Programming the World

[Ink Asylum]

Today I returned from a business trip that had me driving for six hours each way through upstate New York. As I covered hundreds of miles and passed over farmland, mountains, and cities, I started thinking about just how incredibly big our world is and how scaled down worlds are in games. If I had been driving through Azeroth from World of Warcraft I would have driven around the world numerous times in the time it took me to cross one average-sized state.

Naturally, part of that is due to playability. There's really no fun in having to drive hours in game just to get to the next city, or hike through miles of woods to get to a cave you can explore. Another factor is obviously a limitation in storage size, resources, and development time. Still, as games strive for more realism part of that means creating environments that more closely mimic the real world. GTA IV created a scaled down version of NYC. Assassin's Creed reproduces modified versions of historical cities.

So what would it take to create a video game version of the entire world, to scale?

I'm not expecting a recreation down to the last blade of grass. Repeating textures and models would be acceptable for regions that are largely miles of similar terrain, so long as the topography and outstanding landmarks are respected.

Let's leave people out of it for now and shoot for a 3D model of the world that would be explorable with a human-sized avatar and maintains the level of detail we expect from a AAA title like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed.

If the entire video game development community of programmers, artists, and designers contributed to the process would it be possible in a year? A decade? Longer? How long to just get an exterior only model like most of GTAIV? How much longer to also reproduce the interiors of every single building?

[court12b]

O.o

Actually I was pondering something along these lines myself not that long ago, I was curious how much memory google street view of the surface of the entire planet would take.

[Xerxes]

I think we end up at the point of, why. It's so aimless and such a huge task no purpose.

[Ink Asylum]

No purpose in having a nearly accurate virtual model of the world? How can you even say that?

Even if it is pointless, and impossible without either a huge investment of resources or significant technological advancements, it's still an interesting thought experiment.

[Xerxes]

No purpose in having a nearly accurate virtual model of the world? How can you even say that?

Even if it is pointless, and impossible without either a huge investment of resources or significant technological advancements, it's still an interesting thought experiment.

If you were a terrorist or supervillian yeah, it would be awesome. :D

I'm sure it's cheaper than the super collider.

[andru]

Oh and what a perfect way to regurgitate school on a web site I'm suppose to be using for my hobby (quite obvious grad school is taking over my mind), I guess my first reply to this is a response from school, from author Luis Borges:

On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .


It's exactly what you described, the cartographers acting as making a map that became so precise that it was hard to tell the difference between reality and simulation.

Which leads me to philosopher Jean Beaudrillard, who I'd encourage you to read if you decide you're interested in investing some time into this (Warning: not exactly easy reading and even when you do understand what he's writing about, not exactly something that is easy to swallow). It's generally where the Wachowski brothers attempted to translate into the Matrix (though Beaudrillard argued that they completely misunderstood his work).

But I'll just paste the first page of the intro to his book, Simulacrum and Simulation:

"The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. - Ecclesiastes

If once we were able to view Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of the map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)- as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. <- Recognise this? Morpheus, from the first Matrix movie. "Welcome, to the desert of the real."

Anyhow, thought this might be interesting since it's a weird tangent to discover in the midst of my studies and what I used to think was my abode away from it. Go figure. Happy discovering!

[Nameless]

Honestly, I have no idea how much work would go into programming it (I've no knowledge of the field), but just the information-gathering stage would be a ridiculous investment of time and money. Imagine trying to gather accurate visual data from around the world; think of the problems: how do you even gather the information? Can hi-tech satellite imaging do the trick? There are probably lots of places where no-one's ever been. How do we get accurate information for these locations?

Anyway, if anyone's ever going to achieve this, my bet is on Google doing it. Hell, Google Street View helps cover a lot of the major cities of the world already. In fact, programming cities would not be that much work (relatively). A lot of the information is easily accessible (plans and such).

I imagine it's the countryside that would give the most trouble. There's just so much of it. And even though it looks bland when you're driving by at 100kph (or whatever that is in miles), I bet that there are a lot of interesting details in every square mile you travel. I wonder how much it would cost to take hi-res photos (like what you see in Google Maps if you zoom in really close to a city) of the rest of the world.

Interesting stuff.

Clearly, I need to read more philosophy. That sounds really interesting!

[LiquidRain]

They already made a game that accurately portrays the size and terrain of the Prairies/midwest: Penn & Teller's Desert Bus. :D

[andru]

Oh definitely! Philosophy is trying to understand the world we live in, so I personally can't see how one can actively discourage figuring out 'the order of the world' according to themselves.

If you're interested in philosophy, I'd suggest just picking up a work by a philosopher that tends to 'speak' to your intuitive thought - I guess a way of easing into it, though not necessarily always agreeing with it. Since a lot of perspectives can be completely against your own, it's really interesting to consistently reform your ideas of what the world 'is', so I'd highly recommend transitioning onto divergent perspectives after that first step. Wikipedia is a good step to this - there's definitely a lot of thought over the course of human history, but there's never a late step to hop aboard.

[Nameless]

Oh definitely! Philosophy is trying to understand the world we live in, so I personally can't see how one can actively discourage figuring out 'the order of the world' according to themselves.

If you're interested in philosophy, I'd suggest just picking up a work by a philosopher that tends to 'speak' to your intuitive thought - I guess a way of easing into it, though not necessarily always agreeing with it. Since a lot of perspectives can be completely against your own, it's really interesting to consistently reform your ideas of what the world 'is', so I'd highly recommend transitioning onto divergent perspectives after that first step. Wikipedia is a good step to this - there's definitely a lot of thought over the course of human history, but there's never a late step to hop aboard.

Yeah, I always wanted to take more Philosophy courses (I only ever took 101, which was a joke, and 102 (Great Philosophical Questions) which was more an introduction than anything else). All I remember is Descartes and his cogito. I remember being particularly interested in Descartes due to his work in Math (which was my main area of study), maybe I should look up more of his stuff.

Now you got me all interested in Philosophy again. I'll just be asking questions all week. :p

[andru]

For Descartes, I'd recommend picking up his reasoning for WHY he believed an approach to rationality was the direction to go through for life. It's interesting to look at Descartes because the influence of his thought has been such a great impact on Western thinking that it's become almost structural; in other words, you don't even realize you're consciously 'thinking' in his method, because of the manner in which you were raised rather than consciously attempting to procure the same manner of thought as he did. This is why history is always so interesting to interpret since it's never in the same sense as the lens through which YOU are reading it from. (Even the notion of time, history, is a constructed manner of thinking... I can talk about this later.) But I always found it so interesting because of the fact that I wonder if my thoughts are actually real, or if they are actually, in a sense, always directed by another manner of control (elaborated by Herbert Marcuse, in his book One-Dimensional Man).

Since you like math (and by the way, my main area of study isn't philosophy either, it's actually architecture), I see that as a way of ordering the world (so I can easily see your fascination with it). I'd suggest looking at music as well.

It's interesting because the ancient Greek conception of 'math and music', in the senses of arithmetic, geometry, etc. were NOT separate as they are today - music too, was a method of ordering (and it makes a whole lot of sense for that).

Furthermore, I'd suggest that you pick up philosophy of anti-science philosophers; now, mind you, this is not a rally against reason (as an idea unto itself) but rather in the conception of WHY 'reason' has become the primary manner of thinking for Western civilization (this ties into conceptions of technology and time). Giambattista Vico is an interesting one, from the Renaissance. He's not as well known, though his ideas are interesting as they pertain to issues today (particularly, the issue of 'imagination' and originality as gamers are so quick to proclaim for 'innovation').

Anyway, food for thought! :)

[Xerxes]

Oregon Trail was to scale. :p

I mean it took almost a year to get anywhere. Not cause you weren't trying at least.

[Vandabo]

I always got to thinking about scale while playing Freelancer, where you make interstellar trading runs between planets that are only slightly larger than your ships, and you complete them in minutes.

Microsoft Flight simulator in it's latest versions is a pretty damn accurate model of the planet. Especially if you get all the add-ins that give you more detailed terrains. Just for kicks one time I flew an SR-71 from Portland, OR to the Grand Canyon. It still took quite a while, even at Mach 3 or so. Then I tried to fly down through the canyon and crashed because the SR-71 can't turn worth shit.

I also took off in a Cessna 170 from my hometown airport and flew over to the coast, following the highway I normally take. It was fun.

[Panthera]

Microsoft Flight Simulator X counts, for sure, especially with certain add-in packs.

Battleground Europe (http://www.battlegroundeurope.com/) has people fighting in a 1:3 or 1:4 scale Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and part of France, Germany and a hint of England. The sense of scale is really remarkable and adds a lot to the depth of the game.

[ShivaX]

Pretty sure Battleground Europe uses 1:2 scale. Mostly because of people bitching that planes are going twice as fast as they should from one place to another.

Nothing like driving an Opel around for 20 minutes to do something or, God forbid, driving across the map for the hell of it.

[Panthera]

Nothing like driving an Opel around for 20 minutes to do something or, God forbid, driving across the map for the hell of it.

Someone might read that and think it's sarcastic, but there really is something fascinating about spending an hour to fly across the map with a formation of bombers, or setting out from Britain in a plane full of paratroopers, or even driving a tank across beautiful scenery to the front line, watching every hedge with paranoia.

[Wraith]

I've always wanted to see a SimCity where everything was rendered inside and out, so you could walk or drive around your city in first person, go into buildings and see individual stores, rooms. Or a racing game that puts you on real roads on the map.

As for high levels of detail, see Shenmue, especially the 1st game. A petty small playable area, but very detailed, and also very expensive.

GPS/google maps/city view are probably the closest we'll see anytime soon. It's just too expensive to try model in too much detail.

[Vandabo]

Or a racing game that puts you on real roads on the map.


Go play Test Drive Unlimited on 360. The whole game is played on a pretty large scale recreation of Oahu, Hawaii and uses real cars and has traffic on the roads. One of the races is a lap around the perimeter of the island, and it can take up to an hour depending on your car.

I got the microsoft wireless wheel, and it is amazing how it feels like just going out and taking a drive. The cars have a very realistic in car view, and going around real roads with traffic makes for a very immersive experience.

[DoctorFinger]

I think in Elder Scrolls 2 it would take something like 6 hours to go from the southernmost point on the landmass to the northernmost, but that's about as extreme an example as I've seen so far.

[Ink Asylum]

There are definitely a few genres that could make great use out of such a project. A racing game would be amazing, with players able to make their own courses out of any set of roads in the world. Or set up a crazy multiplayer "Cannonball Run" style competition to cross the country with any route you want. Imagine using Google Maps to plot a route in a video game.

An RTS game that uses the entire globe to simulate World War 3 would be unprecedented, with the ability to zoom in to street level to observe movements. Or a WWII Online style MMO on a much larger scale.

Or the most epic Katamari Damacy game ever.

[DoctorFinger]

Man. Would even a TB of storage be enough? I guess you could reuse textures a lot, but that's an interesting question.

[Ink Asylum]

I definitely think the storage capability needed is beyond what the average gamer would have for another decade, probably.

If it were just a racing game where you were limited to paved surfaces you could probably cut down on the necessary level of detail, as well as avoid the need to map out huge areas where there are no roads beyond what can be seen from a distance.

If you took all the racing games made in the current console generation I wonder how large a land mass that would be.