Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi (loficities.com)
104 points by safaelmali 3 hours ago
thih9 2 hours ago
The product hunt ad is breaking the immersion for me. I know that most cities have ads but still, I prefer ad free pixel art.
It’s also not realistic, in one landscape the billboard is taller than a 9 story building.
trevoragilbert 2 hours ago
It feels bolted on to an otherwise cool thing. Even angling the board, or smudging, dimming color, localizing language, etc. All would make it feel like it fits.
sublinear an hour ago
I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but the way the dithering is used feels very "generated" and chaotic.
Human pixel art tends to be very deliberate about the exact colors of every pixel and their placement tends to follow idealized (but not necessarily geometric) shapes.
The last time I saw dithering this sloppy was decades ago when people would scan photos as low color images. It is its own vibe, but it's a cold and rough one. These artifacts feel more "realistic", but it felt like slop back then too.
willmeyers 2 minutes ago
> Created with AI-assisted tools, curated and prepared as ready-to-use video loops.
They are. And they are charging $19 to buy AI generated art (https://safaelmali.gumroad.com/l/lofi-cities-complete-collec...).
kromokromo 11 minutes ago
Yes, that’s the tell tale sign of AI generative pixel art. AI can’t be consistent with the pixels. Looks ok sometimes but never pops.
blobdole 23 minutes ago
Very cool project. I love the tour aspect of it!
I first saw Paris from inside the room, and only later realized that 90% of the cities seem to be outdoors. It did make me kind of miss the indoor theming of the local area.
Also make me think how cool it would be to be able to toggle between being indoors or on the balcony. Shift the volume of the music vs the weather, maybe add some city sounds and shift them as well. Finally, it means you could have twice as much visual variety for only 50% more art.
iand675 an hour ago
There's a lot to like here, but too AI-generated for me. The pixel art for Tokyo & Hong Kong don't use proper Chinese/Japanese characters. The pulsating badges in the non-pixel UI are also pretty AI-indicative in a way that is distracting.
timenotwasted 3 hours ago
Gorgeous, very well executed. I'm guessing the primary request will be more cities but I'll deviate and say I'd love to see more views as well. Would be nice to have the same set of cities by I can see it from a studio view same way it is in the Paris view. Or from an office. Or a cafe.
andsoitis 3 hours ago
So cool. Add Los Angeles, Cape Town, Florence, Cairo, Athens, Vancouver, São Paulo.
Actually, shouldn't it be possible to auto-generate any city via AI on demand?
vunderba 2 hours ago
Maybe to a degree but this isn’t just somebody using Seeddance to generate a first-frame-and-last-frame video loop and calling it a day.
There's definitely some manual curation. They even have assets that are clearly being placed into the scene, like the boats moving in the water.
You could theoretically generate all possible animated sprites (birds, people, vehicles, etc.) for use in any given cityscape, but automatically segmenting/detecting the different valid "paths/waypoints" where those assets should be placed would probably end up looking pretty janky.
XenophileJKO an hour ago
Maybe??.. Opus 5.5 is a giant step function up with "manual illustration". Quite a bit better than Astra. It is entirely possible to get this quality of animation "hand drawn" from Opus 5.5...
Honestly I was blown away, it is one capability that blindsided me. I haven't been this surprised by a capability lift in a long time.
vunderba 22 minutes ago
mft_ an hour ago
Nice idea, but the rain sound (at least on my system) isn't rain - it's just white noise?
losteric an hour ago
White noise is better than the repetitive and generic synthetic music I got
TomGarden 2 hours ago
This is a vibe! Is this pixel art AI generated?
zaxioms 2 hours ago
There's a lot of AI on the author's github, so I would assume so. I have no idea how I feel about these sorts of things. On the one hand I think it's objectively a super neat idea, but it makes me sad that a human (probably) didn't make the art/songs.
userbinator 2 hours ago
A human did --- just indirectly, in the same way as using a compiler or assembler instead of writing each byte by hand.
johnfn 2 hours ago
vunderba 2 hours ago
Yes according to the author - the assets were created with AI tooling.
https://safaelmali.gumroad.com/l/lofi-cities-complete-collec...
TomGarden an hour ago
Ah that's a bummer. I'm unsure if this is gonna change over time, but it entirely tanks my enjoyment of any visual art project to know it was generated.
NDlurker 3 hours ago
This would be cool as a Roku channel
namirsab an hour ago
Love it! Really cool idea!
bitwize an hour ago
I love the FM synth in the music. Some of the patches from Sonic games can be heard.
Razengan 3 hours ago
Man, wish we had dynamic wallpapers like this, and we could have had it decades ago.
Why do companies like Apple & Microsoft sterilize themselves so?
andelink an hour ago
Just tested and this works great on macOS with Plash [1] by Sindre Sorhus. I couldn't find too many URL parameters to control it, but the FAQ does mention an ?obs parameter to hide the interface by default and ?weather=... to choose the weather. This URL in Plash works as described:
https://loficities.com/tokyo/?obs&weather=leaves
richarme an hour ago
This was already a thing almost 3 decades ago. Active Desktop [0] was just a web page displayed instead of the wallpaper image.
andsoitis 2 hours ago
Wallpapers that move would make for poor usability.
ciberado 2 minutes ago
When using my 32 inch screen sometimes I set the wallpaper to a random walk video in YouTube and it works fantastically. I know that it is counter intuitive, but the contrast between real and moving elements and static and almost flat Windows makes for a nice experience. And helps fighting text editing fatigue.
Of course, ymmv. But give it a try.
Razengan 35 minutes ago
That's up to personal preference. Just like with static wallpapers, some people like single subtle colors, some people like noisy multicolored wallpapers.
There's already subtle parallax in iOS etc.
Animated wallpapers could be subtle, like raindrops, or animate only when interacted with.
Cockbrand 2 hours ago
I was having a very similar thought - finally a nice use case for HTML wallpapers like Windows used to have them. I bet that there's a trick to have this as a desktop background in Wayland, but I'm too lazy to find out right now.
Either way, really nicely made, I love it! Small change request: adjust the CSS to make the controls look less vibecode-y.
Vakaiser 2 hours ago
While it's not free or a first party offering, I've had great success with Cindori Backdrop:
rishirathod1165 2 hours ago
So cool