It would be even greater if they add people in the streets, possibly walking, not static. That would turn it into a real city and not only perfectly conserved ruins.
It is. Assassin's Creed games are often set in places and time periods where they can have the assassin climb on famous landmarks and ancient architectures.
Rome was a location you could visit in at least one of the games (I want to say both Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood), and you could even climb the Colosseum itself. So when I saw the video, it instantly made me think of the game.
As for the haystack reference, a common trope in Assassin's Creed games is to reveal a region you have to find a tall structure and climb to the top. Usually they let you jump off from the very top and fall into something to break your fall, usually a haystack. It's super unrealistic but saves you the effort of climbing back down again.
You can see the Colosseum climbing in action in this video, although the time period in the game it's a ruin already, including the fall into a haystack: https://youtu.be/gkHTYydSPks
Frankly I was thinking too of Assassin's Creed. I've never played it but from videos I've seen it looks like they're able to give the impression of entire cities recreated with a fair level of accuracy, and populated with crowds, animals and everyday objects, with realistic elements such dirt and smoke.
I wonder how hard it would be to port the material used to create these videos (that might be accurate from a historical point of view but overall look way too schematic) to AC's engine- not to enjoy killing enemies in the context if the imperial Rome, but to provide a realistic environment to move through in real time. I think it would be loved by casual users and specialists alike.
For example, check this reconstruction of Athens in the 5th century BCE, it beats these ancient Rome videos in every possible way:
Belissimo! I went to Rome a couple years ago and this adds a lot to understand what I saw.
But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.
Not 1:1 recreations, but the Assasins Creed games scratch this itch. Im not a big video-gamer, but do love history, so usually buy them when the price drops down to a couple bucks just cause its neat to spend a couple hours walking around the historical recreations.
Building upon this idea: UbiSoft could license a version of the engine stripped of its game features (e.g. combats & health, climbing of buildings) with the purpose of creating historical reconstructions. These would be open source projects supervised by historians; every single detail could be discussed and improved, and changes merged via pull requests. Maybe UbiSoft's interest in the deal would be the free usage of the generated contents in the next instalments of its game.
AC really made my experience in Italy better —- I probably was more in awe of the buildings and paintings as I only interacted with them on the screen.
I did have the urge to climb up everything. Thankfully I didn’t try and then flip around and accidentally stab a passerby like I did hundreds of times in the game.
AC was sold in the Uffizi’s gift shop in Florence which was cool to see.
I know with Origins (the best of the games) they had an option to explore and not play the game.
Fire that destroyed part of the set happened a year after the show was cancelled. Fire was reported in August 2007, cancellation was announced in July 2006.
Sincere question: why do we assume people in the past were so filthy?
I'm sure there are notable examples of unhygienic cities or buildings (I've read about a few) but in general one suspects there may be a tendency to exaggerate the "uncivilized" nature of people from the past. Romans clearly put a lot of values in their baths, for example, which suggests a people who value cleanliness.
Uninformed on this, so interested to hear a perspective!
It’s often exaggerated (as you say, bathing was popular in the Roman world, and also in the medieval Islamic world and even in many parts of medieval Europe), but ultimately they did not have sanitation (as in sewers, etc) to the same extent we do, and they had beasts of burden.
That said, I’m not sure to what extent this applies to Ancient Rome (as in Republic to fall of western empire). They _did_ have sewers, with public toilets attached to them, and they probably didn’t have that many horses wandering the street, as the horse collar hadn’t been invented yet. Ancient Rome presumably wasn’t as bad as a large medieval city (which wouldn’t usually have had proper sewers), and things may even have gotten worse later on, because at a certain point bathing really did become a lot less common in much of Europe (due to weird medical beliefs and religious objection to public bathhouses).
Came to the comments to say this. The details are beautiful but it looks more pristine than even the cleanest modern cities. Rome as it really was should include some weathering stains at the very bare minimum
This is really cool. It's unclear if this is a community effort or not (getting page timeouts), but it would be great to see some experts in texture and lighting help bring this to the next level because the models already look great.
Any general use tools which can be used for such large scale modelling, not including minecraft which actually speaking seems terrible for the purpose.
Great video, thanks for sharing! I’ve visited Rome a few times and most of the areas in the video I know quite well, it was really fun to see a visualization of the old buildings. The Pompeii theatre blew my mind!
I wish they’d done the pantheon though. I know it wouldn’t be as impressive as the other renders – Forum Romanum was amazing – but I’d love to see the front of it intact with the gold ornaments and what not. Great video nonetheless!
This seems like a ripe topic for an academic/open source wiki approach to 3D modeling and representation. Imagine if some group, or academic consortium, got funding to build an MMO world and to make available to academics the tools to build it out--3D modelers like Sketchup for buildings, behavioural scripting for NPCs, economic modeling of the surrounding environment... all available for people to walk through.
