This week’s post is a bit of an unusual one. Some friends of mine mentioned in conversation that they want to create a Web-based digital card game. As it happens, I have a half-baked card came design lying around from a few years ago, because of course that’s something I tried at some point, because …
Not a river in a forest; a forest of rivers. That makes sense, right? In this post, we’ll cover the first algorithm within Demiurge that can answer real questions about the map. How many major rivers are there? Which is the longest? What are the major watersheds? These and other similar questions all depend on …
It’s finally hot. I planned this post to coincide with the summer’s first hot weather, so I had originally expected to tackle this topic nearly a month ago, and yet here we are. The purpose of this post is to describe my idea for a “Peltier blanket,” a device that I hope will serve as …
This is going to be, by far, the most technical and least prosaic post I’ve yet written for this site. Following up on the overview of Brownian trees I presented in Part 1, this post will be dedicated to enumerating and explaining the modified Brownian tree used in Demiurge. In other words, we will be …
Note: Maya Legend adapted from Robert Laughlin’s Of Cabbages and Kings. His Eyes Full of Darkness Whose truth do I tell when I speak the words of another? -Anonymous Once there was a Chamulan whose wife died. His wife was a very good person. The man cried and cried. He wept over his wife. When …
In the last Demiurge post, I concluded by noting that the first step of a hydrology-first terrain generation system must be river system generation. Today, we get to take that first step. At last the real journey begins. Of Grammars and Triangles Almost every problem has been tackled before, and river network generation is no …
That’s not too bad a photograph, is it? I don’t think it’s on par with my typical post-topping photos, which I carefully curate from the dozens I take on my hikes. However, as a cell phone picture of Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC, I think it’s reasonably nice. It looks better than the real photo, …
How-To: Remove Things from Photographs, the Easy and Free Way Read More »
Geology and hydrology are the two great demiurges of the real world. Geological forces, we believe, war endlessly underground with unfathomable power, their eons-long struggle crushing mighty mountains toward the sky. Amidst these eons, hydrological forces sculpt the landscape granule by granule, each scratch a tiny victory in their endless endeavor to shave the mountains …
It began, as such things often do, with good intentions: brilliant men with ideals, and ideas that they believed in, and the hope of making things just a bit better. They thought they could revolutionize health care by learning where people went and what they did; massive pattern analysis algorithms could then watch for emerging …
I avoided the term procedural generation in my first post about Demiurge because I didn’t want to define it. However, since Demiurge itself is most accurately described as, “a procedural terrain generation engine,” I should probably clarify what that means. Procedural generation broadly refers to the creation (generation) of some form of data by means …