The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

Post by mlrtime » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 10:45 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #70

'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 ).

Post by tobestobestobes » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #149

jvogt wrote: post #64

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 / re…

I have shared this dream for 15 years https://lifebeyondfife.com/follies/real-games/ 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.

Post by zthrowaway » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #150

wyclif wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the human poop on the sidewalks? It won't be realistic until it has that.

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…

Post by bl0b » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

kfarr wrote: post #55

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 authori…

Post by alecbz » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

tetris11 wrote: post #156

dyzone wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could never live in SF again Why not?

when the local baker jacks up his prices to leach off the richest man in town, everyone else suffers