Inspiration
Players of GTA V state that they know Los Santos like the back of their hand, with enough knowledge to navigate it on their first visit despite never actually stepping foot in Los Santos prior. How are players able to attain such a level of knowledge?
What it does
How we built it
Challenges we ran into
Patrick - Working primarily on map generation, I found that despite the high quality images of the exterior and the interior from Matterport, the images were unfortunately still too sparse that a significant amount of time had to be dedicated to refinements and heuristics for making a useable 3D map. This also meant for the exterior and for the portions of the map that didn't have a camera angle which would generally render textureless and invisible for a typical player playing the game without fixes it would be a huge eyesore. Thus the workaround was using the Gaussian Splat from Vexcel/the aerial drone imagery around certain houses to improve the outdoors. This was still a challenge in its own right as the splat was incredibly detailed by itself, so we couldn't take it entirely or the browser would crash. Instead we had to take strategic shots and spend a lot of time on getting the right angles to texture everything we built initially from the Matterport creating this loop of finding issues, finding refinements, and running suites of tests to quickly vet and rerun the loop of improving the map.
