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!)

• benry1

  today at 10:24 PM

  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

• leviathant

  today at 10:09 PM

  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.

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.

• parisisles

  today at 10:09 PM

  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.

• aguynamedben

  today at 9:20 PM

  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.

• madrox

  today at 8:46 PM

  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't

• throwforfeds

  today at 8:54 PM

  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.

• marciob

  today at 9:01 PM

  good to know your feelings, but how different it is from using google maps?

  • aguynamedben

    today at 9:22 PM

    The free will of walking. I walked around the city using certain routes, and I can freely replicate those walks in this. I did walks I did when my kids were 3 years old. Google Maps isn't fluid enough to do this.

I have dreamed about a pipeline that can take elevation data, building data, maps, and streetview imagery to process a city into all the components you would need to build a proper map for one of the GTA engines, including all the other objects like trees, fire hydrants, signs, light posts, traffic lights, etc.

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!

• herpdyderp

  today at 10:08 PM

  I'd prefer something like The Crew but whatever game it ends up in, it would still be awesome!

• michaelbuckbee

  today at 8:36 PM

  I feel like the closest we've gotten to that so far has been the flight sims.

Why the Apple copyright and ToS at the bottom of the page? Is that an Apple product?

• sajithdilshan

  today at 10:15 PM

  Maybe because it’s made from the data from Apple Maps

• fragmede

  today at 10:17 PM

  that's where the data is from so someone's about to get sued

Vette by Spectrum Holobyte, 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtDgTz2peXw

This is awesome. Would definitely download a local higher-res version if that were an option, maybe using Google Street View data? Also, if this was a live MMO, that would be fun. Not that there's really a game aspect here other than the coins when driving a vehicle, but anything to give some life to the sim SF city would be nice.

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

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!

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.

• stronglikedan

  today at 6:13 PM

  > 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?

  • whycombinetor

    today at 6:20 PM

    You can activate flying mode by double-jumping and crank the speed up with +.

It always seemed a missed opportunity that Microsoft Flight Simulator doesn't have a UFO mode or something where you don't need to worry about the physics of keeping the plane in the air and could just stop and look at things.

Maybe you don't need real-ish physics for the glider here. Does the user really need to fall?

• numpad0

  today at 10:12 PM

  MSFS? Y key doesn't work?

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!

'Vette was a racing game from the 90's (I think?) that covered San Francisco. "Released on 3 floppy disks", ha ha. Obviously without the rich dataset we have now. (Clicking on the following link ignores the trailing exclamation point in MacOS Safari for me.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vette!

I did a voxel (ray casting) lunar lander that used actual NASA moon data (https://mooncraft2000.com).

• pimlottc

  today at 8:57 PM

  Screenshots of Vette! at MobyGames:

  https://www.mobygames.com/game/799/vette/screenshots/dos/

• beej71

  today at 8:38 PM

  Man, I just posted this same comment. 'Vette was the first thing I thought of. Ever since playing it way back then, I wanted a better SF open world game.

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.

• dcrazy

  today at 8:45 PM

  The photogrammetry appears to be from Apple Maps.

We got GTA SF before GTA 6.

• metadat

  today at 8:05 PM

  That was actually Watchdogs 2. Great game, basically GTA but you are a hacker in the Bay Area. The SF portion of the map was accurate down to every building.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_2

  https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbDzFt...

  • dcrazy

    today at 8:47 PM

    If that second link is an in-game map, it is far from accurate to the real world. Unless it’s from a timeline in which Golden Gate Park is connected to the Presidio, and half of SF has fallen into the ocean.

  • today at 8:25 PM

• ViktorRay

  today at 9:47 PM

  Gotta shout out to the city of San Fierro in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

  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.

This is incredible, I wish I could have this in my city.

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.

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)

• HanClinto

  today at 6:25 PM

  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.

  • jermaustin1

    today at 7:22 PM

    I did a similar thing for the UK when prepping to drive around. I hooked my steering wheel up to Forza Horizon 4, and just drove slow cars on the wrong side of the road through Edinburgh, following as many of the road laws as I knew.

    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.

• striking

  today at 6:55 PM

  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.

• Stevvo

  today at 7:02 PM

  Depends how you define fidelity. The mesh resolution in MSFS isn't any higher resolution. Looks about the same.

• why_at

  today at 7:26 PM

  I'm still holding out hope for a modern Fallout in the bay area.

• jrm4

  today at 8:10 PM

  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.

• Apocryphon

  today at 6:28 PM

  Not bad, though based on the screenshot Lake Merritt in Oakland looks not to scale.

  https://watchdogs.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Bay_Area

American Truck simulator also has SF in it!

At some point someone will integrate actual interactive models of buildings and houses, based on Zillow pictures and whatnot, and then the entire thing will be interactive in a disturbing way

Loading information just goes forever.

Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.

Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.

• recursive

  today at 8:44 PM

  Update: Restarted firefox and it's working. Computers...

I believe we're getting the hackernews hug of death.

