City maps in the style of 1980s video games. The 8-Bit Cities project, which started with 8-Bit NYC, is an attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space.
The lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation.
This web map was created using a custom rendering engine, with help from several excellent open source software and data packages. The underlying geometry for map features such as roads & parks comes from OpenStreetMap, © by contributors, CC-BY-SA.
The snazzy pixel fonts are by the artist Miffies (some have been modified). The map graphics are assembled in Python: for each 16×16 pixel tile, a series of spatial tests are performed via SQL/PostGIS.
Based on the results (what’s here: a road, a park, a lake?), the appropriate bitmap tile is selected. The bitmaps are then tesselated into larger 256×256 pixel tiles, and served to your browser.
“Für Fans von 8bit, 80iger Konsolen und Zelda ein Muss. Die interaktiven old school Karten für die ganz persönlichen Rollenspiele sind bis jetzt für acht Städte verfügbar.”
http://8bitcity.com
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