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Earlier quoted context omitted.
That second link shows controls but does not have any water effects?
As far as I can see, OP tried to implement water shaders but then abandoned this idea.
This is so cool! Please give me a way to share lat/long links with folks so I can show them places that are special to me :)
It's as if NYC was built in Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
I'll be honest, I've been pretty skeptical about AI and agentic coding for real-life problems and projects. But this one seems like the final straw that'll change my mind.
Thanks for making it, I really enjoy the result (and the educational value of the making-of post)!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can see, OP tried to implement water shaders but then abandoned this idea.
that's right - it worked very nice, but the models to generate the "shore distance mask" for the water shader weren't reliable enough to automate, and I just couldn't justify sinking any more time into the project
Just curious, about how long did this project take you? I don't see that mentioned in the article.
We had our third kid in late November, and I worked sporadically on it over the following two months of paternity leave and holiday... If I had to bet, I'd say I put in well over 200 hours of work on it, the majority of that being manual auditing/driving of the generation process. If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so…
Since the output is so cool and generally interesting, there might be an opportunity for those forking this to do other cities to deploy a web app to crowd source identifying broken tiles and maybe classifying the error or even providing manual hinting for the next run. It takes a village to make a (sim) city! :-)
So, wait: this is just based on taking the 40 best/most consistent Nano Banana outputs for a prompt to do pixel-art versions of isometric map tiles? That's all it takes to finetune Qwen to reliably generate tiles in exactly the same style? Also, does someone have an intuition for how the "masking" process worked here to generate seamless tiles? I sort of grok it but not totally.
I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out. Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article) Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.
It's very cool and I don't mind the use of AI at all but I think calling it pixel art is just very misleading. It's closer to a filter but not quite that either.