A little window / an endless city
Somewhere, above.
Town notes & traffic governor
300 × 300 · made as you fly
no footage. no map. just a passing moment.
Click a lane for a random car or blue motorcycle.
Traffic keeps its distance; crowded clicks can cause chaos.
Keyboard: L finds a lane · arrows aim · Enter adds.
Traffic governor · checking roads
A rule-based controller, not a trained traffic engineer.
- Junctions checked nearby
- 0
- Closed road approaches
- 0
- Drivers waiting at signals
- 0
- Safety interlocks active
- 0
Coordinated green / amber / all-red phases, marked stop lines, pedestrian crossings, keep-clear exits, two-second following gaps, no U-turns, legal-side lanes, residential speed limits, accident closures and alternate home routes. Clearance uses real simulation seconds, never the accelerated town clock.
Checked roads with no safe exit stay closed. Occupied junctions and crossing pedestrians hold both vehicle approaches red. Wrecked approaches close until recovery. Camera-neighborhood audits refresh twice per simulation second.
This miniature models two-way residential grids, not every modern road type or local law: no motorway merges, roundabouts, dedicated cycle lanes, rail crossings, weather-dependent braking or emergency-vehicle priority. Governor diagnostics describe only the modeled streets.
About the films & places
The downtown clock starts at 30 city minutes per real second: a full day in 48 seconds. Below it, << halves and >> doubles the time rate, clamped at 1 city second per real second and 2 city hours per real second. The unavailable direction is disabled at either limit. These controls affect the clock and daylight, not car speed or signal clearance. Drag around the clock face to wind forward or backward (one revolution is 12 hours), or scroll by 15 minutes. Automatic clock movement pauses while dragging. Arrow keys adjust one minute; Shift + arrow adjusts 15 minutes; Page Up/Down adjusts one hour. Home selects sunrise at 06:00, End sunset at 21:00. The readout uses 24-hour time. Winding changes daylight and daily routines, not the physical history of cars. Original city-branded dials and architectural cases evoke local town clocks, architecture and music; they are not Rolex products or replicas. Paris is atelier classic, Munich traditional Rathaus, Istanbul Bosphorus ornament, Seattle industrial punk, New York Art Deco, London Westminster and Ibiza Balearic modern.
The full HH:MM:SS digital clock stays visible at every speed, between the slower and faster buttons. The multiplier near the dial shows the exact time rate. To keep fast hands calm, the second hand is shown through 5× time and the minute hand through 300× (five city minutes per real second); faster hands disappear. The hour hand stays visible. Slow down to restore the other hands. System reduced-motion preference starts playback paused.
Playback defaults to 30 FPS. Each new roll chooses a stable paper tilt within its city's range: Somewhere −3° to −1°, Paris −5° to −2°, Munich −1° to 1°, Istanbul 1° to 4°, Seattle −4° to −1°, New York 1° to 3°, London −2° to 0°, and Ibiza 2° to 5°. The city keeps its object scale; only the paper rotates. Full-screen mode remains level.
Sunrise is fixed at 06:00 and sunset at 21:00 for this miniature, with twilight on either side. The sun travels east to west (world east is right before camera rotation), casting long opposite shadows near the horizon and shorter shadows at midday. This is an idealized summer day, not date-, latitude- or weather-specific astronomy. Household lights gradually go out toward bedtime; streetlights remain on for safety.
Drivers and riders use a hand-coded driving policy informed by official guidance, not a trained model or a real driving qualification. They keep a two-second following gap, observe signals and pedestrian phases, reserve clear junction exits, signal turns, and plan legal routes to their own family homes. Blocked roads trigger another route at a junction, never a pavement shortcut or an oncoming-lane escape. These two-way streets have only one lane per direction, so passing and motorcycle filtering are conservatively disabled in every city. Bikes accelerate briskly but share the same modeled residential speed ceiling. Night arrivals park at home while fewer new journeys begin.
