Kinda funny game, though if you want a bit more fidelity, but less control, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a pretty good version of SF.
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)
HanClinto · 2026-08-24 18:25:51 UTC
Very impressed with the Watch Dogs series of games for this purpose.
We recently used Watch Dogs Legion to prep for a trip to London to get more familiar with the city. Set the game on peaceful mode and just walked around and did virtual sight-seeing instead of playing missions. It's a surprisingly good recreation of the city, and we really appreciated getting some familiarity with the place before we visited.
jermaustin1 · 2026-08-24 19:22:44 UTC
I did a similar thing for the UK when prepping to drive around. I hooked my steering wheel up to Forza Horizon 4, and just drove slow cars on the wrong side of the road through Edinburgh, following as many of the road laws as I knew.
It wasn't perfect, but it did help a little. The streets are way narrower, and the traffic is much worse, but muscle memory to stay on the left side of the road was nice.
striking · 2026-08-24 18:55:35 UTC
I do adore San Andreas but I think San Fierro is one of the weakest areas. My metric for how accurate they are is a sense of "oh I've been here before" and I really only get that in a couple of spots, as compared to Las Venturas (Las Vegas) and Los Santos (Los Angeles) where I could actually go to the cities in real life and feel like I knew where I was going because I'd played San Andreas enough. Compared to those two, San Fierro feels like a Backrooms-style dreamlike compression of the real thing, where a lot of stuff has been moved around. But parts of Haight-Ashbury, Pac Heights, Nob/Russian Hill, Polk Gulch, Ocean Beach and so on are still fairly distinguishable and correctly arranged.
Stevvo · 2026-08-24 19:02:15 UTC
Depends how you define fidelity. The mesh resolution in MSFS isn't any higher resolution. Looks about the same.
why_at · 2026-08-24 19:26:51 UTC
I'm still holding out hope for a modern Fallout in the bay area.
jrm4 · 2026-08-24 20:10:46 UTC
Ha, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most uncanniest valley thing I think I've ever played with; I'm from Tallahassee and it's weird to fly around a very high-fidelity, realistic, inaccurate version of a city I've lived in my entire life.
englishspot · 2026-08-24 17:35:28 UTC
my first experience with San Francisco in a video game was through the City Escape stage in Sonic Adventure 2. and I didn't even know then that it was San Francisco (I had never been there when I played the game). only realized this when I visited the city many years later.
cosmojg · 2026-08-24 17:41:57 UTC
Haha, I know that stage by heart, and I've never been to San Francisco. I had no idea that's what it was modeled after!
pete5x5 · 2026-08-24 19:04:26 UTC
Also love that level, but mostly because the song is such a banger
eli_gottlieb · 2026-08-24 20:34:10 UTC
I was just thinking, this game needs a snowboard I can use to jump, do tricks, and smack around people's cars.
littlexsparkee · 2026-08-24 21:56:13 UTC
my first exposure was Driver and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, later skateboard videos
nickandbro · 2026-08-24 17:44:34 UTC
Crazy how they have GTA San Francisco before GTA 6
SeenNotHeard · 2026-08-24 17:50:36 UTC
GTA Baghdad by the Bay
selimthegrim · 2026-08-24 17:47:49 UTC
<Cisco Heat cries in the corner>
fusslo · 2026-08-24 17:56:46 UTC
man what happened to loading bars?
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)
dimitarbogdanov · 2026-08-24 21:03:03 UTC
The LLM they used to create this does not care for loading bars XD
okokwhatever · 2026-08-24 18:01:03 UTC
what a beautiful city could be...
recursive · 2026-08-24 18:02:13 UTC
Loading information just goes forever.
Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.
Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.
recursive · 2026-08-24 20:44:17 UTC
Update: Restarted firefox and it's working. Computers...
josephjrobison · 2026-08-24 18:05:13 UTC
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.
stronglikedan · 2026-08-24 18:13:29 UTC
> Had a lot of fun (tedious tho) going out to Alcatraz
Curious, did you use a vehicle/glider, or did you take the heel-toe express all the way there?
whycombinetor · 2026-08-24 18:20:17 UTC
You can activate flying mode by double-jumping and crank the speed up with +.
josephjrobison · 2026-08-25 00:48:11 UTC
Haha just walked - is a glider possible?
tuchsen · 2026-08-24 18:09:05 UTC
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!
avelis · 2026-08-24 18:12:02 UTC
The least amount of traffic I have seen in the city. /s
DonHopkins · 2026-08-25 12:10:55 UTC
The hardest to believe most unrealistic scene in The Room was when he conveniently found a parking spot right in front of the flower shop, and he doesn't even get parking ticket, right before the "Oh, hi doggie!" scene.
