A thread on on the beauty of procedurally generated maps | Hacker News Reader

A thread on on the beauty of procedurally generated maps

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293 pointshownottowrite27 comments

This is amazing, but I really wish people willing to put in this much effort would write a real article on literally any blogging/publishing platform vs. an impossible to read Tweetstorm (or whatever this is called).

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980968298002006016.html

Every little while when I scroll and a media element is displayed I experience a large stutter. That's an awful UI.

Agree. I have little love for Medium but it would be considerably more readable than this, and a subject this interesting really deserves a long-form article.

I suppose possibly it depends on where you perceive your audience to be and how you can most effectively reach them, but twitter certainly isn't optimal for my consumption.

Alternate format: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980968298002006016.html

Why doesn't Twitter look like this?

I may have actually started to use it if it looked like that.

I'm constantly amazed at how little effort Twitter put into UX. Many of the features were only adopted after 3rd parties made them popular (RTs, pictures) or because people found ways to circumvent the platform's limitations (People post pictures of text? Longer tweets, URLs no longer increase the character count, etc).

Also performance: I'm surprised the Twitter mobile interface is so laggy on an iPad Pro.

did not see this mentioned: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

What kind of sorcery is this??? Purely black magic computing :-)

That is pretty awesome: thanks for sharing. I am now desperately trying to think of a project where I can use this.

Oh, wow, this is super impressive!

I remember Strike Commander (1993) was generating its maps at install time, which took forever, but saved a lot of floppy disk space.

http://fabiensanglard.net/reverse_engineering_strike_command... http://fabiensanglard.net/reverse_engineering_strike_command...

Elite (1984) generated its maps on demand, in real time:

http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2015/01/14/procedural-content-g...

Admittedly, a few specks on a black background does not take a lot of generation!

That reminded me of this small piece[1] on the arcade version of Berzerk[2] from 1980.

> The maze for each level was established on the fly using a seed number fed into a rudimentary algorithm.

and, further,

> Each time the code is “cold started” the seed starts out at zero, but from there the room number is used as the next seed. This is fed through a very simple algorithm. It generates directions for the walls, which use s few bit-wise operations to add the pillars inside the rooms.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2013/07/21/how-the-mazes-were-generated...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)

Another beautiful example of a procedural city generator is that of the Subversion game once in development by Introversion software, makers of Uplink, Defcon and Darwinia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9xI0GgrBY

It was their intention to generate the entire city including building interiors and game elements. 20-part blog series with broken images can be found here: http://introversion.co.uk/subversion

I learned only now that the generator was apparently distributed once with a Humble Bundle.

The Internet Archive preserved the blog images: https://web.archive.org/web/20110210072637/http://introversi...

I recently wrote up an explanation of the way procedural generation works, and compiled a list of interesting live demos! Repo even contains some simple code to experiment with :)

https://github.com/Computer-Graphics-And-Pretty-Pictures/Pro...

Amit Patel's map generator (one of the examples) is a truly awesome piece of work http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

God I hate this post format.

There is something beautiful about randomly generated maps, especially in RTS games. 0AD has quite a few that are stunning.

I remember reading about the Minecraft generation algorithm years ago but can't find the link now. The worlds of minecraft are certainly beautiful in a similar sense.

Twitter seems especially unsuited for long-form "articles" like this. Neat generators and neat maps, but the whole time I was distracted by the breakup of text and flow.

Why not get a free Medium or WordPress account?

These sorts of threads are usually created as much to attract more Twitter followers as they are to impart interesting information. They can be easily shared around on Twitter (via retweets) so more people find the creator.

It's not that so much. People don't put effort into writing passionate threads like this solely for followers. They write passionate threads like this because they are passionate. Added followers are sometimes a side effect and rarely if ever the actual goal.

Well I didn't say anything like "solely for followers". They can be created out of passion and still posted on Twitter instead of somewhere else for a reason.

It does seem unfortunate that such a great collection of information is on such an ephemeral platform. Interesting enough that it doesn't matter much.

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