Show HN: Valencia, Spain in Sim City/Isometric View (tinyvalencia.com)
148 points by leugim 7 hours ago
NikolaNovak 2 hours ago
1. Awesome!
2. I read the info, but I'm incredibly curious for more detail about the pipeline, in particular how much manual work was done, and can this be generalized to other locations? :)
paulbjensen 10 minutes ago
Valencia is a fantastic city to visit - I really loved seeing it back in January 2020, right before the pandemic kicked in.
vunderba 4 hours 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 5 hours 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?
leugim 5 hours ago
On it. It will take some hours but it will be done.
lausobo 3 hours ago
As someone from Valencia, currently in Valencia: same! Hehe
OP great work, I love it.
matallo 3 hours ago
Likewise! As someone born and raised in Valencia, I found the orientation with the centered position a bit confusing. That said, the layout makes much more sense when focusing on Estación del Norte and Plaza de Toros.
Congrats on the launch! I was so excited when I saw this post.
darkwater 4 hours ago
Spanish cities by seaside have a pattern of putting the sea on the "south", even when it's not there.
nico 2 hours ago
I love it. Could someone please combine it with https://city2026.app/play/
And make it actually playable? Or let me know if you’d like to collaborate, it’d be a fun project
zahlman 2 hours ago
I guess you're thinking of SimCity 2000? The original used a flat top-down view (with perhaps a bit of "forced perspective" in the artwork for individual zones).
villosil 2 hours ago
Thanks for sharing! I'm from the region, and I really enjoyed the map and the games! In a year or so, the map will need a stadiums update :D Amunt Valencia!
Michael_Houben 4 hours 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 !!
jnmandal 5 hours ago
So cool. Very curious what tools you used for making this!
vunderba 4 hours ago
Not OP but the person who did the NYC isometric map has a pretty detailed breakdown of their process.
FLeXMurphy 4 hours 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.
larodi 4 hours 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,.
ericmay 3 hours ago
Idk, it looks like better pixel art than most stuff I've seen. I'm a big fan and enjoy the website and think they did a really great job.
adwn 2 hours ago
"It's only real pixel art if it originates from the bare hands of a starving artist, otherwise it's called 'sparkling bytes'."
This kind of gate-keeping is getting so tiresome…
nekooooo 6 minutes ago
no you're right, we'll eat slop and like it
torcete 2 hours ago
I can't see the pink panter fountain, although it says it's there.
dn3500 4 hours 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 5 hours 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!
green-frog-445 2 hours ago
I live in valencia!
mapcars 5 hours 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.
stagas 4 hours ago
This is super nice! It would be very interesting to share some details on how it was made. Good job!
petargyurov an hour ago
This is cute!
First thing I did was zoom in on the City of Arts and Sciences and I can tell you that the science museum definitely doesn't have waterfalls along it's sides haha
torben-friis 5 hours ago
Missing some tents in Plaça de l'Ajuntament :)
cozzyd 5 hours ago
It's a good thing there was no Spanish Robert Moses...
harlequinetcie 5 hours 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 5 hours ago
Love it. I was just living in Valencia for the summer. But I still did horribly on the landmark-guessing game.
jorisboris 4 hours ago
I saw a couple of these on Twitter in the last 24 hours
But this one is particularly detailed, very nice!
vunderba 4 hours ago
I'm sure it wasn't the first, but the one that got a lot of traction was from about nine months ago - the isometric view of New York City.
idbnstra 5 hours ago
cool! i wonder if there's a collection of all these isometric city projects
joeadler 4 hours ago
Breath-taking! Well done!
khazhoux an hour ago
it's just so damn pretty!
kubenest an hour ago
now that's cool, how much of it was automated?
consensus1 4 hours ago
Dense development right up to farmland. Something you will never see in a US city. Not surprising that Valencia is 4x as dense as Atlanta even though Atlanta is 5x more population.
https://tinyvalencia.com/?lat=39.498684&lng=-0.384359&zoom=1...