6 ms·
Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF
- accrual 2mo agoThis is really cool, it gives me SimCity 2000 vibes. I like that I can click on neighborhoods and regions and get more information about them!
- greatony 2mo agoTHIS IS SICK! The BGM, the SFX, the visual are all perfect. My favorite is the banner plane, this is really really SF
- nuwandavek 2mo agohaha ty!
- harrisonpage 2mo agoAmazing! I was sad I couldn't zoom in more tho
- nuwandavek 2mo agooooof, I can actually allow more zoom (was just embarrassed at bad pixels)
- nuwandavek 2mo agomore zoom enabled!
- murphyslab 2mo agoIncredible. It's easy to just go on browsing and exploring. The massive, scrollable pixel art aspect reminds me a little of Floor796: https://floor796.com/ https://floor796.com/
- tamimio 2mo agoThis is amazing, it got everything I could think of but not all, where’s little nightmares, silent hill, naruto, men in black, for a starter. But it’s neat regardless!
- murphyslab 2mo agoMen in Black: https://floor796.com/#b2r4,541,605 https://floor796.com/#b2r4,541,605 Naruto: https://floor796.com/#t2l4,684,675 https://floor796.com/#t2l4,684,675 The author continues adding and refining the project, so if it isn't in there yet, perhaps in the future.
- tamimio 2mo agoNice, love it!
- smusamashah 2mo agoi remember seein men in black here
- nerdsniper 2mo ago[dead]
- j117noai 2mo agoThis is really cool!
- montag 2mo agoReally cool. I can see some issues, like Starr King park turned into a lake for some reason, but it’s so much fun to look at. Do you have any way to patch errors and discontinuities at the tile boundaries?
- nuwandavek 2mo agoyeah, there are a ton of issues especially around water. I've documented a bunch of them here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html I tried out a few ideas, but i think better training data around water will help a LOT.
- danenania 2mo agoSuper cool! Can you talk a bit about how you built it?
- nuwandavek 2mo agohey thanks! i wrote it all up here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html
- jtfrench 2mo agoThose who know game dev know making good isometric maps can be deceptively difficult. You grabbed that bull by the horns and did so beautifully. Well done!
- nuwandavek 2mo agoty!
- lawrencechen 2mo agoBehind the scenes stuff: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html > The source is Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Isometric.nyc explored and rejected the use of 3d building data. It is pretty insane that US gov has free LIDAR data for every city in the US available to the public. I spent <30mins exploring this and stuck to google 3d images. Claude Code whipped up a scraper to stream the 3D Tiles and render with three.js. This gives the best "real" texture base for the model to learn from. Anything else would involve a LOT of manual work to get the inputs right. > Now that we have the 3D tiles, we need to generate the ground truth pairs for training! Similar to isometric.nyc, I generated a few ghibli-style pixel-art images using Google's Nano Banana. SF terrain is very interesting. There are quite a few distinct features like skyscrapers in FiDi, the hills in the southeast, 2 iconic bridges, lots of coastline, piers, parks, suburban grids and lots of water. I generated a ton of images and curated from them. Getting consistent style was a challenge. There was a LOT of manual trial and error. But as usual, Claude Code added this feature to the dev app that allowed me to select the best images and approve them.
- simonw 2mo ago> I'm stoked for the golden era of side-projects! Love that attitude. Me too!
- nuwandavek 2mo agovery inspired by you!
- hacklewoodple 2mo ago[dead]
- hacklewoodple 2mo ago[dead]
- hacklewoodple 2mo ago[dead]
- nee_oo_ru 2mo agotime to push the boundaries of your creation
- bestony 2mo agoVery cool! Yesterday my wife and I watched Inside Out, and seeing the San Francisco setting felt very familiar (last year, 2025). Last year, in 2025, my wife and I went to San Francisco for our honeymoon. This website also showed me many familiar places.
- wxw 2mo agoI'm reminded of the wonderful https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc project, also previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721802 This could be a great anecdotal benchmark for agent/model progress. I wonder how much easier things have gotten with the latest Codex/Claude vs. when isometric.nyc was made.
