This reminds of the first time I ever went to San Francisco from Australia. My hotel was near some famous tourist spot (oh, Pier 39 - it's mentioned in the post!). I went down to see what was there, and was struck by the most intense deja-vu I'd ever felt. This was my first time to the US, but for some reason I knew this place. It was like I had astral-projection traveled there or something crazy.<p>Walking around the pier I instinctively knew where everything was: store fronts, stairs... I knew that if I went down I would look out and see Alcatraz? Yep, there it was. And if I went left I'd see... sea lions?! I even said "sea lions?" out loud to myself. I'd never even seen a sea lion before, but yep, there they were!<p>I was freaking out until I turned around and saw a flight of stairs with a bright red hand rail and realised: Tony Hawk Pro Skater IV.
There's something off. Someone used the Berlin Reichstag (parliament building) [1] as the model for the SF City Hall [2].<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/s2MmJ8B.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/s2MmJ8B.jpg</a><p>[1] <a href="http://footage.framepool.com/shotimg/qf/252862096-reichstag-dome-bundestag-norman-foster-tiergarten-district.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://footage.framepool.com/shotimg/qf/252862096-reichstag-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.aerialarchives.com/stock/img/AHLB3555.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.aerialarchives.com/stock/img/AHLB3555.jpg</a>
Reddit thread where the individual who created this answers questions:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/593auz/san_francisco_11_recreation_in_cities_skylines/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/593auz/san_fr...</a>
Cities:Skylines is a great game for this kind of thing, because it has tremendous support for mods. It even has a built-in "asset editor" that lets you define buildings, maps and road junctions. All of which can then be shared on the Steam workshop.<p>You do need quite a few mods to remove restrictions on road and building placement, and then allow manual control of buildings rather than letting them "grow" according to the game mechanics.
A friend of mine works for a company doing something like this with vehicle-mounted scanners. It's like street view on crack - I want to say something like centimeter precision on the measurements, and then they skin it with the photos? It's pretty impressive.<p>This is also impressive, but for other reasons.
I've always wanted this kind of thing in Gran Turismo, or some other racing sim, just so that I could do my various commutes over time with no traffic and fast cars.
I wonder if the city is profitable if the map is loaded with the normal game mechanics. I suspect he wouldn't have strategically placed the municipal resources around the place.
other data source:<p>OpenStreetMap : "San Francisco Building Height Import"<p><a href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Building_Height_Import" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Building_H...</a>
Some people also spend weeks and months in Minetest (this one fictitious):
<a href="https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6642" rel="nofollow">https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6642</a>
I'm surprised this only took 200 hours. Said gamer must have imported a large bit of the data automatically. Could be copyright issues with Google.