Would it be a good idea to create a MMO racing game containing 600 cars from Gran Turismo 2?
Specially if the whole game is created with 1999 dated graphics.

If the game had plenty of features and it would be competitive online, would you play it?

I had this idea of transforming the LiDAR data of various locations from point cloud to mesh.
The mesh would had to be cleaned ofcourse and I could extract just the roads and the terrain out of it.
Perhaps the buildings could be redone. And ofcourse there can be some mesh cleaning.

Would anyone play such a free roam MMO racing game with such dated graphics but with plenty of gameplay features?
Is there anyone willing to help me with such a project in his spare time?

It could be open for everyone to contribute.
Even by random folks passing by.

An MMO racing game would definitely work. I believe The Crew did something really similar to what you want to do, so it definitely has some backing to it. The biggest thing would definitely have to be the features you add in there, since that'll be what keeps people playing. Just having race courses won't be enough, you'll want something more that would have people want to explore and discover more like, for example, spontaneous race events with small rewards that makes them go from point A to point B.

In short you want people to want to drive around and explore and challenge other people to races and stuff. If you can pull something like that off, there will be a following behind it. If you make it free to play as well with in game purchases it'll draw some people into it (if you're even planning on making money off of the project). Just some thoughts of mine.

If you want anyone to bounce design ideas off of, I'd be glad to help out.

Have you secured the rights to the cars from the game?

You could alterantivly either go steam punk, sci-fi or post apoc with the cars. it has some promise but you need to have a world to drive in. yeah you could go the race track thingy . But mmo are more then fighting or racing or flying. its about creating groups and communitys so that needs to be in place. then you need to make sure the economic system is in place. or that gonna bite you in the ass

Moving the design forum, which is probably a better place to have a discussion about the pros and cons of this idea than the hobby projects forum (which is intended to be for announcing or showcasing actual projects).

Racing can be fun, but if you're talking about an MMO there needs to be a LOT going on in terms of gameplay and quests and socialization. I think the Crew was about as far in the direction of multiplayer that a racing game can get without expanding beyond just doing races. When compared to a generic MMO, it may seem that you're making a game entirely out of fetch quests and races, which while novel, is more limited in scope. What is end game in this scenario? Are there levels here? What do levels do? If you answer those questions in very cool fun accessible ways, no one will care about the graphics quality or cars, just as they don't care about the quality of the graphics in Rocket League (though Rocket League smartly avoids 'accurate' models in favor of 'fun' ones because of the lower poly counts.)

I think having hundreds of cars could be nice, but if it's just a racing grind, I don't think pretty pixels alone would hold me very long. Of course, that might be the point, to have a quick and dirty free to play MMO. If we're talking 1999 graphics, you might be talking about a mobile/tablet ready MMO, which wouldn't require much more than what you have now.

If you wanted a full MMO that could support a notable subscription and all, I would consider looking for inspiration for customization and missions from fuller car-centric universes such as Fast and Furious, Transporter, or something more sci-fi (Speed Racer? Knight Rider?), to expand players' abilities.

I think extracting real world data into a racing game is novel, but I think you'll find that a very small fraction of the that data is useful for interesting races. It sounds like a lot of work to not just clean meshes, but to find the fun and bring it to players. If your goal is to do this with a small/no team, I think it might be worth your investment to create a procedural track-making system that evokes the real world. I honestly don't think that would take longer/be more expensive than pulling in and cleaning up an MMO's worth of real-world data.

I think the overall idea sounds super-intriguing though.

Oh look at all this replies.. :)
I wouldn't want any money from it so it would be absolutely free.
It should be open source at some point. Perhaps it would be good to release tools to host private servers or code LAN in it.

I would really want to work on 200 square kilometers of the place I live in. Once that is done I could do more real world locations or atleast write a tutorial and show the procedures.

The cars would be at this level of quality.. mostly ripped from GT2. Other cars could be easily created with the help of some generic blueprints and images found on google.



The features I would want to build in would be gear, suspension, ECU, Turbo tuning.. Perhaps even a ingame car skin drawing tool. So if you want to colour your windows or mirrors or change just about everything...well perhaps that could be done somehow.

I would pretty much copy The Crew and Need for Speed World... and features from Need for Speed Underground 2.. where you can select to purchase a tower strut or small-large sway bars..stuff like that.

But first.. I'd like to try and create just 1 square kilometer in a 1999 era graphics and than write a procedure for how to do it and follow that same way of doing it for the rest of 200km 2. For all I care it can look like this xD

So yea.. I would use the cars, sounds from Gran Turismo 2.. Most probably rip textures from other racing games and use it on the transformed lidar location to subsampled mesh. I think it was never done before.. Exactly copying a location but limiting yourself to 1996-1999 graphics. And even if all this is illegal.. me no care. I would do it for the love of semi arcade racing games and online competition.

MMO means hundreds of thousands of users -- how are they all going to fit on the road?

Networks mean lag. Lag means some people are behind others in the information they have; and in racing that's going to be a problem -- however fast you make your code, anyone on the wrong side of an ocean is looking at the world a tenth of second or more behind other people. And in racing 1/10th second is a long time... you'll need a solution for this if you're going to make it work.

"Most probably rip"

And you're instantly in trouble...

"me no care."

So the problem is that the law doesn't quite work that way... it can MAKE you care.

The game won't have 100.000 users.. more likely a 1000 tops. Out of those 1000 only a 100 will be online at a time.. and each and everyone could host their own race. Perhaps when ingame you click to search for races it founds races hosted by players. All you do is join the lobby and wait 40 seconds and race. We can limit the races to up to 8 players and that every network can handle i think.

Do you honestly think they would sue me? For a freeware undergroundish MMO racing game that would so happen to be loved by perhaps a 1000 people tops. Which I won't get any money from it btw.. I think its absurd. And the game would never rise in popularity beyond a point because of its graphics.

For the legal aspect, you can choose to take the risk, and "hope" that not too many people will play the game. But if people start to talk about it on youtube and share the info, then chances are you will indeed get in trouble.

From my understanding of network and online games, the issue with the players hosting the races is that the lag between players will then depend on each host's connection. Additionally, the 40sec wait time is only valid if thousands of people are trying to find a match. If there are only 100 online at a time, and that 93 are in a race, then the other 7 that will want to race will have to wait for someone to finish, and hope they get a spot. This is why MMOs tend to die quickly when not enough people are playing them, especially when they don't have a strong single player component.

Seeing that The Crew made something really similar, with graphics, what would your MMO have that would make it unique? (not saying there's nothing interesting in your idea, I'm actually genuinely curious about what is the unique aspect you want to bring.)