This is insanely awesome man; I turned the entire SF gov into an AI Gov. but this has really humbled me; great work dude.
aaroninsf · 2026-08-24 18:20:43 UTC
Chrome on MacOS: largely unusable (over fiber); POV stuck and will not move except in a tiny area.
I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.
busymom0 · 2026-08-24 18:22:34 UTC
Will 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.
aselimov3 · 2026-08-24 18:23:05 UTC
How do I turn the camera? Stuck with a single perspective.
aselimov3 · 2026-08-24 18:29:04 UTC
Mouse capture works in chrome but not safari for me
zuzululu · 2026-08-24 18:35:02 UTC
where did you get the 3d map assets? also if one was serious about turning this into a game how would you go about it
dimitarbogdanov · 2026-08-24 21:02:01 UTC
It says 'Apple Inc' in the bottom left, and there's a link to the Apple Maps T&Cs.
DonHopkins · 2026-08-24 18:40:16 UTC
What's the actual game? Try not to step in doo-doo?
wyclif · 2026-08-25 06:57:21 UTC
Where's the human poop on the sidewalks? It won't be realistic until it has that.
DonHopkins · 2026-08-25 10:40:12 UTC
It won't be a solid hit until you can do your civic doody on the sidewalks yourself.
There's a rich fertile tradition of "First Person Poopers", some of them quite regular, long-running, corny, or impactful.
Natural Selection 2: Combat -- Rock Paper Shotgun's literal headline: "First-Person Pooper: Swallowed Alive In NS2 Combat". You get devoured by an Onos and can fight your way through "the finale of the digestion process. All from an appalling first-person view. What great guts!" You don't poop — you ARE the poop.
>"We want players to feel not only horrified at the idea of being eaten alive but that even after being devoured, there's still a chance to destroy the beast and stay alive!" director and sound designer Thomas Loupe told RPS.
Zoo Tycoon 2 -- Eurogamer on its first-person Zookeeper Mode, where you personally clean up after the animals: "The fact it turns the game into the world's first first-person pooper-scoop-'em-up is just an added bonus."
Sploot -- first-person seagull bombing simulator. Boing Boing: "Poop on everyone as a beautiful seagull." Pro tip from the review: "if you fly in low you can almost always make a very personal deposit."
Pooper Scooper -- asymmetric first-person dog-vs-human PvP: "The Dog must collect meat in order to drop slippery poops throughout each map while the Human must collect all of the poops before the time runs out."
Pooper Scooper (2009, iOS, a completely different game) -- you are Zookeeper Zeke, frantically shoveling animal "products" into a waiting tractor. "No time to dally - there is poop to scoop!" Delisted from the App Store, but archived:
(Zeke has been the canonical zookeeper name since Taito's 1982 arcade game Zoo Keeper.)
Party Pooper -- Ludum Dare 40 entry representing the abstinence branch of the genre: "Drink as much alcohol as possible! (without pooping on yourself)"
And of course Reverse Pac-Man, the mathematically pure form: traverse the maze depositing the dots instead of eating them.
So the First Person Pooper design space spans pooping, being pooped on, becoming poop, scooping poop, weaponizing poop, and heroically holding it in. A deep fast moving genre.
zthrowaway · 2026-08-25 12:16:47 UTC
This is an epic shitpost. Bravo.
juancn · 2026-08-24 18:47:00 UTC
Nice, but the camera system is hard to grasp.
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:
tommek4077 · 2026-08-24 18:50:29 UTC
Mouse-click (left) and turn the mouse.
