alt Hacker NewsShow HN: A CSS-Only Terrain Generator
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Wow this really feels like roller coaster tycoon!!! (I can see lots of people refer to this to their favorite sim game though)
Great work!
Lots of javascript for a "css-only" tool. Looks like just the rendering is css-only.
Really reminds me of openttd, especially the sandy border around the water
Looks really cool and runs great on my phone.
Seems like there's some kind of rendering bug in the corners sometimes causing the walls to intersect the grass
I've used a few terrain generators before but I think this one might be my favourite. Obviously the fact its a "CSS only" demo project restricts things a bit, but its got enough going for it regardless.
It actually comes at a really good time for me, I'm currently trying to make the transition from 2d game dev to 3d and things like this are really helpful.
This thing is killing my CPU, what's the actual bottleneck here for CSS? Is it the number of elements visible and rendered at once? Is it the calculation engine backing CSS is super slow? Or just that most of the work is being done on the CPU it seems (on my machine, rotating around the map, my integrated GPU goes to 20% but CPU stays around 40-50%).
Really cool, especially when I realised you could rotate the terrain and do some zooming as well.
Impressive, but there is a noticeable lag after modifying the terrain or moving the camera. Is there a way to know if the browser is using the GPU or CPU for rendering, and is there are way to see the milliseconds per frame?
Can someone please reimplement something like Warcraft 2 on a mobile web device?
It would be a hit, I’m telling you. Even from 1995.
Some people are still playing it 30 years later, obsessively.
And myth ii by Bungie is a classic too
Very cool! Do you think it’s possible to do lakes and waterfalls?
for those interested in more CSS-Only art, Lynn Fisher makes some neat stuff
I got some rendering issues, but otherwise very cool !
https://i.imgur.com/qT6ozyh.png
Firefox 144.0.2, Windows
It is giving Sega Genesis "Populous" vibes.
Dark Reader mutilates the rendered output, but only certain tiles. No clear pattern as to what tiles get mangled. Peculiar.
The next obvious step will be SimCity 2000 completely implemented using web tech. One can hope!
1. what's a layou tit?
2. does it sometimes raise / lower by 2 units?
3. the "flatten" tool is missing.
Reminds me of RCT, very nice!
This is super cool! Wonder how hard it would be to use with an RTS game.
Amazing job by an amazing developer!
This is really cool.
Impressive work
looks sick! great job :)
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Crazy that vibe coding can make things like this now! 2026 going to be crazy! There is no AI bubble
When I turn off JS, it shows a loader instead of the terrain. Is this really CSS-Only? I mean it's still a high achievement even with JS, but was expecting it would also work without JS. This one, for example, truly works without JS https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/ .