

Earth Primer - dluan
http://www.earthprimer.com/

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pserwylo
This is very cool indead. Reminds me of my time as an undergrad at uni, where
one of our projects revolved around making a game/sim like this. Everybody
else was trying to make 3D adventure games, but we were interested in "good
quality" (I put that in quotes because I just went back to look at the code
and shuddered) 2D games, that were more polished.

Our game was called "Land of Life" [0] (or Geco, according to the source code,
not sure why). It was a basic, fixed size, isometric tile game. To start with,
you are presented with a desert. The only thing you can do is add mountains,
and then hit play and watch clouds form and move over the mountains. If you
constructed your mountains well, you'd get nice oasis' with rivers flowing out
of the mountains, and greenery around it. If, you probably wouldn't get any
rivers, but would get some small shrubs.

From memory, the only heuristics about adding mountains were: You can only
make a mountain bigger if there are a certain number of mountains of a certain
size adjacent to it. It was a bit like game-of-life in that way, hence the
name "land of life". This worked surprisingly well for constructing mountain
ranges.

One main difference from our approach and the one linked to here is that
theirs looks absolutely amazing and educational, whereas ours used heuristics
that we dreamed up via trial and error.

[0] Screenshot (missing assets for river tiles, because I couldn't find the
final source code) - [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of-
life/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of-
life/master/screenshot.png)

EDIT:

Here is a screencast [1]. I still think it is nice how the first river which
heads off to the top right (rendered in black due to no river assets) gets
surrounded by trees because it is a source of water in the desert. This is not
based on any geological/ecological/climate knowledge on our part, but was
still fun to tinker with.

[1] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of-
life/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of-
life/master/screencast.webm)

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chrisfarms
This looks pretty great.

Getting closer to a world where The Young Lady's Primer is possible :)

~~~
BoppreH
I don't think the name similarity was a coincidence.

For context, The Young Lady's Primer is a fictional book in Neal Stephenson's
Diamond Age sci-fi novel. It's a electronic choose-your-own-adventure book
that tailors itself to the user, and is narrated by anonymized actors on the
background (think mechanical turkey). It's highly interactive, in much the
same way as Earth's Primer.

~~~
ashark
Is there any other fiction that explores the idea?

 _The Diamond Age_ spoilers follow.

One of many disappointments[1] for me past about 1/3 of the way in to the _The
Diamond Age_ was that the Primer didn't continue to exhibit new, interesting
behavior. It seemed like the promise of the Primer at the beginning was that
it would be a companion that grew with Nell and continued to react to what was
going on around her, but past a certain point it's just a smarter-than-average
interactive fiction edutainment game, so that the in-the-book scenes
increasingly felt like digressions in to World-of-Warcraft-plus-math than
anything really innovative (or narratively interesting for that matter), as
they have less and less to do with Nell's immediate environment and don't
change as she grows older, aside from the material getting more difficult.
Even Nell often seems bored by it in the later chapters.

Maybe that's a subtle nod to how some video games have more resources put in
to the first few levels to generate good reviews, then phone it in for the
rest :-)

I'd love to see the idea of the nanotech educational book-companion (or
similar) explored more fully. Those early scenes are _so_ powerful.

[1] Oh man, that pages-long part near the end that exists solely for one
character to tell us what another's motivations had been for the second half
of the book, since there'd have been no way for the reader to guess otherwise.
Closest I've ever come to punching a book.

~~~
anon4
Sounds like a Peter Molyneux game.

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beggi
That's really awesome. I'd love an app like that for the human body,
electronics and more subjects.

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teekert
Any plans for Android?

~~~
chaimgingold
Depending on how the iPad reception goes, I will entertain the possibility of
translations to other languages and ports to other platforms. I'm a one man
show (despite having an excellent illustrator and composer and video
producer), and have been working on this for over four years. This isn't a
full time project for me right now, so I would have to enlist help.

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mckeeboards
Chaim Gingold the creator of this is pretty awesome. Here's some more of his
work [http://levitylab.com/cog/](http://levitylab.com/cog/)

~~~
georgeoliver
There's an interesting post on the motivation for this here,
[http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/06/geology-an-
interactive...](http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/06/geology-an-interactive-
primer/) (note the post date).

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JoshuaRedmond
Looks like the site is having some weird DNS problems (I'm getting a 'host not
found' from the nameserver. Direct link to the video for anyone else having
problems getting to it -
[http://vimeo.com/116182914](http://vimeo.com/116182914)

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strictnein
Bought this yesterday. My kindergarten son has been asking a lot about
volcanoes, islands, and continents recently so this is a perfect fit. Good mix
of learning with interactivity.

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stephenitis
This is what the future should look like when it comes to learning materials
in k-12 schools. $9.99 is worth it. Please keep it up and make other resources
like this for other areas of science!

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zdrummond
Great job! My child is going to love this. He spends time just tooling around
Google Earth for fun. To be able to create volcanos and shape land is going to
delight him.

Thanks!

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mturmon
The author has chosen some really great examples of engaging phenomena - rain
shadows, plate tectonics. Very nice work.

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philbarr
That video is very elegant. Can you say what software/techniques you used to
create it?

~~~
chaimgingold
The trailer video was produced by Laura Kaltman. We scripted/wrote it
together, and iterated it many times. Laura wanted to make a 16:9 HD video,
but the iPad is 4:3, so many of the video captures were done with a special
developer Mac version of the app configured to output at a much higher
resolution and with custom screen layouts. (The Mac version, otherwise, looks
identical—all the same GLSL shaders and GL code.) This enabled us to get big,
high quality video for use in the trailer. Storyboards were vital for
conceiving, refining, and communicating about the script. These were made in
illustration programs.

~~~
chaimgingold
Developing this video was one of the most important parts of explaining the
project; from this effort came the web site and other materials. I've uploaded
some storyboard PDFs to give some insight into this process. If there's enough
interest I could share the 1st revision of the trailer—which didn't work in
all kinds of interesting ways.

1st major revision notes:
[http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v1.1...](http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v1.1.pdf)

2nd major revision notes:
[http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v2.p...](http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v2.pdf)

Trying to figure out why 1st take wasn't working:
[http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Trailer%20Notes%20Meta.pdf](http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Trailer%20Notes%20Meta.pdf)

~~~
infinite8s
Please do share the 1st version of the trailer. Seeing intermediate steps is
always more insightful than the trying to back out the decision behind a final
product.

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rudeboy347
This is super cool. I can see this idea being used for other specialties.

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tzhgseth
_So earth works by being controlled by a god?_

Was my first though. I don't know if this is more in support of science or
religion.

~~~
comboy
One could also think that while playing SimCity. It haven't gone through my
mind though.

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bovermyer
Well, there goes my afternoon.

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01Michael10
I like to see how the Earth works but it doesn't run on the most popular
mobile OS in the world. Sigh...

~~~
Tepix
HN is probably not the place that can change it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984253)

