Project openhattan by snoopy :p

Sure man, that sounds great. Thank you.
There are some logos here: http://www.openhattan.com/PR/PressRelease.zip

@PAKFA I've been in the CG industry for 9 years, mainly in architectural visualization. I've had many big project so I have a good idea what it takes to manage a huge scene. As far as game mods go the Nord was my biggest project, but I didn't model it anyway.

 

Thanks, not sure when it will be completed but I guess I have plenty of time

 

donated, feels pretty good to be a part of this, hopefully in 10 years time we can all be tooling around in it, have to admire the ambition, see you all on the streets in 2025....

 

With IndieGogo's flexible funding scheme chosen here, no, you don't get your money back under any circumstances. So unlike Kickstarter, where you get your money back if it doesn't at least meet the base goal, your money is gone no matter what when you hit that contribute button.

Which is why I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. That's harsh, but this project is insanely ambitious, there are no proofs of concept to show what we can expect, there are no previous projects of this size by the OP to inspire confidence for potential backers, there seems to be obvious questions regarding the technical viability of doing a project of this scale with thousands upon thousands of unique assets, etc etc. You're promising $1,000 to anybody who models a city block, but how many city blocks are there in Manhattan? It must be in the thousands. Plural. You think you can really extensively photograph every building and street and important object/area in all of Manhattan in 3-4 months? It seems you're located in Bulgaria, Snoopy?

This has 'no way in hell' written all over it. What will likely happen is that there will be several $100 to several $1000 worth of backing, it will quickly become obvious that this project is entirely too ambitious and you wont get a tiny fraction of the funding necessary(since we're talking millions in the long run), yet you will still get the money that people contributed, and best case scenario - you've pre-invested that money into ramping up plans for beginning the project and its just a bust in the end, or worst case scenario - you don't commit to anything too early and then just keep the money, having done little to no actual work towards the project til a goal was met, meaning you've potentially gotten yourself thousands of dollars for doing little more than setting up a webpage and selling an idea to certain folks.

I'm sure plenty of people are reading this and thinking I'm being a total *** and honestly, I want nothing more than to be wrong. This would be immensely incredible and I'd be quite happy to look like a total fool and jackass if this all works out great. I'm not a huge betting man, but I still feel confident enough in risking my reputation on calling this a total pipe dream, with a high chance of fallout when this all falls apart and people wonder what actually happened to their money.

 

glass half empty guy right?

 

More of a 'that glass is chipped and dangerous looking so I'd rather not drink from it' kinda guy.

 

There are images showcasing the quality of modeling I've done in the past and we will insist on. There are no projects of this size in the world, not just by me.

What are the obvious questions?

Upwards of 2000 blocks. Multiply that by $1000-$5000 and you get the millions. I don't need to extensively photograph each building. I need good facade and side photos. What difference does my location make?

I understand I may have failed to explain well enough that the $10mil mark is the best case-scenario, and there are much lower milestones that will get a small percentage of the work done to serve as a tech-demo and a basis to attract more donations so we can do the whole thing.

I am absolutely not trying to convince you that you should donate, I just feel I need to face the accusations.

I guess there are two kinds of people. Those that see ambitious tasks as a barrier and those that want to break the barrier.

 

Yes, I think it was clear to anyone who is about to donate to a crowd-funded project that there are no guarantees about anything. Many projects that have met their goals have failed to deliver.
The mentality is more about giving new ideas, that would've never worked the standard, way a super boost.
It is a bit of a gamble-you might not get anything, or you might get something very cool.

 

Wanting to break barriers is great. Creating a hopelessly ambitious plan and asking for money from strangers in order to accomplish it introduces a few other factors, though. Anyways, I hope you put any money you get to good use and don't just pocket everything if it never works out. I don't want to sit here and continue to **** on your plans man, so I wont, and I do wish you the best of luck cuz you will need it.

 

Sneak Peak

 

Thank you. The good news about the idea is that it scales well. So whatever I get, I will use to do even a tiny bit to use for promotion in future.

 

I wish you luck but, it's a product that is really only of interest to game developers, modders and similar.

It's like middleware and perhaps questionable whether the data would be usable by any particularly developer anyway depending on their specific needs for whatever they were developing and how long into the future before the data is out of date, lacking detail etc.

In two words "art style"

I think the idea is a potentially good thing but if you want to manufacture paint for artists to buy you can't expect to fund the idea by going to the public and saying "Paint! People will use it to paint pictures! Think of the pictures that might one day be painted!" - i.e you need to get game developers interested in backing this, not people that want tracks in a racing game.

Plus, who cares about Manhattan? Why not London, Paris or Rome? Or Buenos Aries? It's a bit local isn't it. Gabe Newell can probably manipulate a global audience on reddit into donating to his local hospital, but I think you've cut your audience down quite a bit.

I could just about buy into the idea if you did a kickstarter for some tangible assetto corsa mod - i.e if the kickstarter was for creating a detailed laser scanned model of one or more popular motorsport tracks that Kunos haven't visited yet - and the deliverable for throwing $x at you would be a finished track. That's something where ordinary people would be getting something tangible at the end.

"Crowd funded laser scanning of race tracks" to me that's something the sim audience will throw money at - and if you can mod for a few titles, you've a bigger pool of people.

I think the scale and funding for doing a track or 3 sounds like a more realistic and therefore obtainable goal too.

Which tracks? Brands Hatch? Road America and Laguna Seca?

 

I know, it really is a long shot. The thing is we can't expect studios to do it. If we had the model made the way I imagine it, putting it into games like AC would be almost drag and drop. Still, geting the end client interested seems to not work even with the playable demo offered.

 

Right, as opposed to your rational and calm suggestion that we're all *****les

Anyway to keep it productive, I'll edit this in :-

What about Top Gear test track? Does Top gear have enough global interest? You could mod the relevant car too. Figure out how much it'd cost, add in the cost of flights and hotels etc, see if people are willing to pay.

Maybe you could team with the BBC and offer big pledges a chance to drive around the real track and get their name on the leaderboard?

 

Snoopy - have you looked at any existing maps/models and tried to build on top of that? ManhattanX for FSX is very detailed and maybe instead of reinventing the wheel, you can borrow or build on something that is already there?

This is a super ambitious but very awesome project. I will support you!

 

Don't forget people it's a 10 year project, a lot could happen in that time...a lot of bad things but also good things...sometimes opportunism just turns out for the better and the opportunists celebrate. Try to dream, dare to dream....we all go to work to make one or two people rich who live off the backs of thousands hard working people who earn just enough to pay the bills and feed their children, everyone considers this as "normal and realistic"...well I ****ING DO NOT!! If we lived our real lives the way this community lives, by contributing, sharing, dreaming, co-operating, using each our personal skills and creating dreams FOR THE MAIN PUBLIC and not some single *****le hoping to get rich and abuse the community like in REAL life, the world would be a much better place. So dream on, be opportunistic and keep trying to work together and start motivating....all that positive energy will go somewhere good and maybe the end goal will be different from what first has been obtained for....but we will all benefit from the result we created together and not some idiot individual somewhere on an island. Snoopy isn't abusing any system to get rich, he's only relying on those who just might make a difference at the end of this 10 year era. Donating is entirely free and not obligated at all, everyone can support in different ways....and you know what....why do you people accept the real life system as a common thing when every month the governmentand your top chief is filling its pockets with your hard earned money and are so negative when it comes to donating a tiny bit to a dream that might just come true if only enough people support it in any way they consider possible. I am supporting right now without any donation by creating skins for this project and promote publicity, that's one way....Now I have to go to work at 6AM make that CEO some money and pay mine to the state, yeah that's much more normal and realistic. Think twice what you might consider normal and real, it might turn out it isn't...

 

Yeah...political rants aside, I've been thinking about the campaign and what people will get out of it when it finishes at under $500, because it sure is headed there.
I've decided (and I have put this in the project description) to model a couple of city blocks myself by google maps photos (not perfect, but that's what I've got). I'll put them in a realtime engine so that will be the tech demo.
Also, as most donations came from this community and I just can't bare the thought of not giving anything back I'll try to pick the city blocks and streets so they can form a racetrack and make a Manhattan race track for AC. It won't happen quickly. I'll have to do it after work and on weekends, but it will eventually happen.
Does anyone know a journalist that writes for an online media? I need some advice. I seem to be doing something very wrong because no news outlet would write an article about OpenHattan. I really thought the idea had a good potential for a news article.

 

Got a bit carried away there but that is in fact truely how I feel...won't go further off topic though...thanks for the Facebook campaign screens post, really appreciate that.
Currently downloading +1GB on Windows updates ....stupid factory reboot hdd failure thingy