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cutoff 17 hours ago [-]
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
nuwandavek 11 hours ago [-]
There is so much scope with maps! All we need is a realtime-ish image model to tidy up the scene. (was looking into it during a recent side project - https://sf.isopolis.city/).
So exciting!
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Wait, that was you? So good!
21asdffdsa12 6 hours ago [-]
How would you do a live high-res polygonalization of the maps data with street view?
frankhorrigan 18 hours ago [-]
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.
madrox 16 hours ago [-]
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
dyzone 5 hours ago [-]
> I could never live in SF again
Why not?
tetris11 22 minutes ago [-]
when the local baker jacks up his prices to leach off the richest man in town, everyone else suffers
parisisles 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jamiek88 14 hours ago [-]
I’m a ‘serious’ sim racer and I’m gonna get the chance to drive a touring car at BTCC brands hatch in October. I’ve sim raced that layout a million times I’m very excited to experience this. Already had a weird enough feeling at Laguna Seca without driving it!
throwforfeds 16 hours ago [-]
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 16 hours ago [-]
good to know your feelings, but how different it is from using google maps?
aguynamedben 15 hours ago [-]
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.
frankhorrigan 11 hours ago [-]
Honestly it’s a good question. obviously a big part is walking through it. But I also think it’s because it’s this weird, dreamlike version. Because it’s low res and a little broken, it’s like walking through a place you know really well in a dream. Little truths pop up, like a certain taqueria right where you expect it. But it’s almost a Silent Hill version of the town, so your mind fills in the blanks for you.
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.
bsimpson 10 hours ago [-]
I found my own Vespa!
jvogt 16 hours ago [-]
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!
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.
tobestobestobes 44 minutes ago [-]
Check out 3dep instead of Copernicus. 1 meter resolution elevation data vs 30 m. May need LOD and culling to support it though.
DiscourseFan 13 hours ago [-]
GTA games require a lot of effort outside of this, but the concept of mass-producing a GTA style open world game for any given environment is very compelling. Probably frightening to Rockstar themselves but such is the course of technological development.
21asdffdsa12 6 hours ago [-]
Actually- real world maps do not make for compelling play.. they tend to produce traffic jams.
michaelbuckbee 16 hours ago [-]
I feel like the closest we've gotten to that so far has been the flight sims.
herpdyderp 15 hours ago [-]
I'd prefer something like The Crew but whatever game it ends up in, it would still be awesome!
soulofmischief 9 hours ago [-]
I've long wanted to make a fun milsim game using 3D map and environmental data, pretty much since the moment I tried out Google Earth VR in 2019. I'm not passionate enough about it to do it on my own, but if anyone else ever gets taken by the idea and wants to make it happen, I'm game.
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
This exists, saw a high res demo just a few days ago
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
JKCalhoun 16 hours ago [-]
'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).
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.
swiftcoder 3 hours ago [-]
Driver: San Francisco, while not to scale, felt like it captured the feeling of driving around the city
mlrtime 2 hours ago [-]
I played Vette for hours and hours! I think I spent more time exploring than racing. It was an amazing sim at home at the time.
Callaway Sledgehammer Corvette!
jparishy 13 hours ago [-]
this lunar lander is so cool! very nice work
josephjrobison 19 hours ago [-]
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 19 hours ago [-]
> 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 18 hours ago [-]
You can activate flying mode by double-jumping and crank the speed up with +.
josephjrobison 12 hours ago [-]
Haha just walked - is a glider possible?
tuchsen 19 hours ago [-]
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!
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 well
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!)
wizee 8 hours ago [-]
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.
leviathant 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jparishy 14 hours ago [-]
Awesome! If you click the top left 'Mode' switch and go to Property, you can buy it :) you just have to pick up and scrap enough trash to get the $5k for it.
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
benry1 14 hours ago [-]
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
jparishy 14 hours ago [-]
Hey, thanks. You're pretty much right about highways. I do have a separate working branch that has actual raised highways, but I'm still figuring out the kinks in making it look nice and joining the terrain correctly. Generating accurate entrance/exit ramps has proven to be my kryptonite but I'll get it eventually. I will give the minimap some love when I get back too-- thanks for checking it out
fjlunky 12 hours ago [-]
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!