Obviously no one history department has the budget to licence a serious game engine or maintain an open world; but one would think an endowment from a benefactor plus cooperation and funding from a group of seed universities would be enough to get it started.
As someone who used to make architectural visualizations (I was trained as visualiser) , it would be great to set up some sort of Patreon / Sponsorship with interested parties. I think this is something that could work with the right crew. Would definitely be in.
The content could even be favorably licensed so historically accurate games and teachings in ancient history could be made.
Is anybody working on an AR version of this? Where you walk through an archeological site and can see through your phone how it looked originally? I have been looking now and then but can't find anything like what I have in mind.
I made an iOS/Swift audio app. designed specifically for this purpose 2/3 years ago. I got discouraged as I didn’t have the time/resources to work on it further/make more content for it/other products came out like Microsoft Soundscape etc that I thought were basically similar in some ways... Essentially it was spatial audio coupled with common game engine audio functionality and location/orientation tracking... I’d be very happy if anyone out there could find a use for it/was interested. I thought about uploading it to GitHub/sim., but being an audio designer/musician primarily I was a bit hesitant about the quality of my efforts... did work though when tested at the time...
"Kingdom Come Deliverance was created with crowdfunding to satisfy a hunger for historically accurate games. Extremely well researched, it provides a realistic portrayal of Bohemia in the middle ages avoiding all clichés."
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadThey never mention _which_ time. Do we think they know that Rome still exists?
It would be even greater if they add people in the streets, possibly walking, not static. That would turn it into a real city and not only perfectly conserved ruins.
Rome was a location you could visit in at least one of the games (I want to say both Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood), and you could even climb the Colosseum itself. So when I saw the video, it instantly made me think of the game.
As for the haystack reference, a common trope in Assassin's Creed games is to reveal a region you have to find a tall structure and climb to the top. Usually they let you jump off from the very top and fall into something to break your fall, usually a haystack. It's super unrealistic but saves you the effort of climbing back down again.
You can see the Colosseum climbing in action in this video, although the time period in the game it's a ruin already, including the fall into a haystack: https://youtu.be/gkHTYydSPks
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+assassin%27s+creed+t...
I wonder how hard it would be to port the material used to create these videos (that might be accurate from a historical point of view but overall look way too schematic) to AC's engine- not to enjoy killing enemies in the context if the imperial Rome, but to provide a realistic environment to move through in real time. I think it would be loved by casual users and specialists alike.
For example, check this reconstruction of Athens in the 5th century BCE, it beats these ancient Rome videos in every possible way:
https://youtu.be/-a8cWF-29lI
But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.
It's also available as a stand-alone if you don't already own the game: https://store.ubi.com/upc/discovery-tour-by-assassin-s-creed...
I did have the urge to climb up everything. Thankfully I didn’t try and then flip around and accidentally stab a passerby like I did hundreds of times in the game.
AC was sold in the Uffizi’s gift shop in Florence which was cool to see.
I know with Origins (the best of the games) they had an option to explore and not play the game.
Sure it's not the most inspiring game, but they nailed the setting and the gameplay loop is superb
I'm sure there are notable examples of unhygienic cities or buildings (I've read about a few) but in general one suspects there may be a tendency to exaggerate the "uncivilized" nature of people from the past. Romans clearly put a lot of values in their baths, for example, which suggests a people who value cleanliness.
Uninformed on this, so interested to hear a perspective!
That said, I’m not sure to what extent this applies to Ancient Rome (as in Republic to fall of western empire). They _did_ have sewers, with public toilets attached to them, and they probably didn’t have that many horses wandering the street, as the horse collar hadn’t been invented yet. Ancient Rome presumably wasn’t as bad as a large medieval city (which wouldn’t usually have had proper sewers), and things may even have gotten worse later on, because at a certain point bathing really did become a lot less common in much of Europe (due to weird medical beliefs and religious objection to public bathhouses).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...
It seems highly unlikely to me that this would have been a problem in Ancient Rome.
https://enfilade18thc.com/2015/07/14/the-sound-of-paris-june...
Romanes eunt domus?
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c
The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveAOZfDA44
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_...
I wish they’d done the pantheon though. I know it wouldn’t be as impressive as the other renders – Forum Romanum was amazing – but I’d love to see the front of it intact with the gold ornaments and what not. Great video nonetheless!
I'd be curious to learn which one it is and why they choose it. :)
Here is one the monuments in color. Look for the video within the content.
https://relivehistoryin3d.com/2019/11/10/trajans-column-full...
More about the history of the monument: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/
Obviously no one history department has the budget to licence a serious game engine or maintain an open world; but one would think an endowment from a benefactor plus cooperation and funding from a group of seed universities would be enough to get it started.
The content could even be favorably licensed so historically accurate games and teachings in ancient history could be made.
"Kingdom Come Deliverance was created with crowdfunding to satisfy a hunger for historically accurate games. Extremely well researched, it provides a realistic portrayal of Bohemia in the middle ages avoiding all clichés."