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Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – an interactive 3D map of the city centre

64 points2 hoursp.migdal.pl

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!

stared • 2 hours ago

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.

wossab • 51 minutes ago

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.

ivanjermakov • 21 minutes ago

> Sure beats HTML tables with text and pictures

Except this websites chokes many desktop PCs, not to mention phones.

sixtyj • 1 hour ago

Mobile version reloads, imho it is too heavy for Safari.

Well done.

As default weather - I would prefer sunny day instead of rain…

stared • 33 minutes ago

Yeah, it is a bit heavy, but I had to balance features and performance without adding too many toggles that push choices onto the user (often when it is already too late). I optimized it primarily for desktop, with some ideas for making it lighter on phones (rendering only small parts in 1m3 voxels and the rest in gray 8m3 blocks).

When it comes to weather, I am torn between always using golden hour with a clear sky and using the current weather.

camies • 1 hour ago

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.

throw_a_grenade • 1 hour ago

A bit unfortunate it doesn't reach to the Old Town, or even Royal Palace. But impressive stuff nonetheless!

stared • 20 minutes ago

Good point! I've already expanded the area from something much smaller (so to go to the National Stadium and so on). The first draft is easy, since Opus 5.5 is good at working with open data and checking against it.

What takes much more time is polishing. Sometimes things are jagged or wrong, streets are disconnected, some tree crowns float in the air, and bridges look like they’ve been hit by an airstrike.

I check things manually, compare them with photos, etc.

java-man • 1 hour ago

Is it raining, or are those rendering artifacts on a fractional scale monitor?

edit: it is raining!

thehamkercat • 1 hour ago

Yes it's raining, you can change the weather on top-left of the website

donovan-places • 30 minutes ago

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