alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre
Explore central Warsaw in voxels - slightly inspired by Minecraft, and MagicaVoxel. You can change the date, time of day and weather, explore the city, or click on a pedestrian to control them (here a bit of inspiration from Dungeon Keeper).
Works best on desktop, but I tried to make it usable on mobile too. The initial load can take a while. It's based on several open datasets, including:
- OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/52.02/19.14) - buildings, streets, sidewalks, tram tracks, etc
- GUGiK / Geoportal (https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/) - LiDAR for building heights and trees, aerial imagery for colours
- Warsaw's city tree database (https://mapa.um.warszawa.pl/) - individual tree species, used for seasonal foliage
Open-source (https://github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel), so feel invited to (re)use it as you wish!
Comments
I really enjoyed visiting Warsaw, I went there for work a few years ago and didn't really know what to expect.
If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
It's almost unusably slow on my laptop. 3080ti mobile, windows 11, chrome. I opened the profiler and the update appears to be fast enough; roughly hitting 30fps, but there are massive gaps between updates and the actual frame time seems to be about 120ms.
Other than that, neat :)
The voxel version of Złota 44 doesn't do it justice. I mean, just look at this thing:
Mobile version reloads, imho it is too heavy for Safari.
Well done.
As default weather - I would prefer sunny day instead of rain…
Wow such amazing work! I love it.
I have good memories of my visits to Warsaw. Very walkable city so I spent a lot of time doing that (despite being there on tiresome work trips).
Nice. At first glance looks cool, but then, oh my, some areas are really butchered :S Poor Old Town and Plac Zamkowy - I'm familiar with the area and at first was scanning trying to find it visually by the features I know are there, but then in this model it's very different (wrong color, many more floors in this model, a 20-story building where at most should be at most a 5-story, the old town castle looking like a gray residential 'blok' and not the prettier structure that it is!).
Unusable because of (lack of) performance. I have a laptop with a dedicated GPU...
I really like this, not trying to be annoying but is the main point that we can walk around in first person or does it lend itself to be ported to minecraft or something?
Sorry to be weird and ask. Very impressive though I like it.
For the longest time I wanted this as the interface for a Local News website I was participating in. It was impossible at the time but I hope it will become a thing. Sure beats HTML tables with text and pictures.
It was raining when I opened it. Is that tied to the live weather?
It's really good, and responsive in Firefox on my android tablet.
small part of Downtown.. looks cool but instantly one wants more, especially if you know what this city can offer today and how rapidly it's changing its landscape!
Really impressive. The autumn trees and the golden hour light make it feel alive, and the landmark labels are a nice touch. Fun to fly around the city centre.
A bit unfortunate it doesn't reach to the Old Town, or even Royal Palace. But impressive stuff nonetheless!
A fragment of Śródmieście (the downtown center of Warsaw). The Old Town and most of the right bank (including Praga) are missing.
In any case, very fun. Hope it improves.
Is it raining, or are those rendering artifacts on a fractional scale monitor?
edit: it is raining!
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There are quite a few such other projects, e.g. Streets of Prague (https://beta.streetsofprague.com/), were one can explore Prague in a top-down GTA2-like mode, based on real data.