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
Those greedy bakers that only got into baking for the bread (money).
The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
171–180 of 181 posts
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#172This 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…
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!
Recent and related:
Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149966 - Aug 2026 (81 comments)
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#173I 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'd prefer something like The Crew but whatever game it ends up in, it would still be awesome!
Eh, something with enough sliders to tweak the sim into other types of sandboxes seems most obvious
Then players can shape entity generation, gravity, to their vibe
Not quite Blender level turn teapot into a unintelligible smear of geometry range of tuning
The baseline being Earth world model then tweak entities individually, and such changes spread through the entity population over subsequent ticks of the world loop
Even include ability to speed up and slow the diffusion of the new parameters
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#174For 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…
I tried this in Firefox and Chrome, and the bike and unicycle both only go backwards. I can steer, but I can't seem to brake or go forward.
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#175Earlier 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.
Traffic jams can be a feature, if it's the game Prototype where you could barrel through cars like a freight train.
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#176For 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…
I tried this in Firefox and Chrome, and the bike and unicycle both only go backwards. I can steer, but I can't seem to brake or go forward.
Which OS? I'll try to reproduce and get a fix into the next update
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#177'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 ).
I sorta recall a game (midtown madness?) that included a Rand McNally fold up street map in the box. The world was so accurate you could give your buddy driving directions by using the actual map to navigate.
I always respected that (for the time) extreme level of fidelity.
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#178this is compelling. interesting to click the park area or other sections of map and explore. only going to get better.
Without even increasing the resolution, some ai or tool that recognises common objects like cars and lays the splats out in a more cogent way to expose the bottom of car instead of it being a melted ghost costume would be great.
this is the ground floor, if this is compelling, imagine it cleaned up and higher res.
nice job.
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#179I would pay for an app that allows me to explore any city in the world in a similar matter.
Re: The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
#180Will 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.
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