VICE MAPS
A GTA: Vice City–flavoured driving sandbox that runs on real streets, anywhere on Earth.
Type a place — your street, Miami Beach, Shibuya — and it pulls the actual road network and
building footprints for that spot and turns them into a drivable city.
No build step, no dependencies, no API key. Open index.html and drive.
git clone https://github.com/RaushanSakhibzadin/GoogleMapsGTA.git
cd GoogleMapsGTA && open index.html # or: python3 -m http.server
Free and always will be. Any tier gets GHOST MODE: full speed across open ground and
straight through buildings, where the car is otherwise a road car that drops to walking pace off
the tarmac. Backers get the word that unlocks it, in a post on the page.
Controls
| |
|---|
| W A S D / arrows | drive, reverse, steer — up to 360 km/h |
| Space | handbrake — hold it into a corner and the back end steps out |
| H | horn |
| N / the ☾ pad | daylight ⇄ dusk. The game opens in daylight |
| V / the 3D button | top-down view ⇄ chase view |
| M / tap the radar | the full city map — drag to pan, pinch to zoom |
| R / the bar along the bottom | next radio station; the name plays and stops it |
| ♪ | two volumes, the game's and the radio's |
| ⤓ LOG | saves what the map servers sent and everything that went wrong |
| Esc | pause / change city |
| touch | on-screen pads appear automatically on phones and tablets |
What's in it
- Real map. Road centrelines with their OSM class, buildings at their real heights and
colours, names painted across the wall that carries them.
- A 120 km city in about eight seconds. Every lane across the 5.4 km you start in, arterials
for 60 km, and more streets streaming in as you drive.
- Five shifts — courier, taxi, police, fire, ambulance. Clock on at a real depot: a taxi rank,
a police station, a fire station, a hospital. The engine and the ambulance are their own
vehicles, not repainted cars.
- Traffic, police, pedestrians, a wanted level, repair shops, and a day/night switch.
- Buildings you cannot squeeze between. A car is a body rather than a point, so a gap
narrower than the car is a wall — for the police and the traffic as well. And when something
does have you pinned, the pauk comes: Belgrade's tow truck, either from the button that
appears once you have been stuck for a few seconds or on its own after twenty-five, and it
carries you to the nearest police station for $100 — or for nothing, if you have nothing.
- Trees where OSM says there is green. Street trees along the verges, and a stand of them
filling every park, garden and courtyard lawn in the data — anything from a street tree's own
height up to three times it, 8 to 40 m, so a park is saplings and half-grown trees under a few
mature ones. The park ones are grown, not stamped: a recursive branching in three
dimensions, each generation shorter and thinner and forking wider than its parent, with the
foliage hung on the outer twigs so the canopy's outline comes from where the branches actually
reached. Planted off a world-aligned lattice, so a rebuilt block comes back identical.
- Red or black. OpenStreetMap knows where the casinos are, so they are on the map where they
really are — Belgrade has dozens. Two buttons at the table, a tenth of your money on a fair
coin, and whichever colour you pick more is the side you are on. From the first bet you carry
a spray can: a wall you paint goes your colour in the street, in the chase view and on the
radar, with an unreadable tag across its ground floor. Every so often the other side takes one
back. A city with no casinos in OSM simply has none, and nothing else changes.
- The camera faces the way you are going. Reverse hard and it swings round the front of the
car so you are looking at the road you are backing into, and comes back when you drive on. Two
thresholds with a dead band between them, so shunting out of a parking space does not spin it.
- Three renderers: Canvas 2D top-down, hand-written WebGL2 for the chase view, and software 3D
for a browser with WebGL turned off.
- No image assets. Every texture is grown from fractal noise at load.
How it works
| |
|---|
| Geocoding | Nominatim turns "Ocean Drive, Miami Beach" into a lat/lon |
| Geometry | Overpass API, out geom qt;. Split into streets / buildings / landmarks so the loading screen only waits for what it cannot start without |
| Projection | Local equirectangular: x = (lon−lon₀)·111320·cos(lat₀). Metres are the world unit |
| Physics | Forward/lateral velocity split, per-car mass, OBB collisions off a 26 m bucket grid |
| Off-road | A drivable mask stamped along centrelines; off it the car crawls, unless GHOST |
| Streaming | 1.8 km tiles, geometry batched per 512 m cell, one cell built per frame |
| Loading | The screen waits 9 s for the streets and 6 for the wide map, then starts you in the bundled city and keeps the request running — if it lands, the real city swaps in behind the wheel. Silent mirrors cost 10 s instead of 42 |
| Cache | Every script is fetched with ?v=<hash> over the contents of all of them, so a deploy is never invisible |
| Tests | 87 Playwright suites — node tests/run.mjs, about fifty minutes |
Everything is plain <script> files sharing one global scope, deliberately not ES modules:
modules are blocked over file://, and opening the game straight off disk is the point. Load
order is fixed in index.html.
index.html markup style.css styling data/belgrade.js the offline city
js/i18n.js ten languages js/util.js palette, theme
js/geo.js network: Overpass, Nominatim js/log.js the session log
js/world.js OSM parsing, indexes, streaming js/terrain.js the heightfield
js/turf.js casinos, the bet, the spray can
js/entities.js cars, traffic, police, physics js/body3d.js the car as a cuboid
js/game.js state, shifts, missions, wanted js/io.js input, audio, canvas
js/render.js top-down view js/render3d.js chase view + the dispatcher
js/soft3d.js chase view without a GPU js/gl.js WebGL2 plumbing, ear clipping
js/carmesh.js the car mesh js/proctex.js every texture, from fractals
js/radio.js the dial js/main.js the loop, menus, debug hooks
tools/ buildcity.py, logfixture.py, stamp.mjs, glb2car.py, perkword.mjs, mirror.mjs
tests/ the suite, and the captured sessions it replays
Why the decisions are not in this file. Nearly every non-obvious line in this repo carries a
comment saying what was tried, what it measured, and why it is the way it is. That is where the
reasoning lives — next to the code it explains, where it cannot drift out of date.
About Google Maps
The repo is called GoogleMapsGTA and the original ask was Google Maps. It uses OpenStreetMap
instead, for two reasons: the Google Maps API needs a billed key, which cannot go in a public
repo; and Google serves rendered tiles — pictures of a map, with no road centrelines or
building polygons in them, so there would be nothing to collide against. Overpass returns real
vector geometry, which is what the physics needs.
Credits
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
Geocoding by Nominatim, geometry by Overpass — please respect their usage policies.
Radio directory by Radio Browser.
A parody tribute. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Rockstar Games or Google.
