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- Hacker News
- Kinda funny game, though if you want a bit more fidelity, but less control, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a pretty good version of SF.
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)
by forthwall - I'm still holding out hope for a modern Fallout in the bay area.by why_at
- Depends how you define fidelity. The mesh resolution in MSFS isn't any higher resolution. Looks about the same.by Stevvo
- Not bad, though based on the screenshot Lake Merritt in Oakland looks not to scale.by Apocryphon
- Ha, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most uncanniest valley thing I think I've ever played with; I'm from Tallahassee and it's weird to fly around a very high-fidelity, realistic, inaccurate version of a city I've lived in my entire life.by jrm4
- I do adore San Andreas but I think San Fierro is one of the weakest areas. My metric for how accurate they are is a sense of "oh I've been here before" and I really only get that in a couple of spots, as compared to Las Venturas (Las Vegas) and Los Santos (Los Angeles) where I could actually go to the cities in real life and feel like I knew where I was going because I'd played San Andreas enough. Compared to those two, San Fierro feels like a Backrooms-style dreamlike compression of the real thing, where a lot of stuff has been moved around. But parts of Haight-Ashbury, Pac Heights, Nob/Russian Hill, Polk Gulch, Ocean Beach and so on are still fairly distinguishable and correctly arranged.by striking
- Very impressed with the Watch Dogs series of games for this purpose.
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.
by HanClinto - Is this ripped using the retroplasma flyover-reverse-engineering code? The retroplasma repo is a bit behind now and doesn’t work with the updated way Apple serves map data and the heif texture format.
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!
by fjlunky - it looks like this is using some sort of triangle splattingby 1e1a
- This would maybe be a pretty good opportunity to use some of that "upscaling" AI tech: given this weird results of spatial scanning, produce something plausible and much higher definition. There are some dangers of doing so, of course. People will believe details that show up in it because it's taken from real life, and AI loves adding fake details, but for a little game it seems like detail beats ground truth.
- The photogrammetry appears to be from Apple Maps.by dcrazy
- Here’s Seattle, but in n64 styleby fassssst
- This is excellent! Wish it had more of the surrounding area, and the announcements are all queued/delayed, but still lots of fun. Love the style as wellby kgen
- For any Philly ppl here, I've been making this game for a few months: https://cityrider.jpsmaps.com/
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!)
by jparishy - I tried this in Firefox and Chrome, and the bike and unicycle both only go backwards. I can steer, but I can't seem to brake or go forward.by greyhat
- This was so much fun! Some feedback - I wish the highways were more accurate, seems like a limitation of how elevation is handled on these maps. The navigation line was really hard to see since it was at camera level. It was hard to tell what direction i was going, the minimap and the large map seemed to disagree.
But so fun to play, bookmarked and will be back
by benry1 - Wow, super cool! It works quite well, looks nice, and really covers the whole city. I'd love to build something similar for my own home city.by wizee
- It took a little while because I was struggling with the scale a little bit at first, but I found my house. I appreciate that you tore 95 and 676 out! Keep it up - consistent art direction usually beats hyper-realism, for me, and I appreciate the bizarro world you've concocted.by leviathant
- This is awesome and if it's legal I'd love to do similar things on geospatial projects I work on. However I don't think Apple will be OK with this use of their data. I know that Google closely limits its 3D tiles data through a specific API and Apple does not make a 3d API available, therefore this has to be against ToS.
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!
by kfarr - Yeah, you're right, but also, fuck the ToS of any big company these days.by bl0b
- Ah nice demo! I flew around SF for way too long just enjoying the sights. On my M3 Air using Chrome it eventually just turns into blobs and my character get stuck, takes about twenty minutes. I popped open the DevTools and the game loads in at like 400mb but after five or so minutes I'm at 2GB of memory consumption. I'd guess that you need to have your agent do a couple of passes for memory leaks. Very fun otherwise!by tuchsen
- I lived in SF for nearly 20 years, though I mostly spend my time in New York now.
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.
- I found my own Vespa!by bsimpson
- good to know your feelings, but how different it is from using google maps?by marciob
- This made me super nostalgic as well. I've lived in NYC for 20 years, but spent a ton of time in SF early in my career (starting in 2008). I love NYC, but I've been sort of feeling like a change lately and this made me feel like subletting a place for a few months and getting back to the slower pace of SF.by throwforfeds
- Same. I lived in SF for 15 years, my kids were toddlers in the Marina... this is so freaking awesome and really brings out the nostalgia! It matches my memories exactly.
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.
by aguynamedben - Probably a testament to how good my life is otherwise – but I feel so much grief from not living in SF / the bay area anymore.by parisisles
- Happy to hear someone else say this. Similar story. I could never live in SF again but roaming around it was nostalgic in a way going back now just isn'tby madrox
- Very amazing. And this is the worst it will ever be. We'll soon be exploring 4k versions of this and we can open every trash can in Tunis. Fascinating. Had a lot of fun (tedious tho) going out to Alcatraz and figuring out how to get in.
- > Had a lot of fun (tedious tho) going out to Alcatraz
Curious, did you use a vehicle/glider, or did you take the heel-toe express all the way there?