Live data from Hacker News

The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

sf.thijs.gg

161–170 of 181 posts

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#161

silly question from someone who's never played fps: how do you get the camera to face the way the player is moving? For me the camera is always facing the same way, so if the player is walking toward the camera I can only see behind him?

On my phone I was able to just touch-and-hold on the screen to move the camera. I assume on a PC you can just use the mouse to control the camera.

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#163
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Normalize price discrimination Though actually I’d suspect a lot of that is just rising costs (rent)?

yeah SF is one of the capitals, if not THE capital of NIMBYism. SF needs to relax zoning codes and shift to land value tax (just like any city), but of course that will never happen

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#164
post #135

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…

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.

When you do, send it to me!

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#165
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

The local baker increases their prices because their lease drastically went up. The reason their leases went up is because inventory is low due to NIMBY regulations.

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#166
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…

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.

I doubt it would be frightening for Rockstar since Ubisoft has been mass producing repetitive open world games for over a decade.

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually- real world maps do not make for compelling play.. they tend to produce traffic jams.

Whoa, totally realistic xD

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#168

silly question from someone who's never played fps: how do you get the camera to face the way the player is moving? For me the camera is always facing the same way, so if the player is walking toward the camera I can only see behind him?

drag the background

Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

#170
How does this work? What data is it pulling? It seems like it's made of Gaussian splats, but the creator says it comes from Apple data. What Apple data? Is Apple making Gaussian splat data available?

I feel like we're not too far away from someone taking street view photographs and aerial photographs and feeding them into a multimodal LLM that is able to construct intuitive meshes with textures that are independent of lighting... surely there are people working on this problem right now?

Post reply on HN