Looks like an atmospheric explorer kinda thing. Low-poly SF where you can just wander around and take in the city, pretty chill. I dunno, I really enjoyed it

funny timing, i was exploring the same, some friends and me play alot of geogussr (a game where you put into streetview somewhere on the world, and have to find out where) lately.

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.

This was loads of fun haha. I would have liked to have optionally clicked a button and started at my current physical location because the tile load time dominated how long it took to get there.

• asveikau

  today at 7:44 PM

  I was able to get it to stand directly on the roof of the structure I'm sitting at. (Which is kind of a glitch, it walked right over the structure as if it's a hill.)

  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 feel like I did that walk, in person (the tourist areas for sure). I've been to SF three times now, most of the time I'm walking everywhere. Even found a place that sells Brazilian coxinha

very fun game. I don't live there any longer but I "ran" the commute from my apartment to work. It felt very nostalgic to go through this.

We got GTA SF before GTA VI.

• planb

  today at 7:08 PM

  When I was in SF the first time some spots seemed weirdly familiar to me. Only later that day I remembered that I probably know them from GTA San Andreas (but maybe also the Full House intro)

  • Jeremy1026

    today at 7:26 PM

    It is fun when you play a game based on a place, then visit the place. There have been a few places that I've been to that were levels of the Tony Hawk series. I enjoyed how the game designers were able to take what was otherwise pretty mundane, and tweak it into a fun map, while not just making it all up and losing the source location.

my first experience with San Francisco in a video game was through the City Escape stage in Sonic Adventure 2. and I didn't even know then that it was San Francisco (I had never been there when I played the game). only realized this when I visited the city many years later.

• littlexsparkee

  today at 9:56 PM

  my first exposure was Driver and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, later skateboard videos

• cosmojg

  today at 5:41 PM

  Haha, I know that stage by heart, and I've never been to San Francisco. I had no idea that's what it was modeled after!

  • pete5x5

    today at 7:04 PM

    Also love that level, but mostly because the song is such a banger

• eli_gottlieb

  today at 8:34 PM

  I was just thinking, this game needs a snowboard I can use to jump, do tricks, and smack around people's cars.

This is awesome! I tried to make it to the Golden Gate, but my MBP got too hot to hold before I got there.

Could Nvidia's DLSS 5 convert this to hi-fi?

man what happened to loading bars?

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)

• dimitarbogdanov

  today at 9:03 PM

  The LLM they used to create this does not care for loading bars XD

Ahh wow this is awesome! Is there a way to deep link to a lat/long?

I was thinking of the game Outrun in the Red Ferrari driving around SF.

How do I turn the camera? Stuck with a single perspective.

• aselimov3

  today at 6:29 PM

  Mouse capture works in chrome but not safari for me

Needs a soundtrack. How about:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v91cvVqBwWg

This is amazing

Nice, but the camera system is hard to grasp.

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:

• tommek4077

  today at 6:50 PM

  Mouse-click (left) and turn the mouse.

Crazy how they have GTA San Francisco before GTA 6

• SeenNotHeard

  today at 5:50 PM

  GTA Baghdad by the Bay

Better than Horizon Forbidden West. jk.

This is pirated content

This is insanely awesome man; I turned the entire SF gov into an AI Gov. but this has really humbled me; great work dude.

We need an LA version of this.

• tolidano

  today at 7:54 PM

  And NY.

  • retroplasma

    today at 8:04 PM

    I can offer you the whole planet, and you are a chicken:

    https://gist.github.com/retroplasma/12e0e6e236aabd17c314cb53...

Back in the 90's, there was a game called "Midtown Madness" by Microsft. They simulated SF and London very well. This game now takes it to another level.

I wish I had enough brain compute cycles to keep up with 20 year olds earning millions at OpenAI.

Will try on my Mac. On my iPhone, I got the spinner wheel for a while and my phone started getting hot, so I killed it.

Chrome on MacOS: largely unusable (over fiber); POV stuck and will not move except in a tiny area.

I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.

<Cisco Heat cries in the corner>

really cool!

what a beautiful city could be...

What's the actual game? Try not to step in doo-doo?

where did you get the 3d map assets? also if one was serious about turning this into a game how would you go about it

• dimitarbogdanov

  today at 9:02 PM

  It says 'Apple Inc' in the bottom left, and there's a link to the Apple Maps T&Cs.

[dead]

The least amount of traffic I have seen in the city. /s

[flagged]

• jb12

  today at 5:45 PM

  Woah dude careful, I think you're stuck in 2022!

  • teaearlgraycold

    today at 5:47 PM

    The poop situation is still not great.

    • ink

      today at 6:57 PM

      I wish this wasn’t true, but I live in the Mission and yeah, still not great

• nonethewiser

  today at 5:59 PM

  Oh cmon man. Every city has its “lets just accept human feces on the sidewalk “ phase.

Nobody defecating in public or play parties that are worse than going to the dentist 3/10