from Hacker News

Threescaper: A website for loading Townscaper models into Three.js

by Red_Tarsius on 6/15/24, 12:13 PM with 24 comments

• by kibwen on 6/15/24, 1:45 PM

  For context, Townscaper is a lovely, meditative townbuilding game (or what you might classify as a toy, since there's no obstacles, progression, or external objectives). It's only $6 and I highly recommend it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/

  In the same vein is an upcoming game called Tiny Glade, which currently has a free demo available, and HN may be interested to know that it's written in Rust and makes use of Bevy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/

• by padolsey on 6/15/24, 1:57 PM

  Oh my god! Seriously. Wow. This is honestly sublime – emotionally. For so long I've had townscaper builds, many of which were from a really crummy time for me in my life. I still build at least one a week, as a kind of meditative task. I've always so wanted to explore these little creations. They often have embedded coves, labyrinthine stairways, and hidden gardens that the normal controls make impossible to fully appreciate.

  So this is ... wonderful.. and I'm so so so grateful there are people that make these things. What a beautiful surprise to see on HN! Thank you so much for sharing this :)))) EDIT: my day tomorrow is entirely forecast to be spent indoors navigating these little worlds. EDIT2: I wonder if there's a way to get to floating castles? I seem to get dropped in the ocean below.

  EDIT3: A rather big build I'm whiling away time on: j11y.io/stuff/Town.obj

• by catapart on 6/15/24, 3:08 PM

  Awesome project! I've been very excited about stuff like this cropping up - where people take model-builders and then load those models into first/third-person 3d scenes. I know someone trying to do a similar kind of thing with Cities: Skylines, and I just can't wait!

  But this is exactly as satisfying and surreal as I had thought it would be. You did a great job with this! If I had one note, it would be to start the player high above the map and let us fall into the town so we can kind of see the whole of it, as we fall. I simulated this in your demo map by running and holding jump as I ran up and across roofs which resulted in some wonky super-high jumps. Which I'm not saying are a bug! It just led me to being way up over the map and falling back down onto, which was really nice.

• by thatgamer44 on 6/15/24, 4:38 PM

  Townscaper also has a Unity WebGL build, for anyone interested:

  https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/

• by herpdyderp on 6/15/24, 3:49 PM

  When I'm in the demo, it lags to <30fps while I'm on any part of the city. However, once I leave it for the water (with the whole city in view), it surpasses 60fps. Why would that be? I expected having the whole city in view would drop the FPS rather than raise it.

• by knighthack on 6/15/24, 3:51 PM

  This is seriously amazing! Could have potential for parkour-like games, or even for exploring randomly generated liminal spaces.

• by lsaferite on 6/15/24, 2:22 PM

  That demo page gave me Battlefield Heroes vibes and made me nostalgic and sad. Looks really cool in any case.

• by petermcneeley on 6/16/24, 12:29 AM

  There is some issues with the geometry that become very noticeable at a distance. Also while the nearest neighbor filtering looks good close up it aliases very badly at a distance.

• by genghisjahn on 6/15/24, 3:53 PM

  This game is also great on the quest 2 and 3.

• by SamBam on 6/15/24, 6:19 PM

  Lovely. I love that double jump works -- you can get on top of the very highest building in the demo.

• by needfish on 6/16/24, 8:54 AM

  This might be what push me to buy Townscaper