The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

(sf.thijs.gg)

99 points | by centrosphere 1 hour ago

26 comments

  • frankhorrigan 1 minute ago
    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, etc.

  • tuchsen 53 minutes ago
    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 57 minutes ago
    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 49 minutes ago
      > 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 42 minutes ago
        You can activate flying mode by double-jumping and crank the speed up with +.
  • forthwall 1 hour ago
    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)

    • Stevvo 0 minutes ago
      [delayed]
    • striking 7 minutes ago
      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.
    • HanClinto 37 minutes ago
      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.

    • Apocryphon 34 minutes ago
      Not bad, though based on the screenshot Lake Merritt in Oakland looks not to scale.

      https://watchdogs.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Bay_Area

  • recursive 1 hour ago
    Loading information just goes forever.

    Console shows CORS violations and WebGL errors.

    Firefox on Windows. Recent ThinkPad provided by my employer.

  • Jeremy1026 6 minutes ago
    We got GTA SF before GTA VI.
  • jrflowers 6 minutes ago
    Nobody defecating in public or play parties that are worse than going to the dentist 3/10
  • englishspot 1 hour ago
    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 1 hour ago
      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!
  • bengotow 44 minutes ago
    Ahh wow this is awesome! Is there a way to deep link to a lat/long?
  • tims33 45 minutes ago
    I was thinking of the game Outrun in the Red Ferrari driving around SF.
  • aselimov3 39 minutes ago
    How do I turn the camera? Stuck with a single perspective.
    • aselimov3 33 minutes ago
      Mouse capture works in chrome but not safari for me
  • juancn 15 minutes ago
    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 12 minutes ago
      Mouse-click (left) and turn the mouse.
  • fusslo 1 hour ago
    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)

  • nickandbro 1 hour ago
    Crazy how they have GTA San Francisco before GTA 6
  • selimthegrim 1 hour ago
    <Cisco Heat cries in the corner>
  • busymom0 40 minutes ago
    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.
  • aaroninsf 42 minutes ago
    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.

  • DonHopkins 22 minutes ago
    What's the actual game? Try not to step in doo-doo?
  • arionhardison 42 minutes ago
    This is insanely awesome man; I turned the entire SF gov into an AI Gov. but this has really humbled me; great work dude.
  • zuzululu 27 minutes ago
    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
  • okokwhatever 1 hour ago
    what a beautiful city could be...
  • nicechianti 59 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • avelis 50 minutes ago
    The least amount of traffic I have seen in the city. /s
  • walrus01 1 hour ago
    I don't think it's really simulating San Francisco unless it has a public defecation feature.
    • jb12 1 hour ago
      Woah dude careful, I think you're stuck in 2022!
      • teaearlgraycold 1 hour ago
        The poop situation is still not great.
        • ink 5 minutes ago
          I wish this wasn’t true, but I live in the Mission and yeah, still not great
    • nonethewiser 1 hour ago
      Oh cmon man. Every city has its “lets just accept human feces on the sidewalk “ phase.