Show HN: Valencia, Spain in Sim City/Isometric View

65 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by leugim

22 Comments

larodi

9 minutes ago

It is incorrect to name this pixelart. Perhaps diffusion-art. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it "slopart"—that would be derogatory.

First, it has very little in common with the process of creation of actual pixelart imagery, as all here on the map is blurred, no pixels are clearly distinguishable.

Second of all, pixelart is something ppl intent-fully create one layer at a time, very often - one pixel a time. Is akin to as embroidery (which pixelart very much resembles), and embroidery is not the same as textile produced by a Jacquard Loom. And the whole point of embroidery is to do it like this in order to achieve the result, not that you cannot do whatever you want with machine textile, and not that we don't wear it daily, because it was programmed and done by machine.

Present map is perhaps the third similar attempt at something... which has its value, but should be regarded the same as perhaps taking Pink Floyd's lyrics and progressions recreated in Suno... or rather training a model to play like Pink Floyd and then call a diffusion product psychedelic rock.

As s.o. who is both super-fan of pixel-art (such as https://x.com/84Aleha/status/2038268570094723313, though I can take isometric stuff also, that is fine), and diffusion imagery (I actually did some poster designs with it, not many), I feel the need to express my disagreement and overall confusion reg if this is an actual pixelart. To me - it is not,.

Michael_Houben

26 minutes ago

My last visit to valencia (as a tourist) was a long time ago (20 yeyrs) but i just had some minutes of fun playing your two tourist games :-) thanks for showing !!

vunderba

37 minutes ago

> An image model trained on a hand-picked pixel-art style then repaints it, tile by tile, each tile continuing its painted neighbours so the city stays seamless.

Nice work. The developer of Isometric NYC did something similar - creating a fine-tune of the Qwen Image Edit model. I'd be curious to hear more detail about the image model you used. (the base checkpoint, LoRAs, etc).

akfanta

an hour ago

As someone who's only familiar with Valencia on Google Maps, I found the default orientation very confusing. Is it possible to configure it so that north always points upwards?

darkwater

32 minutes ago

Spanish cities by seaside have a pattern of putting the sea on the "south", even when it's not there.

leugim

an hour ago

On it. It will take some hours but it will be done.

stagas

18 minutes ago

This is super nice! It would be very interesting to share some details on how it was made. Good job!

jnmandal

an hour ago

So cool. Very curious what tools you used for making this!

vunderba

an hour ago

Not OP but the person who did the NYC isometric map has a pretty detailed breakdown of their process.

https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc

FLeXMurphy

30 minutes ago

> A few months ago I was standing on the 13th floor balcony of the Google New York 9th St office staring out at Lower Manhattan. I’d been deep in the weeds of a secret project using Nano Banana and Veo and was thinking deeply about what these new models mean for the future of creativity.

[Proceeds to generate a whole bunch of same-old-shit with LLMs.]

I guess the conclusion is that creativity is dead.

dn3500

an hour ago

The streetcar tracks fade out in places and I don't see any streetcars. And I can't see my narrow medieval street from this angle. But overall very impressive.

franciscop

an hour ago

Hey I'm from Valencia! This is pretty nice render of the city, thanks for sharing. I liked the mini game as well. Would've loved to see some other angles of some places though!

mapcars

an hour ago

That is a quite a nice way to explore a city, a middle ground between regular maps (too abstract, no sense of height) and detailed/realistic street view.

torben-friis

an hour ago

Missing some tents in Plaça de l'Ajuntament :)

harlequinetcie

an hour ago

Ohhhh very nice.

We should figure out a good game to play with it. Like adding transport infrastructure or you need to achieve X time reduction in commuting times.

Nice!

johnny_lol

an hour ago

Love it. I was just living in Valencia for the summer. But I still did horribly on the landmark-guessing game.

idbnstra

2 hours ago

cool! i wonder if there's a collection of all these isometric city projects

joeadler

an hour ago

Breath-taking! Well done!

cozzyd

2 hours ago

It's a good thing there was no Spanish Robert Moses...