San Francisco Is Now a Playable Video Game
The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
A new web-based project turns the entire city of San Francisco into an interactive video game. Using Apple Maps' tile data, it streams real city geometry as you explore, letting you walk, run, jump, glide, and even drive through the streets in your browser. The game features a glider, a vehicle, and a tile-streaming system that loads the city in real time.
The streets around you are ready.
- jparishy
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 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.
(*might be a bit of lag; server needs more ram but on vacation rn!)
- frankhorrigan
I lived in SF for nearly 20 years, though I mostly spend my time in New York now.
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.
- jvogt
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 / 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!
- cutoff
This 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 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
- JKCalhoun
'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).
- kfarr
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 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!
- tuchsen
Ah nice demo! I flew around SF for way too long just enjoying the sights. On my M3 Air using Chrome it eventually just turns into blobs and my character get stuck, takes about twenty minutes. I popped open the DevTools and the game loads in at like 400mb but after five or so minutes I'm at 2GB of memory consumption. I'd guess that you need to have your agent do a couple of passes for memory leaks. Very fun otherwise!
- josephjrobison
Very amazing. And this is the worst it will ever be. We'll soon be exploring 4k versions of this and we can open every trash can in Tunis. Fascinating. Had a lot of fun (tedious tho) going out to Alcatraz and figuring out how to get in.