Show HN: Isopolis – isometric pixel map of SF

(sf.isopolis.city)

36 points | by nuwandavek 1 hour ago

11 comments

  • lawrencechen 5 minutes ago
    Behind the scenes stuff:

    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.

  • jtfrench 10 minutes ago
    Those 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!
  • nee_oo_ru 1 minute ago
    time to push the boundaries of your creation
  • murphyslab 46 minutes ago
    Incredible. 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/
    • tamimio 21 minutes ago
      This 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!
  • montag 25 minutes ago
    Really 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?
  • accrual 28 minutes ago
    This 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!
  • danenania 22 minutes ago
    Super cool! Can you talk a bit about how you built it?
  • harrisonpage 1 hour ago
    Amazing! I was sad I couldn't zoom in more tho
  • greatony 1 hour ago
    THIS IS SICK! The BGM, the SFX, the visual are all perfect. My favorite is the banner plane, this is really really SF
  • j117noai 32 minutes ago
    This is really cool!
  • nerdsniper 42 minutes ago
    [dead]