What is the largest spherical (or oblately spheroidal) open world map ever designed for a video game?
The other day I was thinking, "what if there was a Grand Theft Auto game set on a spheroid with fictionalized versions of at least one real major city from every continent?"
Has there ever been a map that could be fully explored on foot, maybe something along the lines of: GTAV's flat map, or maybe even more like on the scale of World War II Online's map, but with no invisible walls or any artificial method that prevents players from crossing a certain boundary that would reveal the flatness of the virtual world?
I was also thinking something like No Man's Sky but wasn't procedurally generated, had more than just one biome, was set in the present, had Earth fauna and flora, had thousands of NPCs, and cities based off of real-world cities.
The map would have to be a lot smaller than real Earth, of course. Perhaps a spheroidal map the size of Ceres? Or smaller. No wait. Not Ceres. Maybe the asteroid 8 Flora. Might be just perfect for the GTAV map.
Has there ever been a spherical open world game set inside a space station on the scale of something like the Death Star that could be fully explored inside and out?
Or an oblately spheroidal open world set inside of a hollowed-out asteroid?
Or for that matter: how hard would it be to just take the flat map from GTAV and paste it onto a globe?
Is there such an open world game?
Bernd
2023-07-03 15:07:50 ⋅ 1y
No. 277200
>>277184
>What is the largest spherical (or oblately spheroidal) open world map ever designed for a video game?
KSP I guess. 1/10 (linear) of the real Earth. But it's quite empty.
> how hard would it be to just take the flat map from GTAV and paste it onto a globe?
The game engine probably won't allow anything like that. But why would anyone want spherical GTAV in the first place?
Bernd
2023-07-03 15:35:45 ⋅ 1y
No. 277204
Microsoft Flight Simulator :^)
Bernd
2023-07-03 15:58:25 ⋅ 1y
No. 277216
>>277200
>The game engine probably won't allow anything like that. But why would anyone want spherical GTAV in the first place?
Because I'd love to play a GTAV-like game in which the map isn't flat and has multiple biomes (e.g. jungles, tundras, permafrost locations like McMurdo station, etc.) and fictionalized versions of real major cities from all over the planet and not just Miami, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Las Vegas.
Bernd
2023-07-06 21:18:19 ⋅ 1y
No. 277609
Actually, I think that this can be done today. I mean--with present-day technology--it could take anywhere from about a year or two to as little as just a few hours. I've seen this guy on Youtube who is doing an awesome job at remastering Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and creating his own Grand Theft Auto VI before Rockstar finishes.
The easiest way to go about it today would be by taking Grand Theft Auto V's flat map and wrapping it around a recreation of a small, spheroidal celestial object like the asteroid 8 Flora. The GTAV map has a total area of 75.84 square kilometers. The asteroid 8 Flora is 147.5 kilometers in diameter.
The video game "The Crew" has a map that is 5,000 to 7,000 km² in size. It does a decent job at recreating the US, shrinking it, then recreating it again. Sort of. Maybe.
Bernd
2023-07-07 08:56:07 ⋅ 1y
No. 277665
>>277204
Not sure if this counts, but I also found this other guy on Youtube who created some sort of flight timed package delivery sim game by taking imagery from Google Earth and running it through Unreal Engine 5. Of course, he had to shrink the Earth to make one side of the globe reachable from the other over the course of a few minutes on a biplane and make all the planet's features cartoonishly semi-realistic, but it still looked pretty good. I was thinking of something like that but at ground-level. Obviously not fully-simulated Earth, but something possible with current technology.
It also bothers me how Civilization maps still seem to be flat or cylindrical and don't allow players to cross the poles from one hemisphere to another.
Would be neat to be able to fly over a shrunk-down version of Antarctica from not-Brazil or not-Argentina, maybe land on a fictional recreation of McMurdo station, and then take off and travel to not-Australia in a GTA clone.
Bernd
2023-07-07 11:25:07 ⋅ 1y
No. 277671
>>277609
>The GTAV map has a total area of 75.84 square kilometers. The asteroid 8 Flora is 147.5 kilometers in diameter.
Uhh, that's not how sqkms work…
A ~ R^2 (for sphere the geometric factor is 4pi) so something 147.5km in diameter will have much much more surface area - ~68350km^2
75.84km^2 is a bit less than 9km x 9km
Bernd
2023-07-07 11:54:31 ⋅ 1y
No. 277675
>>277671
Yeah I made those calculations about a year ago and can't remember what they were meant for.
Perhaps I was hoping to get a map like that of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (209,331 square kilometers) copied and pasted onto a spheroidal object the size of the 8 Flora asteroid. Probably not as impressive.
Bernd
2023-07-07 13:27:46 ⋅ 1y
No. 277681
>>277675
Why do you want it to be the size of a real asteroid? If you're looking for some realism there won't be any anyway because even these big roundish asteroids have less than 1% of Earth gravity at most.
You could says your asteroid is filled with solid metal to have more gravity but still not enough for any lifestyle that resembles Earth
Bernd
2023-07-07 13:46:52 ⋅ 1y
No. 277683
>>277681
For the science fiction route; we could have a game set inside a hollowed-out asteroid. So it could be like living in Hollow Earth which I think would rely more on centrifugal force (I think? Or was it centripetal?) than gravity or whatever. Or maybe have the asteroid have like a white dwarf or micro black hole for a core.
Bernd
2023-07-07 14:10:42 ⋅ 1y
No. 277688
>>277683
Natural asteroid would be torn apart if you spin it fast enough to get this centrifugal force so you'll have to use solid materials instead. As for mystical black hole core approach, any body with such gravity would become much bigger over the years so the only explanation is that humans put this black hole inside by themselves. To sum up that's basically a huge boring space station, completely artificial so no different biomes and other interesting stuff. That is still possible to imagine some gameplay there (I remember some books and movies that took place on such stations, also ME Citadel) but it's not what you wanted I guess
Bernd
2023-07-07 14:48:04 ⋅ 1y
No. 277693
>>277692
> you were only allowed to explore certain section
That's true. And the Citadel was a huge boring city so there was no point in making whole of it playable. It would require a lot of work but the result would be very repetative and no player would ever explore more than 1% of it.
Bernd
2023-07-07 14:58:41 ⋅ 1y
No. 277695
>>277693
Unless it were a dystopian space station. Like Cyberpunk 2077 but in space. Complete with gangs and shootouts and drug wars.
Bernd
2023-07-07 16:51:00 ⋅ 1y
No. 277705
>>277683
>So it could be like living in Hollow Earth which I think would rely more on centrifugal force (I think? Or was it centripetal?) than gravity or whatever.
In this case you have no "gravity" at poles and you're back to cylindrical map.
Bernd
2023-07-08 01:35:54 ⋅ 1y
No. 277803
>>277705
It also bothers me how Civilization maps still seem to be flat or cylindrical and don't allow players to cross the poles from one hemisphere to another.
Would be neat to be able to fly over a shrunk-down version of Antarctica from not-Brazil or not-Argentina, maybe land on a fictional recreation of McMurdo station, and then take off and travel to not-Australia in a GTA clone.
It was around the time when I was in the early grades of elementary school. I was casually looking at a map of Japan and a map of the world and noticed something strange. Shikoku looks like Australia and Kyushu looks like Africa.
I thought it was strange, but it was just an idea that came to me as a child. At the time, I did not pursue it any further, and this "discovery of the century" was forgotten for the time being.
Then one day, more than 10 years later, I was struck by a strange phenomenon that had been discovered between Japan and the rest of the world. I was stunned to learn that there was a Japanese person who had noticed this strange correspondence between Japan and the rest of the world and had placed it in the context of a grand spiritual cosmology. At the same time, I remember my childhood, and I was tapping my knee, knowing exactly what I was getting at.
Bernd
2023-07-08 09:26:23 ⋅ 1y
No. 277838
>>277803
Aw what the hell my post got deleted for some reason after getting banned for posting Julia Butters and then I had to repost but for whatever reason I ended up re-re-re-re-re-posting a repost of a repost.
Bernd
2023-07-08 10:15:07 ⋅ 1y
No. 277843
>>277838
So the same Bernd dreams about spherical open world gaming experience and about teenager body. Maybe Macron is right and video games are harmful after all?
Bernd
2023-07-08 10:18:38 ⋅ 1y
No. 277845
>>277828
That's a very long Russia
Bernd
2023-07-10 10:02:27 ⋅ 1y
No. 278164
>>277828
Looks like Isabella Sermon got me banned this time around.
Where was I? I think I was saying how the Southwestern US would be a good candidate for Rockstar to produce a 1:1 scale recreation of because it's got the world's hottest desert (Death Valley), world's tallest trees (redwoods, Sequoia, Sherman trees, etc.), islands (Channel islands), snow-capped mountains, and other biomes. Probably part of the reason as to why early filmmakers picked Hollywood back in the day. With a map the size of Daggerfall's; you can get much of Southern California, maybe a bit of Central California, Northern Mexico, and Nevada.
Also for a map that size you can get much of Southern and Central Iraq and maybe get like a 1:1 recreation of Sumer for an Assassin's Creed game or Mount & Blade mod.
Bernd
2023-08-07 22:43:09 ⋅ 1y
No. 282146
>>277204
i like how everyone is just ignoring the obvious answer
Bernd
2023-08-07 23:26:41 ⋅ 1y
No. 282153
>>282146
Ah, but can you walk around on foot in Microsoft Flight Simulator?