The entire city of San Francisco as a video game(sf.thijs.gg) |
The entire city of San Francisco as a video game(sf.thijs.gg) |
Oh yeah and multiplayer. Then ship it!
And stuff to do. Ship it!
I’ve long thought about a multiplayer MMO style GTA-like of San Francisco, though not literally 1:1 like this. Adds a whole nother thing.
Main thing is you have to bridge that Apple Maps -> game engine better though I must say driving off in the car was impressive
I managed to get stuck in a courtyard.
It gets pretty close irl on Christmas Day - so quiet and flawless!
It’s the typical MMO dilemma. I want to know other players are possible, other than that leave me alone xD
Maybe you don't need real-ish physics for the glider here. Does the user really need to fall?
But what did available was a glider, so I guess my only form of faster transportation in the city is to glide to anywhere I want :)
I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.
When I noticed it getting choppy I realized I had filled most of my VRAM with an LLM, so I unloaded that and it got better.
Pretty cool project.
I want to make it more video game like, cause the jumps of google maps make me motion sick.
I used google streetview as image source (cause you need to read signs, cars, see geometry) and colmap to reconstruct 3d chunks.
But it never really worked that well, jumps in time (cause the google car does not always continuously scan) and the image density is just too low, but was a fun side project.
Without even increasing the resolution, some ai or tool that recognises common objects like cars and lays the splats out in a more cogent way to expose the bottom of car instead of it being a melted ghost costume would be great.
this is the ground floor, if this is compelling, imagine it cleaned up and higher res.
nice job.
I cannot turn the camera for the life of me. The camera is always facing north!
Edit: I feel dumb now, I needed to click the trackpad to rotate, somehow I expected a two finger drag to move the camera :facepalm:
This was a fantastic game. Having been entranced by flight simulators for years, I found the San Francisco terrain in "Vette!" to be fantastic and very engrossing. It was a very "open world" game that wasn't as atrocious as GTA. (Although you could apparently run over pedestrians and tangle with the cops!)
It was not multi-player but just a leisurely, offline, fast-rendering racing game. Very, very enjoyable for an 18-year-old kid!
https://gist.github.com/retroplasma/12e0e6e236aabd17c314cb53...
There's a rich fertile tradition of "First Person Poopers", some of them quite regular, long-running, corny, or impactful.
Natural Selection 2: Combat -- Rock Paper Shotgun's literal headline: "First-Person Pooper: Swallowed Alive In NS2 Combat". You get devoured by an Onos and can fight your way through "the finale of the digestion process. All from an appalling first-person view. What great guts!" You don't poop — you ARE the poop.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/natural-selection-2-combat-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WacIMCEhVYU
>"We want players to feel not only horrified at the idea of being eaten alive but that even after being devoured, there's still a chance to destroy the beast and stay alive!" director and sound designer Thomas Loupe told RPS.
Zoo Tycoon 2 -- Eurogamer on its first-person Zookeeper Mode, where you personally clean up after the animals: "The fact it turns the game into the world's first first-person pooper-scoop-'em-up is just an added bonus."
https://www.eurogamer.net/r-zootycoon2-pc
Sploot -- first-person seagull bombing simulator. Boing Boing: "Poop on everyone as a beautiful seagull." Pro tip from the review: "if you fly in low you can almost always make a very personal deposit."
https://boingboing.net/2015/08/24/sploot-seagull-poop-game.h...
A Dump in the Dark -- fecal survival-horror FPS with five ammo classes, including Cannon Shot, Liquid Diarrhea, Rapid Fire, and Sniper Shot.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/577080/A_Dump_in_the_Dark...
Pooper Scooper -- asymmetric first-person dog-vs-human PvP: "The Dog must collect meat in order to drop slippery poops throughout each map while the Human must collect all of the poops before the time runs out."
https://store.steampowered.com/app/682370/Pooper_Scooper/
Pooper Scooper (2009, iOS, a completely different game) -- you are Zookeeper Zeke, frantically shoveling animal "products" into a waiting tractor. "No time to dally - there is poop to scoop!" Delisted from the App Store, but archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250812150108/https://apps.appl...
(Zeke has been the canonical zookeeper name since Taito's 1982 arcade game Zoo Keeper.)
Party Pooper -- Ludum Dare 40 entry representing the abstinence branch of the genre: "Drink as much alcohol as possible! (without pooping on yourself)"
https://padierfind.itch.io/party-pooper
Poop On 2020 Simulator -- hurl soft-body physics turds at the year 2020 while gentle piano music plays. Steam tags it "Immersive Sim".
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1433480/Poop_On_2020_Simu...
https://www.pcgamer.com/this-dollar2-game-lets-you-throw-tur...
Bird Game -- steal people's food and poop on them for points until they deploy anti-bird drones.
https://dandonnan.itch.io/bird-game
And of course Reverse Pac-Man, the mathematically pure form: traverse the maze depositing the dots instead of eating them.
So the First Person Pooper design space spans pooping, being pooped on, becoming poop, scooping poop, weaponizing poop, and heroically holding it in. A deep fast moving genre.
Thankfully the "reset to NY" button removes the chicken/eggs and lets me just fly through without any distractions.
