Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

thih9•about 1 hour ago

The product hunt ad is breaking the immersion for me. I know that most cities have ads but still, I prefer ad free pixel art.

It’s also not realistic, in one landscape the billboard is taller than a 9 story building.

trevoragilbert•28 minutes ago

It feels bolted on to an otherwise cool thing. Even angling the board, or smudging, dimming color, localizing language, etc. All would make it feel like it fits.

sublinear•15 minutes ago

I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but the way the dithering is used feels very "generated" and chaotic.

Human pixel art tends to be very deliberate about the exact colors of every pixel and their placement tends to follow idealized (but not necessarily geometric) shapes.

The last time I saw dithering this sloppy was decades ago when people would scan photos as low color images. It is its own vibe, but it's a cold and rough one. These artifacts feel more "realistic", but it felt like slop back then too.

timenotwasted•about 2 hours ago

Gorgeous, very well executed. I'm guessing the primary request will be more cities but I'll deviate and say I'd love to see more views as well. Would be nice to have the same set of cities by I can see it from a studio view same way it is in the Paris view. Or from an office. Or a cafe.

andsoitis•about 2 hours ago

So cool. Add Los Angeles, Cape Town, Florence, Cairo, Athens, Vancouver, São Paulo.

Actually, shouldn't it be possible to auto-generate any city via AI on demand?

vunderba•35 minutes ago

Maybe to a degree but this isn’t just somebody using Seeddance to generate a first-frame-and-last-frame video loop and calling it a day.

There's definitely some manual curation. They even have assets that are clearly being placed into the scene, like the boats moving in the water.

You could theoretically generate all possible animated sprites (birds, people, vehicles, etc.) for use in any given cityscape, but automatically segmenting/detecting the different valid "paths/waypoints" where those assets should be placed would probably end up looking pretty janky.

namirsab•23 minutes ago

Love it! Really cool idea!

TomGarden•about 1 hour ago

This is a vibe! Is this pixel art AI generated?

zaxioms•about 1 hour ago

There's a lot of AI on the author's github, so I would assume so. I have no idea how I feel about these sorts of things. On the one hand I think it's objectively a super neat idea, but it makes me sad that a human (probably) didn't make the art/songs.

userbinator•35 minutes ago

A human did --- just indirectly, in the same way as using a compiler or assembler instead of writing each byte by hand.

johnfn•30 minutes ago

I use a compiler to perform a task. I don’t use pixel art to perform a task, other than to feel connection to another human —- something AI makes more challenging.

vunderba•about 1 hour ago

Yes according to the author - the assets were created with AI tooling.

https://safaelmali.gumroad.com/l/lofi-cities-complete-collec...

TomGarden•17 minutes ago

Ah that's a bummer. I'm unsure if this is gonna change over time, but it entirely tanks my enjoyment of any visual art project to know it was generated.

NDlurker•about 2 hours ago

This would be cool as a Roku channel

Razengan•about 2 hours ago

Man, wish we had dynamic wallpapers like this, and we could have had it decades ago.

Why do companies like Apple & Microsoft sterilize themselves so?

richarme•6 minutes ago

This was already a thing almost 3 decades ago. Active Desktop [0] was just a web page displayed instead of the wallpaper image.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

andsoitis•about 1 hour ago

Wallpapers that move would make for poor usability.

Cockbrand•about 1 hour ago

I was having a very similar thought - finally a nice use case for HTML wallpapers like Windows used to have them. I bet that there's a trick to have this as a desktop background in Wayland, but I'm too lazy to find out right now.

Either way, really nicely made, I love it! Small change request: adjust the CSS to make the controls look less vibecode-y.

Vakaiser•about 1 hour ago

While it's not free or a first party offering, I've had great success with Cindori Backdrop:

https://cindori.com/backdrop

rishirathod1165•31 minutes ago

So cool

Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews