Eigengrau’s Essential Establishment Generator starts with a description of a town, in text, like:
Corevorn is a town located in the temperate river coast, where the vegetation is lush.
It’s different every time. From there you can read about the streets and the establishments:
There’s a nice little square, Princess Square, where there is The Sanctuary of Divine.
And you can tap on The Sanctuary of the Divine, discovering that it’s a temple with a main room which pentagonal in shape and is decorated with mostly squalid looking holy art. And you can tap to read about the priestess (Donella Leffery), who is a gnome, and tap again to read about her early life (born in a forest, an only child), and tap again to read about her son who is a pastry chef: The most notable physical trait of Dabbledob is that he has fingernails cut to the quick.
And, again, this is different every time.
There’s a little moment of sadness when you hit RESTART and you can’t go back, but then you can start exploring again, these intimate stories of a little town and its people and its history, all of which exist right now only for you, and you just discovering as you go.
2.
One of all my all time favourite Twitter bots is Uncharted Atlas.
It’s a different map of a different non-existent place with a different non-existent language, every hour:
The Marches of North Olmgurpils
Empire of Schuchzizh
The Upper Wilderness of High Mabaa
The artist Martin O’Leary has a long, wonderful, interactive essay of how the terrains are generated.
Random coastlines and hills! Erosion! Realistically meandering rivers! Cities! (And a whole fake language to name them.) All drawn by the computer to look like old-fashion pen and ink maps.
I remember waking up on long haul flights and looking out the window at random valleys and hills, sometimes seeing a road down there, or a few buildings, and imagining what it would be like to hike through that wilderness. So there’s something similarly transporting here, so tiny each square frame, really, and yet so vast.
The point about these lo-fi worlds is that you don’t need 3D cinematic graphics and VR headsets and all the rest. How can these outlines, deft and clever but outlines, how do they feel so alive, like exploring the streets and alleys of a new town?
(I would kinda love this in the form of Google Maps too – just an app that I pan and pan and pan and pan and pan. There’s a whole visual vernacular right there.)
3.
Like many Brits of a certain age, my first experience of a procedurally generated universe was the space trading game Elite on the BBC Micro in the early 1980s. You can now play Elite in the browser.
Despite the wireframe spaceships and the minimal descriptions of planets, it felt like there was an infinity of stars and details, but it’s actually all unfolded from smart programming and three randomly chosen seed numbers: 23114, 584, 46931.
This fantastic and technical article digs into how the universe of Elite ACTUALLY WORKED – walking through the (surprisingly simple) code:
Procedural content generation: Creating a universe.
Get this: the data for the universe is several hundred kilobytes big. The BBC Micro, one of the launch platforms for the game, only had 32KB of RAM.
And here’s the first star system in the game, software-generated, and wow the name is etched in my memory:
Name: Lave
Location: 20,173
Economy: Rich Agri
Government: Dictatorship
Tech level: 5
Productivity: 7000
Radius: 4116
Population: 3bn
Description: Lave is most famous for its vast rain forests and the Lavian tree grub.
It’s pretty unique. You just hit the disclosure triangles and keep digging down.
Universe > galactic supercluster > galaxy > arm > star system > telluric planet > continent > sky > cloud > water > oxygen > proton > up quark > …
But.
If you click around a few different triangles.
If you’re LUCKY.
Then:
… telluric planet > explored continent > kingdom of Storagag > scorched county > village > farm > Cecily Greenforest (peasant) > psyche > memories > Wandering the wild expanses with my mother when I was a child.
So.
Then you glance back at all the galactic superclusters with triangles you haven’t yet opened, with all their stars and all their villages and all their people and all their thoughts and memories, too many to explore, too many to count, just software, just text, not even prose, and yet…
Total perspective vortex.
There’s a quote from Darius Kazemi that has stuck in my head since I first read it. Here it is:
A simple for loop can, in a few seconds, generate more information than a human being can consume in a lifetime. When we make art with code, we have to confront this fact. So how do you compose for infinity?
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
ENTER NUMBET 0016jndldxhs.com.cn humsocc.org.cn www.hzjlsj.com.cn www.fun-88.com.cn lyscsp.com.cn gwumsr.com.cn www.ldwjzpc.com.cn prlous.com.cn www.txtx.org.cn www.x-moxing.com.cn
1.
Eigengrau’s Essential Establishment Generator starts with a description of a town, in text, like:
It’s different every time. From there you can read about the streets and the establishments:
And you can tap on The Sanctuary of the Divine, discovering that it’s a temple with a main room which And you can tap to read about the priestess (Donella Leffery), who is a gnome, and tap again to read about her early life (born in a forest, an only child), and tap again to read about her son who is a pastry chef:
And, again, this is different every time.
There’s a little moment of sadness when you hit RESTART and you can’t go back, but then you can start exploring again, these intimate stories of a little town and its people and its history, all of which exist right now only for you, and you just discovering as you go.
2.
One of all my all time favourite Twitter bots is Uncharted Atlas.
It’s a different map of a different non-existent place with a different non-existent language, every hour:
The artist Martin O’Leary has a long, wonderful, interactive essay of how the terrains are generated.
Random coastlines and hills! Erosion! Realistically meandering rivers! Cities! (And a whole fake language to name them.) All drawn by the computer to look like old-fashion pen and ink maps.
I remember waking up on long haul flights and looking out the window at random valleys and hills, sometimes seeing a road down there, or a few buildings, and imagining what it would be like to hike through that wilderness. So there’s something similarly transporting here, so tiny each square frame, really, and yet so vast.
The point about these lo-fi worlds is that you don’t need 3D cinematic graphics and VR headsets and all the rest. How can these outlines, deft and clever but outlines, how do they feel so alive, like exploring the streets and alleys of a new town?
(I would kinda love this in the form of Google Maps too – just an app that I pan and pan and pan and pan and pan. There’s a whole visual vernacular right there.)
3.
Like many Brits of a certain age, my first experience of a procedurally generated universe was the space trading game Elite on the BBC Micro in the early 1980s. You can now play Elite in the browser.
Despite the wireframe spaceships and the minimal descriptions of planets, it felt like there was an infinity of stars and details, but it’s actually all unfolded from smart programming and three randomly chosen seed numbers: 23114, 584, 46931.
This fantastic and technical article digs into how the universe of Elite ACTUALLY WORKED – walking through the (surprisingly simple) code:
Procedural content generation: Creating a universe.
Get this:
And here’s the first star system in the game, software-generated, and wow the name is etched in my memory:
(I’ve written about Elite and procedural generation before.)
4.
Nested is a universe outline.
It’s pretty unique. You just hit the disclosure triangles and keep digging down.
Universe > galactic supercluster > galaxy > arm > star system > telluric planet > continent > sky > cloud > water > oxygen > proton > up quark > …
But.
If you click around a few different triangles.
If you’re LUCKY.
Then:
… telluric planet > explored continent > kingdom of Storagag > scorched county > village > farm > Cecily Greenforest (peasant) > psyche > memories > Wandering the wild expanses with my mother when I was a child.
So.
Then you glance back at all the galactic superclusters with triangles you haven’t yet opened, with all their stars and all their villages and all their people and all their thoughts and memories, too many to explore, too many to count, just software, just text, not even prose, and yet…
Total perspective vortex.
There’s a quote from Darius Kazemi that has stuck in my head since I first read it. Here it is: