The studio plans to use civilian drones like the eBee to map the entire planet -- or at least everywhere civilian drones are legally allowed to fly, which currently does not include the U.S. -- and reconstruct as a 3D virtual environment.
They basically plan to make an open world survival game, and use real world geography and data for the location... oh, and implement a full day and night cycle and weather that somehow perfectly syncs up to that reality.
Personally, I doubt that they'll succeed. The real world is just too big to plausibly include in its entirety in a video game (yes Minecraft exists, but that's procedurally random worlds with a mostly machine made landscape with limited biomes), the illusion will collapse the minute anyone realises how high people's expectations for a real world map are (lots of people will probably head straight to their house or some other recognisable place just to see how close it is) and well... the technology just seems like something you'd need almost Google levels of resources to achieve. It's just not something an indie team has a hope in hell of succeeding at.
But what do you think? Interesting idea? And do you think they'll ever be able to succeed with a project with this much ambition?
They are trying to copy the concept that Google already began (Google has a game that uses Google Earth) it sounds like. And my immediate thought upon reading that quote was exactly what Nin posted - the memory needed would be far too huge for anything we have now - or will probably have in the next decade, for that matter.
They are trying to copy the concept that Google already began (Google has a game that uses Google Earth) it sounds like. And my immediate thought upon reading that quote was exactly what Nin posted - the memory needed would be far too huge for anything we have now - or will probably have in the next decade, for that matter.
Yeah, pretty much this.
Cannot wait for poor draw distances and loading screens whenever you change streets!
And this. I mean, has anyone ever used Google Maps StreetView or Google Earth?
They're... not very good for anything other than a bit of virtual sight seeing and ten minutes of free time at work. Basically, they're slow as heck to load anything and look blurry in quite a few spots.
And guess what? They're not games. They're basically just either 3D model tech demos (Google Earth from what I can remember) or lots of photos pasted together. Yet they still take a huge amount of resources and look kind of like crap in many cases.
A game cannot work in such a setting. Not on this day's hardware. You'd end up with frame rates worse than Google Maps and a system of gameplay which is just frustratingly unplayable because of the sheer scope of all the things the engine has to process. Like, this stuff:
The basic game physics engine that makes it even run
The world itself, which is supposedly about the size of the actual planet
A day and night.time cycle which presumably has to be run every frame or so.
Weather effects/system
Other characters and things on screen, because you can't have a survival game with nothing to attempt to survive the effects of.
AI for anything not controlled by a human player
Weapon shots/trajectory/physics (survival basically guarantees guns or something similar)
Various other objects that might be on screen
Loading those textures for everything in sight
The music/sound effects?
And then someone's gonna have to make an actual game out of it. Because hey, you can't just stick the real world's map as a video game setting and hope it'll work completely unedited. Characters have to be able to get to most of the places in the setting, since otherwise it may as well not exist. They have to have things to do there too. But hey, the tech stuff will get them way before the 'oh god we have to design a video game world the same size as Earth' thing ever will.
Maybe it could happen. As long as producers have enough knowledge to make a game of the whole world. The time thing would work if the game uses the computers time, but the weather thing to me is a definite no-go. Maybe they might do updates to the game, like in minecraft. Start off with one continent, then start adding more and more as it goes
No. The already fragile video game industry and market would absolutely crash from such a drastic change to how major titles would work. Not only that, but the idea, while coming from a genuine and hopeful place, is really just damaging. There is absolutely no convenient way to pool the opinions of all who backed it and absolutely would need a direct leader with the knowledge and leadership to be able to make good educated decisions and control it. While it would be better in that it allows studios who aren't related to the parent company who have the skills to make the games the players want would be great, it would simply go out of control. Not only does each player have individual opinions and ideas that vary drastically that would all need to need to be represented, but there also needs to be a way to be able to pass ideas in a democratic way, but it's absolutely unreasonable to think that a full game, let alone one of any quality could come from the composite of such scatterbrained ideas. You absolutely need a leader and a designer heading it. If such a thing were to happen, it would be better to transfer control from the publisher to a person, not to say that person is guaranteed reliable or trustworthy, but it's the only way to work it, and not everyone's going to get what they want, but that's how the world works. It's the best it is going to get. This is also ignoring the vast amounts of money that would be required to buy a title, and while a crowdfunding could potentially work, there's no chance it could be cobbled into a common thing.