Jeremy1026 · 2026-08-24 18:55:57 UTC
We got GTA SF before GTA VI.
planb · 2026-08-24 19:08:46 UTC
When I was in SF the first time some spots seemed weirdly familiar to me. Only later that day I remembered that I probably know them from GTA San Andreas (but maybe also the Full House intro)
Jeremy1026 · 2026-08-24 19:26:21 UTC
It is fun when you play a game based on a place, then visit the place. There have been a few places that I've been to that were levels of the Tony Hawk series. I enjoyed how the game designers were able to take what was otherwise pretty mundane, and tweak it into a fun map, while not just making it all up and losing the source location.
jrflowers · 2026-08-24 18:56:03 UTC
Nobody defecating in public or play parties that are worse than going to the dentist 3/10
frankhorrigan · 2026-08-24 19:01:17 UTC
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.
madrox · 2026-08-24 20:46:35 UTC
Happy to hear someone else say this. Similar story. I could never live in SF again but roaming around it was nostalgic in a way going back now just isn't
dyzone · 2026-08-25 08:15:21 UTC
> I could never live in SF again
Why not?
tetris11 · 2026-08-25 12:24:54 UTC
when the local baker jacks up his prices to leach off the richest man in town, everyone else suffers
alecbz · 2026-08-25 13:22:02 UTC
Normalize price discrimination
Though actually I’d suspect a lot of that is just rising costs (rent)?
idbnstra · 2026-08-25 14:13:20 UTC
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
chaostheory · 2026-08-25 14:57:26 UTC
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.
zardo · 2026-08-25 17:02:33 UTC
Those greedy bakers that only got into baking for the bread (money).
throwforfeds · 2026-08-24 20:54:23 UTC
This made me super nostalgic as well. I've lived in NYC for 20 years, but spent a ton of time in SF early in my career (starting in 2008). I love NYC, but I've been sort of feeling like a change lately and this made me feel like subletting a place for a few months and getting back to the slower pace of SF.
marciob · 2026-08-24 21:01:47 UTC
good to know your feelings, but how different it is from using google maps?
aguynamedben · 2026-08-24 21:22:42 UTC
The free will of walking. I walked around the city using certain routes, and I can freely replicate those walks in this. I did walks I did when my kids were 3 years old. Google Maps isn't fluid enough to do this.
frankhorrigan · 2026-08-25 02:13:11 UTC
Honestly it’s a good question. obviously a big part is walking through it. But I also think it’s because it’s this weird, dreamlike version. Because it’s low res and a little broken, it’s like walking through a place you know really well in a dream. Little truths pop up, like a certain taqueria right where you expect it. But it’s almost a Silent Hill version of the town, so your mind fills in the blanks for you.
Maybe this is a common experience, but the first time I left SF for six months, I would have these sort of flashbulb memories of certain intersections and locations. Not even particular memories there. I think because I moved there right out of college and my late adolescence and all that it entails took place there, there are a hundred little corners where I’ve got a thousand more memories.
It being like a half-remembered scene particularly triggers the nostalgia. Also probably because I’m not there right now.
aguynamedben · 2026-08-24 21:20:43 UTC
Same. I lived in SF for 15 years, my kids were toddlers in the Marina... this is so freaking awesome and really brings out the nostalgia! It matches my memories exactly.
Exact proportions are crazy. I had the reverse experience doing sim racing... do a track a bunch, finally visit it in person - and it looks the exact same as in your mind.
jamiek88 · 2026-08-24 22:51:26 UTC
I’m a ‘serious’ sim racer and I’m gonna get the chance to drive a touring car at BTCC brands hatch in October. I’ve sim raced that layout a million times I’m very excited to experience this. Already had a weird enough feeling at Laguna Seca without driving it!
parisisles · 2026-08-24 22:09:42 UTC
Probably a testament to how good my life is otherwise – but I feel so much grief from not living in SF / the bay area anymore.
bsimpson · 2026-08-25 02:31:08 UTC
I found my own Vespa!
asdfman123 · 2026-08-24 19:05:49 UTC
I believe we're getting the hackernews hug of death.
miguelacevedo · 2026-08-24 19:06:50 UTC
really cool!
brcmthrowaway · 2026-08-24 19:13:18 UTC
I wish I had enough brain compute cycles to keep up with 20 year olds earning millions at OpenAI.
zkmon · 2026-08-24 19:15:49 UTC
Back in the 90's, there was a game called "Midtown Madness" by Microsft. They simulated SF and London very well. This game now takes it to another level.
callmemclovin · 2026-08-25 06:44:08 UTC
Came here to say this - I have fond memories of playing Midtown Madness 2 as a kid (IIRC it came bundled with our new Windows ME family PC). I remember when I had the chance to visit SF in 2005 and I would recognize so many of the streets from playing the game. Good times.
cutoff · 2026-08-24 19:23:52 UTC
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
nuwandavek · 2026-08-25 01:46:55 UTC
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/).
