Liberty City Dimensions ======================= Saturday 1 August 2009 19:00 Since FUEL brags about over 5,560 square miles of map, I wanted to find out how that compares to GTA IV. So you steal a car, drive to Francis International Airport, get to the end of a runway, check the vehicle stats for miles driven in a car, drive to the other end of the runway and check the vehicle stats again. Turns out the runways are about 0.45 miles long. Which is a bit short for a 747 that is about 230 feet long. In comparison, the shorter runways of JFK are 2 miles long, so about 4 times as long as those of Francis International Airport. By scaling the map like that you can easily get away with only 1/16 or 1/36 of the content needed for the real thing. On the Liberty City Area Street Map that runway is about 7.5 centimeters long. Which means that map is scale 1:10,000 meaning 1 cm is 100 meters. I double checked that by driving the full length of Albany Ave, which measures about 20 centimeters on the map and adds about 2 km, 1.3 miles to the vehicle stats. Albany Ave runs almost the full length of Algonquin. Compare that to Central Park in New York, which is about twice as long. What this boils down to is that Liberty City's complete map is only about 5 km x 3 km, 15 km² total. But it can feel like 20 km x 12 km, 240 km² or maybe even 30 km x 18 km, 540 km². It makes Union Drive West about a mile long, so speeding up and down that in a super car at 200 mph during Drag Kings wouldn't take that long. Which probably means that if you mess with the content density scale of a map, you also have to mess with with the speed of the vehicles, and while it looks like you're going pretty fast, you aren't moving that fast on the map. That probably also explains why fast cars aren't that much faster than slow cars, they mostly just sound faster. You can't use realistic high speeds in a reduced map, so you are slowed down to have the map appear bigger. FUEL has about 5,560 square miles of map. But how that feels depends on how it's content density is scaled, and how the speed of the vehicles is adjusted to that. What they claim is probably that if the map was square, the sides would be about 75 miles long, meaning it would take one hour at 75 mph to go from one corner to the next. But that doesn't mean much if the game itself is telling you you're going 75 mph. Messing with POV and stuff can make it appear you're going something like 75 mph, but it could also be maybe 40 mph. There's a difference between the feeling of doing 50 km/h on a skateboard and 50 km/h in a car, and the game can choose to create whatever feeling they want. But saying 40 mph would bring that impressive 5,560 down to only 1,600. It doesn't change much of the gameplay to make it appear you're going really fast when in fact you aren't, in fact it's a nice piece of work to get a bigger experience out of limited hardware. It shouldn't bother anyone that Liberty City is only tiny compared to New York City. But you probably can't compare it to an F1 simulation where the circuit is a copy of the real thing and you're supposed to get the same lap times and experience as the televised event. And maybe that's exactly what I don't like about F1 games. Games should be measured in hours of fun, not some made up size of a map. And I found out the GTA IV map on my screen is the same size as the Liberty City Area Street Map on paper. Roland van Ipenburg Wednesday 5 August 2009 00:06 Does Manhattan Need an Airport Instead of That Park? Well, it could be funny if it would actually fit: Does Manhattan Need an Airport Instead of That Park?. Don't underestimate the size of an airport. by Roland van Ipenburg http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/play/2009/08/01/liberty-city-dimensions/