1e1a 11 hours ago [-]
it looks like this is using some sort of triangle splatting
fjlunky 11 hours ago [-]
Looks to me like a weird combination; maybe the spat is trained off ripped Apple Maps data? The surface textures all look static like traditional photogrammetry (e.g. no specularity), but there are definite splat artifacts rendered.
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.
1e1a 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting, it does definitely look like the ground is just a mesh. Also, it looks like apple maps has actually recently started using some sort of splatting - I wonder if their implementation is entirely splatted, or if it is this exact weird combination.
fjlunky 6 hours ago [-]
Do you have coordinates for where splatting is used in Apple Maps?
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.
CobrastanJorji 16 hours ago [-]
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 16 hours ago [-]
The photogrammetry appears to be from Apple Maps.
kfarr 17 hours ago [-]
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!
forthwall 19 hours ago [-]
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 18 hours ago [-]
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 17 hours ago [-]
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 18 hours ago [-]
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 18 hours ago [-]
Depends how you define fidelity. The mesh resolution in MSFS isn't any higher resolution. Looks about the same.
why_at 17 hours ago [-]
I'm still holding out hope for a modern Fallout in the bay area.
jrm4 17 hours ago [-]
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 18 hours ago [-]
Not bad, though based on the screenshot Lake Merritt in Oakland looks not to scale.
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.
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.
metadat 14 hours ago [-]
I checked some obscure buildings and I found every one of them in-game, but you're correct that it's not 1:1 topographically.
16 hours ago [-]
ViktorRay 15 hours ago [-]
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 buggy as hell and the quality of the textures is terrible. I immediately got stuck in terrain and couldn't move.
stymaar 15 hours ago [-]
Why the Apple copyright and ToS at the bottom of the page? Is that an Apple product?
sajithdilshan 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe because it’s made from the data from Apple Maps
fragmede 14 hours ago [-]
that's where the data is from so someone's about to get sued
mycall 13 hours ago [-]
Have you thought of going to the SF DBI to get the indoor blueprints and digitizing them for even more experience? I wonder how good GPT Sol would do at scraping photos to apply to the blueprints one of some streaming geojson+bitmap or something.
brap 15 hours ago [-]
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.
aisharahman 13 hours ago [-]
I pricked my finger on a needle as I started navigating around with WASD.
recursive 19 hours ago [-]
Loading information just goes forever.
Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.
Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.
recursive 16 hours ago [-]
Update: Restarted firefox and it's working. Computers...
nirui 9 hours ago [-]
Now sure how to "steal" cars, but when I press V to call a vehicle it eventually says "Vehicle unavailable - stay on foot".
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 :)
fusslo 19 hours ago [-]
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 16 hours ago [-]
The LLM they used to create this does not care for loading bars XD
gourabmi 12 hours ago [-]
Awesome. Please keep developing this. Weird nit : I couldn't pass underneath the walkways on Webster and Geary in Japantown
Advaith_12 6 hours ago [-]
Just got back to campus after eight months interning in SF. Walking my old route from the house to the office today hit me hard.
camoby 14 hours ago [-]
Very nice. Is this using Gaussian Splats? I’m currently building a drone simulator which can fly around huge scenes captured by real drones.
prodigycorp 13 hours ago [-]
Beware, safari users. This locks up safari on my recent macbook pro and you cant close the window to clear it. Restarting safari doesnt help, the tab immediately freezes the app upon start. Holding shift while restarting safari doesnt help. Currently trying to figure out a way.
asdfman123 18 hours ago [-]
I believe we're getting the hackernews hug of death.
nfw2 15 hours ago [-]
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?
Funny, the game won't let you walk through some people's yards, but it'll let you walk on the water under the bridge.
englishspot 19 hours ago [-]
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.
cosmojg 19 hours ago [-]
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 18 hours ago [-]
Also love that level, but mostly because the song is such a banger
littlexsparkee 15 hours ago [-]
my first exposure was Driver and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, later skateboard videos
eli_gottlieb 16 hours ago [-]
I was just thinking, this game needs a snowboard I can use to jump, do tricks, and smack around people's cars.
