A new fantasy world... Every Hour!

[mixerbach]

I've never started a thread out here in the (big, scary) main forum, so many apologies if I'm doing it wrong.

I happened to run into a fascinating article and I could not think of a better place to mention it. But before I forget to include it, here's the article link:
This Bot Generates A Fantasy World Every Hour by Amelia Urry (www.atlasobscura.com)

In summary, the article talks about a program written by glaciolgist Martin O'Leary called "Uncharted Atlas". It creates a map every hour and posts it to a Twitter feed, here:
@unchartedatlas on Twitter

Now, if you're like me, so far you are underwhelmed because you've seen this kind of thing done before with various levels of underwhelming results. Well, don't judge too quickly, my friend. What makes O'Leary's generator different is that his program utilizes an erosion simulation created with real data. You can really see the difference, in my opinion.

I've included a small sample of what the program has created recently, but I highly recommend that you take a look for yourself. Check out the Twitter link for many, many more maps like these or the article for more on O'Leary and his process. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.

ua1.jpg ua4.jpg ua5.jpg

ua2.jpg ua6.jpg ua7.jpg

ua3.jpg ua8.jpg ua9.jpg

Happy Mapping!
MB

[ChickPea]

I think someone actually posted about this the other day, but it's fun to see it again.

It's pretty interesting work, given that it's automated and the fact that it comes labelled too will possibly be a boon to some GMs. It'd be fun to see something like this posting at the Guild actually!

However... once the bots start producing beautifully coloured maps, how long till we're automated out of existence?!

[waldronate]

once the bots start producing beautifully coloured maps, how long till we're automated out of existence?!

If my current project bears fruit, six months or so? I suspect that the fruit from this particular project may be a little less than I'm hoping, though.

[mixerbach]

the fact that it comes labelled too will possibly be a boon to some GMs

I was impressed by that too, ChickPea. The article mentions, albeit briefly, that there's a language generator involved:

The landscapes are rendered in the pen-and-ink style of maps printed at the front of certain fantasy novels à la Tolkien, complete with alien names: “The Pez-mes-Lüch Coast,” “The Confederation of nos-Us,” “Outer Háukwuénoé.” (O’Leary built a language generator, too).

[waldronate]

What makes O'Leary's generator different is that his program utilizes an erosion simulation created with real data.

My question would be "different than what?"

It's an interesting piece of work, though, especially the notes page that walks through the underlying parts. As the notes page points out, the basic generation follows the same pattern as http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/...ap-generation/ and that page has a number of interesting links towards the bottom.

I'm more a regular grid sort of guy, myself. The artifacts are different (tending more towards 8-way than 6-way as with a well-relaxed noise grid), but some of the processing for a regular grid is nicely amenable to easy vectorization and parallelization, which is a little harder to do with a Voronoi-type of algorithm.

Florian Boesch had an interesting demo that runs a terrain erosion simulation on the GPU from your browser ( http://codeflow.org/entries/2011/nov...g-and-erosion/ ). The nice part of this code is that it uses a regular grid to get the same hexagonal connectivity that you get from a well-relaxed random grid while still keeping the regular grid structure that allows for GPU speed.

[mixerbach]

If my current project bears fruit, six months or so?

Quick, quick! Everyone hurry! Get as many commissions under contract as you can, as quickly as you can! In 6 months, waldronate's RoboRealm will have the whole market neatly sewn up!

But seriously, waldronate, I'd love to hear more of what you've got brewing. It sounds fascinating!
What did you think of O'Leary's hourly Twitter feed? I thought it was a clever way of generating some attention for his project, myself.

[waldronate]

I'd love to hear more of what you've got brewing. It sounds fascinating!

Mostly it's just updates to some existing products. I suspect that (as usual) I won't be able to implement everything that I know how to do.

What did you think of O'Leary's hourly Twitter feed? I thought it was a clever way of generating some attention for his project, myself.

I avoid Twitter as I don't find that it holds any particular value for me. Setting a bot to auto-generate meaningless content at regular intervals strikes me as a good way of determining who should be on watch lists (folks who would willingly sign up for that kind of abuse are probably not ones that should be loose in general society).

[ChickPea]

Setting a bot to auto-generate meaningless content at regular intervals strikes me as a good way of determining who should be on watch lists (folks who would willingly sign up for that kind of abuse are probably not ones that should be loose in general society).

Hahaha, now don't hold back, Waldronate. Tell us what you really think!

Thinking sadly about the number of hours I spend on Twitter... actually, not sadly, the word would be gleefully...

[waldronate]

I was wearing my "doesn't play well with others" shirt today. I also did a calculation a couple of days ago about the number of hours of consciousness I can expect to have in the rest of my life compared to the number of hours of consciousness that are already spoken for by my commitments. I really don't recommend doing this sort of calculation.

[V1G1LANC3]

Are all the maps connected?