I'd love to see it cause main stream media to throw a fit over such a "terrorist training sim".
Try Driver San Francisco, The Crew or historical L.A. Noire, these are somewhat more realistic than the GTA series in real world street network mimicry.
Totally forgot about Test Drive Unlimited's Oʻahu, mostly because I have no idea how that island looks like in real life. And TDU2 had Ibiza as well (Yet that game was somehow unbearable otherwise).
I wonder if the city is profitable if the map is loaded with the normal game mechanics. I suspect he wouldn't have strategically placed the municipal resources around the place.
"Traffic is ok, thanks to tram, cable car and BART. I play in sandbox mod (unlimited money mod on) because if not, it's impossible to build a city like this. It does not avoid to deal with services such as garbage and deathcare. I have huge deathwaves, and I had to hid my landfills because they are not existing in the area I built IRL."
yeah i mean usually thats a fixed cost right? like is that actually a cost of AAA titles? do they make a new engine for every game? i dont think they do.
There are mods for the game that let you easily import height maps. I want to say it's done from Open Street Map, but it's been a while since I've tried it out.
Walking around the pier I instinctively knew where everything was: store fronts, stairs... I knew that if I went down I would look out and see Alcatraz? Yep, there it was. And if I went left I'd see... sea lions?! I even said "sea lions?" out loud to myself. I'd never even seen a sea lion before, but yep, there they were!
I was freaking out until I turned around and saw a flight of stairs with a bright red hand rail and realised: Tony Hawk Pro Skater IV.