Driving references: Highway Code: junctions, clear exits and turning; Highway Code: spacing and residential driving; Washington motorcycle lane rules. Conservative shared rules are used where local law varies; this is not a complete legal model of any city.
Only the selected choice is shown at rest. Drag freely and release to snap to the nearest option; scrolling commits after a brief pause. Previews do not resize or regenerate the city. Escape cancels an unfinished selection. Click city, film or FPS to shuffle, or use arrow keys to choose. The size dial grows by 100 px from 100 to 1000 px, followed by Full screen. Home selects 100 px; End selects Full screen. The default is a 300 px print at 30 FPS in Drone view. Enlarge selects 600 px; Small view restores your last 100, 200 or 300 px print. Wide prints scroll inside their frame on smaller screens. Full screen uses the available browser window with header and footer controls, not browser F11. Choose a numeric size or press Escape to leave Full screen. Town notes and governor diagnostics remain available in its footer drawer.
Print size and camera zoom are independent. A larger print reveals more streets at the same scale; Close up doubles the Drone scale, while Space view shows 1.5 times the Drone extent in each direction. Use the three choices to the right of the clock, or focus the selected choice and use arrow keys. Zoom keeps the current roll, clock and existing journeys. Playback, sound and Enlarge are on the left. Frame rate and view size do not change simulation speed; actual frame rate depends on your browser, hardware and the amount of city visible.
Traffic is automatically tuned: a 25% motorcycle draw, personal cruising paces and a soft original generative score. New insertions forecast four seconds ahead; crowded clicks can still overwhelm braking. Crashes block nearby lanes, not the whole city, and only then dispatch a rescue helicopter. Homes and nearby journeys are procedural and recycled outside the camera's neighborhood; the homecoming count records arrivals actually simulated this roll.
The City Chronicle records actual simulated events, newest first, in an observer's voice. Its counters cover this roll: people drowned, vehicles involved in collisions, wrecks delivered to the junkyard and helicopter sorties begun. The journal keeps the latest 120 entries while counters continue accumulating. New roll, a destination change or revisiting the landmark starts a fresh journal. On narrow screens it sits below the print, or folds into the full-screen footer.
Four embedded Web Workers handle Chronicle aggregation, film-grain textures and WAV synthesis, terrain rendering, and sidewalk pedestrian movement and rendering. Terrain batches yield between groups of blocks so they do not monopolize graphics work. Terrain and pedestrian images are transferred back for composition; their queues retain one active job and the newest pending job. Old-roll results and superseded images are rejected. The main thread remains the single authority for vehicle movement, junction reservations, road crossings, collisions and recovery, keeping safety decisions consistent rather than racing between workers. It also owns input, final composition and journal DOM updates. Vehicle bodies and parked helicopters reuse palette-specific sprites. Workers require a modern browser with Web Workers and OffscreenCanvas; failures are shown beside the journal rather than silently moving heavy work back to the game thread.
Every road over a finite river has a connected bridge, including north/south roads. Oceanfront roads cannot bridge an endless sea. Exposed banks have depth; pedestrians and wrecks can fall. Falls use gravity, crashes use mass-based impulses and ground friction, and rescue flight accelerates and brakes. Splash particles and ripples are clipped to open water, never land or bridges. This is a small stylized physics model, not a real-world driving simulator.
All 20 X100VI film modes, including ACROS and Monochrome filter variants, are represented by original palette approximations. These are not Fujifilm's proprietary simulations. Film grading also colors the paper and interface.
The cities are endless, reseeded impressions, not navigable maps. Landmarks recur as the camera travels. All junctions have vehicle and pedestrian signal phases; London uses left-hand traffic.
The blue motorcycle is a tiny top-view interpretation of a 2023 Harley-Davidson Sportster S: fat tires, blue tank, low seat and twin high-side exhausts. All audio is original, synthesized locally. Enable sound with an interaction; pause or mute silences it.
References: Fujifilm manual; Louvre; Eiffel Tower; Munich gardens; Frauenkirche; Istanbul; Seattle waterfront; Space Needle; Central Park; London; Ibiza.