Aboutplants 16 hours ago [-]
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
19 hours ago [-]
ThatGuysGood 12 hours ago [-]
Add a DLSS gloss (is that how it works?) and ship it!
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
trevithick 11 hours ago [-]
It has multiplayer, but I don't know how to find the other players.
I managed to get stuck in a courtyard.
ThatGuysGood 8 hours ago [-]
A San Francisco with no other players is so nice.
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
atum47 17 hours ago [-]
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
K0IN 17 hours ago [-]
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.
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
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 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Jeremy1026 18 hours ago [-]
We got GTA SF before GTA VI.
planb 18 hours ago [-]
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 17 hours ago [-]
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.
16 hours ago [-]
ironqcold 16 hours ago [-]
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
alexgyurov 16 hours ago [-]
Could Nvidia's DLSS 5 convert this to hi-fi?
aselimov3 18 hours ago [-]
How do I turn the camera? Stuck with a single perspective.
aselimov3 18 hours ago [-]
Mouse capture works in chrome but not safari for me
zkmon 18 hours ago [-]
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.
callmemclovin 6 hours ago [-]
Came here to say this - I have fond memories of playing Midtown Madness 2 as a kid (IIRC it came bundled with our new Windows ME family PC). I remember when I had the chance to visit SF in 2005 and I would recognize so many of the streets from playing the game. Good times.
nickandbro 19 hours ago [-]
Crazy how they have GTA San Francisco before GTA 6
SeenNotHeard 19 hours ago [-]
GTA Baghdad by the Bay
time0ut 17 hours ago [-]
This is awesome! I tried to make it to the Golden Gate, but my MBP got too hot to hold before I got there.
juancn 18 hours ago [-]
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 18 hours ago [-]
Mouse-click (left) and turn the mouse.
er4hn 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bengotow 18 hours ago [-]
Ahh wow this is awesome! Is there a way to deep link to a lat/long?
tims33 18 hours ago [-]
I was thinking of the game Outrun in the Red Ferrari driving around SF.
hoppp 14 hours ago [-]
It was loading then it failed
arionhardison 18 hours ago [-]
This is insanely awesome man; I turned the entire SF gov into an AI Gov. but this has really humbled me; great work dude.
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!
DonHopkins 18 hours ago [-]
What's the actual game? Try not to step in doo-doo?
wyclif 6 hours ago [-]
Where's the human poop on the sidewalks? It won't be realistic until it has that.
DonHopkins 2 hours ago [-]
It won't be a solid hit until you can do your civic doody on the sidewalks yourself.
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.
>"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."
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."
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."
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:
(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)"
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.
zthrowaway 30 minutes ago [-]
This is an epic shitpost. Bravo.
zuzululu 18 hours ago [-]
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 16 hours ago [-]
It says 'Apple Inc' in the bottom left, and there's a link to the Apple Maps T&Cs.
nicechianti 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
avelis 19 hours ago [-]
The least amount of traffic I have seen in the city. /s
DonHopkins 36 minutes ago [-]
The hardest to believe most unrealistic scene in The Room was when he conveniently found a parking spot right in front of the flower shop, and he doesn't even get parking ticket, right before the "Oh, hi doggie!" scene.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.mobygames.com/game/799/vette/screenshots/dos/
Callaway Sledgehammer Corvette!
Curious, did you use a vehicle/glider, or did you take the heel-toe express all the way there?
https://seattle64.benjasmin.chatgpt.site/
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 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
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.
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.
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!
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://watchdogs.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Bay_Area
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.
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.
Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.
Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.
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'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)
Maybe you don't need real-ish physics for the glider here. Does the user really need to fall?
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
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.
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 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:
https://gist.github.com/retroplasma/12e0e6e236aabd17c314cb53...
Thankfully the "reset to NY" button removes the chicken/eggs and lets me just fly through without any distractions.
I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.
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!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkoXhgtI58