The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

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 give it a shot if your local town/city publishes some data. No need to understand coordinate systems for example, which is nice.

For the game, there's a button to get in without an account so you can play around, but to get the fun mods you will need to play a bit and figure out the trash pick up/scrap at dump mechanic in the game.

And genuinely this made me emotional. Was weird as hell walking around my back yard. Going to the spot in Dolo that I used to haunt in my 20s. My favorite tennis courts and hill bombs, walked the entire disc golf course, etc.

Maybe you don't need real-ish physics for the glider here. Does the user really need to fall?

The building textures could be recreated from the low-res streetview imagery using a pipeline to scale / relight them using image-to-image models. Building shapes could be rebuilt using generative models for 3d mesh components. Road & sidewalk quality (how clean, how faded lines are, etc) could be inferred from imagery as well to be applied to the map.

Super cool project, hoping it continues to evolve!

Seemingly lower-hanging fruit options I'd like to see:

- show street names, maybe some landmarks or businesses, togglable

- enter address to teleport to

- enter address to get directions to, GPS style, to travel there manually

- get coordinates / current location as a URL to share

- zoom in on minimap, or expand minimap, so that teleporting can be more precise

- changeable avatar

- more dynamic weather / lighting options

From the ToS linked from OP site:

> 1.3 Restrictions. You will not and will not permit or authorize a third party to: (...) (xiv) decompile, decrypt, reverse engineer, attempt to derive the source code of or disassemble the Service or any portion thereof (except as and only to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law or by licensing terms governing the use of any FOSS components that may be included with the Service)

I would love for people to prove me wrong that Apple will embrace this use of their geospatial data!

Can’t help but wondering, how will this look like if we had AI try to “augment” these maps in real time (maybe using street view images?). I wonder if it would be playable in reasonable FPS, and how expensive it would be.

I did a voxel (ray casting) lunar lander that used actual NASA moon data (https://mooncraft2000.com).

Though as for games that use SF (but not 1:1) Watch Dogs 2 is a pretty good proxy, though my favorite video game interpretation of San Francisco is from GTA San Andreas (San Fierro)

Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.

Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.

I want to make it more video game like, cause the jumps of google maps make me motion sick.

I used google streetview as image source (cause you need to read signs, cars, see geometry) and colmap to reconstruct 3d chunks.

But it never really worked that well, jumps in time (cause the google car does not always continuously scan) and the image density is just too low, but was a fun side project.

I'm sitting here watching the block bounce in a circle and I have no idea if the game is actually loading or not. Tried turning off PopUpOff. Tried turning off adblock.

as it turns out it just isn't loading (firefox on win 11, if that matters)

I cannot turn the camera for the life of me. The camera is always facing north!

Edit: I feel dumb now, I needed to click the trackpad to rotate, somehow I expected a two finger drag to move the camera :facepalm:

I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.