I just wish those kind of mods worked more "nicely" with multiplayer... Although I still think with all the GTA4 graphics mods there are, I still think it should quality for one of the current most realistic looking games (definitely not with the default settings, however).
However... Regarding the OP, a Google Maps of Liberty City is really awesome though. Imagine if someone hacked the cellphone in the game to run off an Android emulator rendered to a screen overlay, and link it with the Google Navigator app (that's a significant modification to the engine though so I don't know if that would be possible, and especially not on multiplayer LOL).
When GTAV comes out they should open source the code for 4! The amount of mods and work people have put into the game is insane. The LCPDFR mod alone could have been sold as a add on pack!
It's feasible to store the visual input to the player which could be used as a model to base recreate the actual 3d world. The raw visual from many players could be used to simulate a populous with head mounted cameras. It's a potentially large data-set with a known value to test against.
Hasn't this site, with street view, been around awhile. It has been awhile since I've last played GTA4, but I remember using these street map views a year or two ago.
Right after I read your comment, I realized exactly how useful that might be. From simply helping a friend stuck a particular point to doing entire game walkthroughs/handbooks, his would be a pretty sweet addition to either experience.
The geek side of me is really impressed. The gamer side of me is feeling bad because this was the first GTA game which I could no longer play as my budget machines couldn't keep up with the increasing demand from GPUs in this series.Not that I am complaining.. I was never a serious enough gamer to spend money on expensive GPUs.
I would have loved a map like this of GTA San Andreas.
According to a thread on the matter,[0] it appears it was done by a script. However, it was not done in a recreated world, but in game.
Which means, they created a script that would walk around the world to specific set coordinates, take screenshots in all directions. Then when done, stitch the screenshots together to form the panorama pictures. Accordingly, this took 140 hours. I am assuming a lack of processing power was influenced by it.
I don't think it was. The cars aren't consistent when you "walk" down the street like they are on Google Maps which implies that these weren't generated by someone driving around the GTA4 world taking screen shots. It kind of gives it a sort of an uncanny valley feel.
Also, what's wrong with doing it manually? That's how the real Google Street Views is generated.
So I have seen these done multiple times for different MMOs, so what seems to be so special about this one from GTA4? I have played GTA4 and I enjoyed it, just trying to get a gauge about why this seems to be so amazing to some? (I admit, certainly could legitimately be just something I am missing, is there something about the game that makes this complicated?).
