Show HN: Valencia, Spain in Sim City/Isometric View
tinyvalencia.com> 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).
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?
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.
On it. It will take some hours but it will be done.
As someone from Valencia, currently in Valencia: same! Hehe
OP great work, I love it.
Spanish cities by seaside have a pattern of putting the sea on the "south", even when it's not there.
I wish we all (many who have built similar projects in past few weeks) could agree on some common format of representing such maps, and then be able to drive through these in 3D...
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? :)
Interestingly I just run into something similar recently: https://tinyprague.com/
Fascinating genre of media I'm being told about tonight. I wonder how many of these there are, or if any cities I've lived in have one.
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,.
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.
"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…
no you're right, we'll eat slop and like it
"Slop" is not a synonym for "AI-created". The art on the linked website looks great and isn't slop.
And learn how to use the Shift key. If AI can do it, so can you!
what is this gigantic truck?
https://tinyvalencia.com/?lat=39.502413&lng=-0.384328&zoom=1...
Hallucination! I fixed some but clearly not all.
It's funny because there's absolutely nothing there. I would have expected some weirdly shaped building.
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
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).
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!
It's a fun concept though I noticed some errors:
Some buildings down South are not rendered: https://tinyvalencia.com/?lat=39.355397&lng=-0.322415&zoom=1...
And the Albufera has some weird edges, seems like artifacts from satellite imagery?.
Looking at the oddly shaped structures surrounded by water, it immediately jumped out as very Star Wars-y, and seemed familiar. And of course, turns out Andor was recorded there. I had no idea this was a real location. Very impressive architecture.
I've only been once, but it instantly became one of my favorite cities. Not too big, not too small. Very beautiful and interesting. The green belt is an ex-river turned in to a massive long park that runs through the city!
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 !!
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.
So cool. Very curious what tools you used for making this!
Not OP but the person who did the NYC isometric map has a pretty detailed breakdown of their process.
> 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.
Valencia has a little bit of everything, the old town, the beach, parque turia.
I did my part of checking accuracy. Very cool.
For those who wonder what that gigantic green garden is, it's one of the best thing in Valencia: it's the path of the old Turia river.
But because Valencia has regularly seen terrible floods, including floods with many deaths, with water reaching as high the second floor of some houses (!), at some point it's been decided to divert the Turia so that it doesn't flow in the middle of the city anymore.
Many cities have been build along a river and then spread on both side of the river: be it Paris, Prague, Brussels, Budapest (literally the name of the two sides of the river: Buda and Pest), etc.
But Valencia is magical in that the river has been diverted and most of the old path of the river has been transformed into garden / bike paths / run track / etc.
It's like if you were to take Paris, divert the "Seine" and in its place put a gigantic garden.
IMO more cities should do just that: Valencia is the proof it can be done.
> "at some point"
The "Plan Sur", during Franco's autocratic dictatorship, to redirect the Turia river as a response to the terrible 1957 floods.
No need to be vague.
Interestingly, the new riverbed was what saved the city of Valencia from the damage of the horrific flood in October 2024.
The Turia Gardens are, in my opinion, a huge differential feature of the city. And of course, I'm personally in love with it, and my life is deeply connected to it through memories and daily habits.
Plan Sur intended to build a highway. Massive civic mobilization in the 1970s defeated the highway project and contributed to making it what it is today.
HOW is there still no Tokyo?!
Valencia is a fantastic city to visit - I really loved seeing it back in January 2020, right before the pandemic kicked in.
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!
I live in valencia!
Missing some tents in Plaça de l'Ajuntament :)
It's a good thing there was no Spanish Robert Moses...
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
That's where the dragons are.
This is gorgeous. I would love to be able to take snapshots without the UI chrome.
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.
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!
This is super nice! It would be very interesting to share some details on how it was made. Good job!
Love it. I was just living in Valencia for the summer. But I still did horribly on the landmark-guessing game.
I can't see the pink panter fountain, although it says it's there.
I saw a couple of these on Twitter in the last 24 hours
But this one is particularly detailed, very nice!
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.
cool! i wonder if there's a collection of all these isometric city projects
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...
Breath-taking! Well done!
it's just so damn pretty!
now that's cool, how much of it was automated?
Most of it probably, the description says it's a isometric render of 3d data that is then restyled with a model.