WebGL procedural city that feels alive and is fun to watch | Hacker News Reader

WebGL procedural city that feels alive and is fun to watch

demos.littleworkshop.fr

141 pointsparisianka32 comments

Pretty cool. To say it feels alive, well, compared to a city without any traffic, it does. But without pedestrians, and with cars never turning, it doesn't feel very alive yet. Would be cool to expand on this.

Agreed. No criticism about what this is so far, just excitement about the stuff that could be added. Great work!

Maybe update the title to include 2017, original HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15795204

I tried following the ambulances but never found a hospital. Just plenty of show stores and many many pizza joints.

Seems to be a realistic rendering of the US.

LOL, was wondering why it had such an unnatural grid layout... But this explains it!

When I was small and played 'Sim City' I used to think it was really artificial and created very unnatural cities, then I visited the US for the first time and realised that no they really do have grid layouts with hundreds and hundreds of cross-roads with lights and really do have 'zones' like that and it's pretty accurate for the US!

Salt Lake city literally has an indexed grid around the Mormon Temple - it's kind of amazing. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of-zion/

What would be a natural grid layout?

Sort of like central Stockholm [1], where the grid is warped to respect natural barriers?

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Stockholm%2C%20Sw...

Look for the "H" on the helipad.

Add people otherwise it's not alive, reminds me of this interesting philosophical video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBBuoD9eL5k

Please set user-select: none, somehow the whole canvas got highlighted on my iPhone and I couldn't deselect it.

Other than that, it runs pretty smooth.

The cars occasionally "crash", but without consequences: they just smoothly slide through each other.

I love how it is optimized for phone. Do vehicles ever turn? I was watching a truck for couple minutes and it was going and going straight, never turning.

I am also impressed it runs very smoothly on my two years old mid range phone.

I imagine it has to do with the fact we never see 50 houses at the same time.

They have a lot of other neat demos on their website, go to the top page. I spent several minutes looking through the WebVR showroom, and playing the Keep Out game. Also the Digital Landscapes and Track musical experience were fun.

https://www.littleworkshop.fr

Nice. Would feel a little less generated if the repeated tiles where offset by a few grid points as it is only 9 wide

Spatial subdivision or k-d trees perhaps would provide a less repetitive layout.

I love it.

Cars never seem to turn. Is that because it becomes far easier to simulate without any turns? I liked the effort not to collide in intersections.

Man I wish there were graphing tool to make graphs (eg 3D bar charts/over geo data) to look this cool.

If I understand you correctly it sounds like your looking for something like deck.gl? (https://deck.gl/examples/geojson-layer-polygons/)

This is awesome! Anything you can tell me/us about how you made it?

Pretty cool.

Disclaimer : Not regarding the demo itself.

It is not working on firefox version 81.0.2. It works fine on chrome though.

Yeah, something amiss with old(er) versions of Firefox. I see a gray screen, but if I click on the (?) help, it will glitch the display... FWIW it works in IE11.

Works fine on firefox developer edition (83.0b3), I'm guessing whichever bug there was has since been fixed. Runs very smoothly aswell, props to the devs.

Yep. It works fine on ff version 82.0/Ubuntu.

Thanks.

Runs smoothly on Mac/Firefox 82.0

Yep. It works fine on ff version 82.0/Ubuntu.

Thanks for checking it up.

Nice but would expect pedestrians, random interactions with elements sometimes etc...

Very cool but needs a road diet!

Is it possible to see the source code? I'd love to learn some of these techniques.

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