- toplinesoftsys 2mo agoFantastic project! Sim-city over San Francisco.
- flomo 2mo agoJust one little thing: East of Buena Vista Park, you have a lake, it is actually the road which goes around the park. Also, I would love to zoom in more. (pls give me the pixels)
- nuwandavek 2mo agoSpurious lakes are an interesting issue I looked into a bit. 2 types of cases ended up becoming lakes: 1. "shadows" 2. flat green areas I think a better data distribution should eliminate this. Also, my "water detector" was not too good and could be improved. I wrote about a few of these things here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html
- nuwandavek 2mo agomore zoom enabled!
- qurren 2mo agoWould be extra awesome if there was a navigation app that used this map
- cyanregiment 2mo agoA few AI anomalies, like several roads turning into rivers and lakes. There are also a few massive square ponds in the Tenderloin that I am pretty sure do not exist lol But I like the idea.
- nuwandavek 2mo agoyeah, there are a ton of issues wrt water. I've documented a few of them here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html Planning to fix in the next version!
- cyanregiment 2mo agoNeeds a slight yellow filter over everything too. Less #127614 more #73ba14 So it looks less like Illinois
- EZ-Cheeze 2mo agohttps://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/these-oblique-satellite-images-are-pretty-amazing/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/these-oblique-satell... "Satellite images from highly oblique angles are pretty mindblowing" If u like this u will like that
- nuwandavek 2mo agowoahhh, these are so beautiful!
- dendrite9 2mo agoI haven't used it but Vexcel makes oblique imagery available. They use planes I believe to get multiple passes of each are they image and from various angles. Then they combine it and make the maps available. https://vexceldata.com/ https://vexceldata.com/
- Zaheer 2mo agoSimilar take by Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/atlas https://www.levels.fyi/atlas
- astaka 2mo agothat's pretty cool...
- chaostheory 2mo agoIt would be nice to have a Google or Apple maps version of this. I would also love to see this while driving.
- vortegne 2mo agoCrazy to me that people engage with this. This is not pixelart or any art really, it's just a weird blurry mess. Looks terrible.
- codetiger 2mo agoThis is incredibly beautiful. A few months back I tried to build a my own version of Google Earth rendered in voxels. Basically building from the terrain heightmaps scans available in open public data. Making it smooth and tessellation to work was incredible amount of work even for a simple vexed renderer https://codetiger.in/earth/ https://codetiger.in/earth/
- tda 2mo agoNice, but not sure I agree with your use of voxels. It appears more like pixelated height map, not the use of 3d pixels. From what I see every position on the globe can only have a single elevation
- codetiger 2mo agoEach pixel is a cube drawn at a certain height based on the terrain height map data. It’s not a volumetric render, I agree.
- mnky9800n 2mo agoThis reminds me of my own project https://rainy-city.com https://rainy-city.com
- yreg 2mo agoI'm currently playing with something a bit similar and I was wondering about the fair use aspect. What's the consensus on sharing the stylized assets created by diffusion models based on reference photos from e.g. Google Earth? Can the final output be shared as public domain or do Google, Airbus, et al. still hold some rights over them?
- jcarrano 2mo agoThe same "fair use" as when Google trained its model on everyone else's photos.
- hasyimibhar 2mo agoSorry but that is not pixel art.
- rob74 2mo agoNice! But for a city renowned for its steep streets, this looks suspiciously flat :) Ok, you could say it's only a 3D rendering of a 2D map, and it probably has to be this way for practical reasons, to avoid hills obscuring objects behind them, because you can't rotate the map as far as I can see, but not seeing actual height represented in a 3D view still takes some getting used to. Also, there are neighbourhoods and landmarks, but not actual street names as far as I can see? Not to mention transit stops/lines and other fancy stuff one could add...
- sgt 2mo agoIt's vibe coded. LLM's have a hard time understanding elevation and isometric display.
