TINY MOMBASA

Tiny Nairobi is a pixel-art map of Nairobi and of the towns that are near Nairobi. David Amunga made the full map on one computer from open data.

You can find an area, zoom in to a building, and see the clouds and the rain.

INSPIRATION

Inspired by Silicon Savannah and Rodi.

HOW IT WAS MADE (FOR NERDS)

1. Area. A script calculated the map area from the Nairobi County boundary and a buffer of 2.5 km. The script also added 15 towns that are near Nairobi.
2. Data. Scripts downloaded 1.51 million building outlines, the roads, the rivers, and the land use from Overture Maps. ESA WorldCover 2021 gave the land cover at 10 m. The Copernicus GLO-30 DEM gave the ground height at 30 m.
3. Ground. A Python script made approximately 84,000 ground tiles at zoom 18 into pixel art. Each material has a small palette of 4 colors, for example roads, murram, grass, trees, and water.
4. 3D scene. A three.js program in headless Chromium put the ground on the terrain. The program extruded the buildings with roofs and walls. The program also put a 3D tree at intervals of approximately 5.5 m in each tree area.
5. Camera. An orthographic camera looks to the north-east at a tilt of 30 degrees. This camera gives a 2:1 isometric view. The renderer made 3,318 shots of 512 m by 512 m.
6. Pixel art. Then a Python script made each shot into pixel art with a palette of 144 colors. The script added outlines at the edges of the buildings and the trees.
7. Tiles. One more Python script cut the full image into a Deep Zoom pyramid of 17,845 WebP tiles. The full image is 159,744 pixels by 79,872 pixels. The renderer and the scripts used approximately 90 minutes for the full area on a MacBook Pro.
8. Landmarks. A script made 72 iconic buildings from their OpenStreetMap footprints and 3D parts, for example KICC, Times Tower, and Britam Tower. The renderer then made the shots that show these buildings again.
9. Live layers. The viewer draws the night lights, the traffic, and the main roads on top of the tiles. The position of the sun over Nairobi gives the time of day. Busy hours give more matatus on the roads.
10. KTV. KTV is a news panel with pixel-art presenters and 6 channels: news, business, sports, technology, entertainment, and world news. A Cloudflare Worker gets the headlines from 22 public RSS feeds at intervals of 15 minutes. KTV shows each headline as the outlet wrote it, with a link to the story. On AUTO, KTV goes to the next channel after 3 stories.
11. Viewer. OpenSeadragon shows the tiles in your browser. The area names are from OpenStreetMap through Overture Maps. A Cloudflare Worker gets the Open-Meteo weather data at intervals of 15 minutes. Cloudflare Pages sends the site to your browser.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

Use the keyboard to find places, move the map, and show or remove the layers.

SHOW THE KEYBOARD GUIDE ?

DISCLAIMER

DATA AND CREDITS

• Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors and the Overture Maps Foundation (ODbL)
• Buildings: OpenStreetMap, Google Open Buildings, Microsoft Building Footprints, through Overture Maps
• Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 (CC BY 4.0)
• Terrain: Copernicus DEM GLO-30, © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA
• Weather: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0)
• KTV headlines: Nation, The Standard, Capital FM, Kenyans.co.ke, Tuko, Business Daily, TechCabal, and BBC News, from their public RSS feeds. Each headline links to the story on the site of the outlet.
• Software: OpenSeadragon, three.js. Fonts: Silkscreen and Atkinson Hyperlegible (SIL OFL)
• Privacy: this site counts visits with a self-hosted analytics service at analytics.davidamunga.com.

MADE BY

David Amunga, in Nairobi.