How would you do a live high-res polygonalization of the maps data with street view?
atum47 · 2026-08-24 19:29:59 UTC
I feel like I did that walk, in person (the tourist areas for sure). I've been to SF three times now, most of the time I'm walking everywhere. Even found a place that sells Brazilian coxinha
system2 · 2026-08-24 19:30:01 UTC
We need an LA version of this.
tolidano · 2026-08-24 19:54:32 UTC
And NY.
retroplasma · 2026-08-24 20:04:08 UTC
I can offer you the whole planet, and you are a chicken:
Why isn't this more popular? I've always wanted to be able to use regular 3D game controls to more naturally walk/fly through city streets.
Thankfully the "reset to NY" button removes the chicken/eggs and lets me just fly through without any distractions.
gjenkins · 2026-08-24 19:32:15 UTC
We got GTA SF before GTA 6.
metadat · 2026-08-24 20:05:52 UTC
That was actually Watchdogs 2. Great game, basically GTA but you are a hacker in the Bay Area. The SF portion of the map was accurate down to every building.
If that second link is an in-game map, it is far from accurate to the real world. Unless it’s from a timeline in which Golden Gate Park is connected to the Presidio, and half of SF has fallen into the ocean.
metadat · 2026-08-24 22:49:14 UTC
I checked some obscure buildings and I found every one of them in-game, but you're correct that it's not 1:1 topographically.
ViktorRay · 2026-08-24 21:47:06 UTC
Gotta shout out to the city of San Fierro in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
San Fierro was based on San Francisco of the 1990's. Lots of good memories playing GTA San Andreas and exploring 90's San Francisco.
kfarr · 2026-08-24 19:35:40 UTC
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!
bl0b · 2026-08-25 12:51:59 UTC
Yeah, you're right, but also, fuck the ToS of any big company these days.
time0ut · 2026-08-24 19:38:51 UTC
This is awesome! I tried to make it to the Golden Gate, but my MBP got too hot to hold before I got there.
arjie · 2026-08-24 19:41:25 UTC
This was loads of fun haha. I would have liked to have optionally clicked a button and started at my current physical location because the tile load time dominated how long it took to get there.
asveikau · 2026-08-24 19:44:13 UTC
I was able to get it to stand directly on the roof of the structure I'm sitting at. (Which is kind of a glitch, it walked right over the structure as if it's a hill.)
When I noticed it getting choppy I realized I had filled most of my VRAM with an LLM, so I unloaded that and it got better.
Pretty cool project.
K0IN · 2026-08-24 19:45:31 UTC
funny timing, i was exploring the same, some friends and me play alot of geogussr (a game where you put into streetview somewhere on the world, and have to find out where) lately.
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.
jvogt · 2026-08-24 20:17:10 UTC
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!
michaelbuckbee · 2026-08-24 20:36:52 UTC
I feel like the closest we've gotten to that so far has been the flight sims.
herpdyderp · 2026-08-24 22:08:51 UTC
I'd prefer something like The Crew but whatever game it ends up in, it would still be awesome!
grackasthebig · 2026-08-25 21:15:28 UTC
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
Comments
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)
We recently used Watch Dogs Legion to prep for a trip to London to get more familiar with the city. Set the game on peaceful mode and just walked around and did virtual sight-seeing instead of playing missions. It's a surprisingly good recreation of the city, and we really appreciated getting some familiarity with the place before we visited.
It wasn't perfect, but it did help a little. The streets are way narrower, and the traffic is much worse, but muscle memory to stay on the left side of the road was nice.
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)
Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.
Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.
Curious, did you use a vehicle/glider, or did you take the heel-toe express all the way there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkoXhgtI58
I don't mind the lazy asset loading; I just can't go anywhere outside a couple blocks from the start position. M3 MBA.
There's a rich fertile tradition of "First Person Poopers", some of them quite regular, long-running, corny, or impactful.
Natural Selection 2: Combat -- Rock Paper Shotgun's literal headline: "First-Person Pooper: Swallowed Alive In NS2 Combat". You get devoured by an Onos and can fight your way through "the finale of the digestion process. All from an appalling first-person view. What great guts!" You don't poop — you ARE the poop.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/natural-selection-2-combat-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WacIMCEhVYU
>"We want players to feel not only horrified at the idea of being eaten alive but that even after being devoured, there's still a chance to destroy the beast and stay alive!" director and sound designer Thomas Loupe told RPS.
Zoo Tycoon 2 -- Eurogamer on its first-person Zookeeper Mode, where you personally clean up after the animals: "The fact it turns the game into the world's first first-person pooper-scoop-'em-up is just an added bonus."
https://www.eurogamer.net/r-zootycoon2-pc
Sploot -- first-person seagull bombing simulator. Boing Boing: "Poop on everyone as a beautiful seagull." Pro tip from the review: "if you fly in low you can almost always make a very personal deposit."
https://boingboing.net/2015/08/24/sploot-seagull-poop-game.h...
A Dump in the Dark -- fecal survival-horror FPS with five ammo classes, including Cannon Shot, Liquid Diarrhea, Rapid Fire, and Sniper Shot.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/577080/A_Dump_in_the_Dark...
Pooper Scooper -- asymmetric first-person dog-vs-human PvP: "The Dog must collect meat in order to drop slippery poops throughout each map while the Human must collect all of the poops before the time runs out."
https://store.steampowered.com/app/682370/Pooper_Scooper/
Pooper Scooper (2009, iOS, a completely different game) -- you are Zookeeper Zeke, frantically shoveling animal "products" into a waiting tractor. "No time to dally - there is poop to scoop!" Delisted from the App Store, but archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250812150108/https://apps.appl...
(Zeke has been the canonical zookeeper name since Taito's 1982 arcade game Zoo Keeper.)
Party Pooper -- Ludum Dare 40 entry representing the abstinence branch of the genre: "Drink as much alcohol as possible! (without pooping on yourself)"
https://padierfind.itch.io/party-pooper
Poop On 2020 Simulator -- hurl soft-body physics turds at the year 2020 while gentle piano music plays. Steam tags it "Immersive Sim".
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1433480/Poop_On_2020_Simu...
https://www.pcgamer.com/this-dollar2-game-lets-you-throw-tur...
Bird Game -- steal people's food and poop on them for points until they deploy anti-bird drones.
https://dandonnan.itch.io/bird-game
And of course Reverse Pac-Man, the mathematically pure form: traverse the maze depositing the dots instead of eating them.
So the First Person Pooper design space spans pooping, being pooped on, becoming poop, scooping poop, weaponizing poop, and heroically holding it in. A deep fast moving genre.
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:
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.
Why not?
Though actually I’d suspect a lot of that is just rising costs (rent)?
Maybe this is a common experience, but the first time I left SF for six months, I would have these sort of flashbulb memories of certain intersections and locations. Not even particular memories there. I think because I moved there right out of college and my late adolescence and all that it entails took place there, there are a hundred little corners where I’ve got a thousand more memories.
It being like a half-remembered scene particularly triggers the nostalgia. Also probably because I’m not there right now.
Exact proportions are crazy. I had the reverse experience doing sim racing... do a track a bunch, finally visit it in person - and it looks the exact same as in your mind.
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
So exciting!
Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149966 - Aug 2026 (81 comments)
https://gist.github.com/retroplasma/12e0e6e236aabd17c314cb53...
Thankfully the "reset to NY" button removes the chicken/eggs and lets me just fly through without any distractions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_2
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbDzFt...
San Fierro was based on San Francisco of the 1990's. Lots of good memories playing GTA San Andreas and exploring 90's San Francisco.
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!
When I noticed it getting choppy I realized I had filled most of my VRAM with an LLM, so I unloaded that and it got better.
Pretty cool project.
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.
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!
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