- notpushkin 2mo agoIt’s vibe coded but it’s not slop. There’s a lot of human input here. So either the author overlooked the elevation issue or it was a deliberate decision, but in any case you can’t just pin this on “LLMs don’t understand isometric 3D”.
- sgt 2mo agoI've been busy with a rendered isometric map recently and I figured this is something Opus can help with, but it was near useless at understanding isometric designs along with elevation changes. It kept me busy for days.
- RugnirViking 2mo agofrom his dev blog: "All map math happens in a single fixed ... plane... The intended effect was a classic Sim City view of the city. "
- sgt 2mo agoSim City 2000 for example had elevation [1]. The issue is that LLM's simply don't "get this". It's vibecoded. [1] https://patcoston.com/sc2k/city/images/Calebopolis_Big.png https://patcoston.com/sc2k/city/images/Calebopolis_Big.png
- receptopalak 2mo ago[flagged]
- burnoutdv 2mo agoI am not a fan of this. Like the new york one, its just...unpolished. I dare to say slop. I am sure the author put some effort into it, BUT its just not there for me. The wiggly lines, the blurry designs and just everything. With something is pixelart or appears to be, I expected it to be pixel perfect, not just some random picture that looks like pixelart on the first glance. The idea feels neat, but the execution needs so much more touch and polish. Maybe even handcrafting to be impressive.
- jullls 2mo agoReminds me "transport tycoon", very cool!
- quemtrouxe 2mo agoit's pretty interesting
- digg99 2mo agowell done! The opening music made me lol
- cpfohl 2mo agoUnwanted sound! Not cool.
- nuwandavek 2mo agosorry! i debated this quite a bit, but the sv opening credits was too good to not include :(
- cpfohl 2mo agoNo biggie, just almost woke up a household of sleeping people
- Palomides 2mo ago>ghibli-style pixel-art I suppose that explains the yellow filter and the mixels
- donatj 2mo agoI've spent about a month all told in SF over a couple visits. As a devout midwesterner, I didn't think I was going to enjoy the place. Having spent a bit of time there however, and having been shown around by natives, I absolutely get it. There's so much to see and do packed in a small area, and the air just feels electric. It's genuinely a different world.
- leviyi 2mo ago[dead]
- nico 2mo agoAmazing, great project. The SV show music playing on opening was such a good detail to add, loved it! Thank you for putting this together. Brought some fun memories back from my time living in SF
- karpour 2mo agoHonest opinion: Really charming on first look, but nothing where you can get lost in the details, because once you look closer, the soullessness of the generated imagery comes through. So I spent about 5 minutes looking at it, then moved on, and likely won't ever go back there. With other things, like Floor796 that other people pointed out, I can spend so much time looking at all the labor of love that went in there, but making something to look at too closely likely wasn't the point here.
- johnfn 2mo agoOuch, this seems unnecessarily harsh for a side project made for fun. This might be acceptable if this was a low effort single prompt to an AI but it’s pretty clear from the write up that that is far from the case. FWIW I thought this was really cool.
- jihadjihad 2mo agoFor me it's the copy, it really does read as soulless slop and I think there are many people who are just tired of it.
- justusthane 2mo agoI don't think was unkind, and I think that if you make something public, opinions are always warranted.
- johnfn 2mo agoI think “soulless” crosses a line into unkind. Just say you don’t like AI generated text.
- thih9 2mo agoFor context, Floor796: https://floor796.com/ https://floor796.com/ Note that clicking the characters shows extra information. Protip, visit About -> FAQ; there are many interesting questions like “What interactive elements are there?”. Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401612 (and others).
- rambambram 2mo agoWow, nice prompting!
- imranshah10140 2mo agoAbsolutely amazing Love to see how much we can go out of the box. Great work
- aguynamedben 2mo agoI lived in San Francisco for 15 years, and love this. Great work!
- bjourne 2mo agoWow, very impressive! But where is the bulldozer tool? I have some landscaping to do.
- vldszn 2mo agov cool!
- ethannam9022 2mo agoI really like the ’90s game vibe. It almost feels like I’m playing a game.