
A thread on on the beauty of procedurally generated maps - hownottowrite
https://twitter.com/ptychomancer/status/980968298002006016
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paxys
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).

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iKlsR
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980968298002006016.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980968298002006016.html)

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

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amitp
Alternate format:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980968298002006016.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980968298002006016.html)

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emilsedgh
Why doesn't Twitter look like this?

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

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lou1306
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).

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

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leeoniya
did not see this mentioned:
[https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse](https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse)

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

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glandium
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_commander/sc_mapgenerator.png)
[http://fabiensanglard.net/reverse_engineering_strike_command...](http://fabiensanglard.net/reverse_engineering_strike_commander/index.php)

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

[http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2015/01/14/procedural-
content-g...](http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2015/01/14/procedural-content-
generation-creating-a-universe/)

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

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dwringer
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...](https://hackaday.com/2013/07/21/how-the-mazes-were-generated-
for-classic-berzerk-game/)

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

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Confiks
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](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](http://introversion.co.uk/subversion)

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

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pronoiac
The Internet Archive preserved the blog images:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110210072637/http://introversi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110210072637/http://introversion.co.uk/subversion/)

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tehsauce
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...](https://github.com/Computer-Graphics-And-Pretty-
Pictures/Procedural-Generation)

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megaman22
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/...](http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-
programming/polygon-map-generation/)

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bytematic
God I hate this post format.

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

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endlessvoid94
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.

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na85
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?

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Nition
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.

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naikrovek
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.

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Nition
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.