Seemingly lower-hanging fruit options I'd like to see:
- show street names, maybe some landmarks or businesses, togglable
- enter address to teleport to
- enter address to get directions to, GPS style, to travel there manually
- get coordinates / current location as a URL to share
- zoom in on minimap, or expand minimap, so that teleporting can be more precise
- changeable avatar
- more dynamic weather / lighting options
So exciting!
Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149966 - Aug 2026 (81 comments)
The building textures could be recreated from the low-res streetview imagery using a pipeline to scale / relight them using image-to-image models. Building shapes could be rebuilt using generative models for 3d mesh components. Road & sidewalk quality (how clean, how faded lines are, etc) could be inferred from imagery as well to be applied to the map.
Super cool project, hoping it continues to evolve!
Finally got round to vibe coding something in Godot this summer for my city. It used GeoTIFFs on AWS S3 at s3://copernicus-dem-30m/ for elevation. No authentication required, each tile covers 1°×1°. Combined this with OpenStreetMap. Was enough to get started and satisfy curiosity. As you state, lots more that could be done.
Then players can shape entity generation, gravity, to their vibe
Not quite Blender level turn teapot into a unintelligible smear of geometry range of tuning
The baseline being Earth world model then tweak entities individually, and such changes spread through the entity population over subsequent ticks of the world loop
Even include ability to speed up and slow the diffusion of the new parameters
Different approach than OP’s
I think it can do the whole world and just using webgpu
Dont recall name or more details, probably saw it on m3taverse account on ig
I did a voxel (ray casting) lunar lander that used actual NASA moon data (https://mooncraft2000.com).
I always respected that (for the time) extreme level of fidelity.
Callaway Sledgehammer Corvette!
Curious, did you use a vehicle/glider, or did you take the heel-toe express all the way there?
And genuinely this made me emotional. Was weird as hell walking around my back yard. Going to the spot in Dolo that I used to haunt in my 20s. My favorite tennis courts and hill bombs, walked the entire disc golf course, etc.
From the ToS linked from OP site:
> 1.3 Restrictions. You will not and will not permit or authorize a third party to: (...) (xiv) decompile, decrypt, reverse engineer, attempt to derive the source code of or disassemble the Service or any portion thereof (except as and only to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law or by licensing terms governing the use of any FOSS components that may be included with the Service)
I would love for people to prove me wrong that Apple will embrace this use of their geospatial data!
Similar concept, but more abstract in terms of art style. I'm pretty close to having the foundation I wanted before adding quests on top; telling a story is the ultimate goal.
Building on top of GIS data is super fun though. Especially since the barrier to entry is so low these days with LLMs. I encourage everyone to give it a shot if your local town/city publishes some data. No need to understand coordinate systems for example, which is nice.
For the game, there's a button to get in without an account so you can play around, but to get the fun mods you will need to play a bit and figure out the trash pick up/scrap at dump mechanic in the game.
(*might be a bit of lag; server needs more ram but on vacation rn!)
I’ve been playing with the same thing to make RC tracks in re-volt (or rather RVGL). This game though, running the game as a webpage is fantastic!
Actually, ripping the data might not be required with this approach; instead the splat could be trained with a screen recording of normal Apple Maps usage.
Though as for games that use SF (but not 1:1) Watch Dogs 2 is a pretty good proxy, though my favorite video game interpretation of San Francisco is from GTA San Andreas (San Fierro)
We recently used Watch Dogs Legion to prep for a trip to London to get more familiar with the city. Set the game on peaceful mode and just walked around and did virtual sight-seeing instead of playing missions. It's a surprisingly good recreation of the city, and we really appreciated getting some familiarity with the place before we visited.
It wasn't perfect, but it did help a little. The streets are way narrower, and the traffic is much worse, but muscle memory to stay on the left side of the road was nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_2
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbDzFt...
San Fierro was based on San Francisco of the 1990's. Lots of good memories playing GTA San Andreas and exploring 90's San Francisco.
I feel like we're not too far away from someone taking street view photographs and aerial photographs and feeding them into a multimodal LLM that is able to construct intuitive meshes with textures that are independent of lighting... surely there are people working on this problem right now?
Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.
Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.
Can’t help but wondering, how will this look like if we had AI try to “augment” these maps in real time (maybe using street view images?). I wonder if it would be playable in reasonable FPS, and how expensive it would be.
I'm sitting here watching the block bounce in a circle and I have no idea if the game is actually loading or not. Tried turning off PopUpOff. Tried turning off adblock.
as it turns out it just isn't loading (firefox on win 11, if that matters)
Why not?
Exact proportions are crazy. I had the reverse experience doing sim racing... do a track a bunch, finally visit it in person - and it looks the exact same as in your mind.
Maybe this is a common experience, but the first time I left SF for six months, I would have these sort of flashbulb memories of certain intersections and locations. Not even particular memories there. I think because I moved there right out of college and my late adolescence and all that it entails took place there, there are a hundred little corners where I’ve got a thousand more memories.
It being like a half-remembered scene particularly triggers the nostalgia. Also probably because I’m not there right now.
I do think 95 and 676 will be in the game more accurately eventually. But it will match the style of the rest of the game. It's a work in progress now but not good enough to ship yet. Love that you said bizarro, feels like i'm on the right track
But so fun to play, bookmarked and will be back
It does seem like an obvious next step towards realistic maps, could be difficult with weather conditions changing during capture. A brute force approach though could be 1000 drones to do capture simultaneously.
Though actually I’d suspect a lot of that is just rising costs (rent)?