This is a blog about the many, many different aspects of procedural generation.
What is procedural generation? My loose definition is that it is the creation (generation) of something through a system of rules (procedural) rather than by directly creating it.
Elite (1984)
Procedural generation can be used to create music, images, sound effects, jewelery, buildings, trees, and entire worlds. Some techniques attempt to model the thing being generated as closely as possible, but many of the most useful procedural techniques produce something that looks like the subject but was created in an entirely different way. And a few applications take the procedural creation out of the virtual world and generate physical objects.
Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)
This blog is not just about procedural generation: I believe that any subject worth studying exists in a vast, interconnected web of knowledge. Some of those nearby strands will be explored as well. There will be algorithmic art. There will be fractals. There will be artifical intelligence. There will be weird experiments. There will be roguelikes. (There will be a lot of roguelikes.) We’re going to talk about computational creativity, artificial life, Twitter bots, and computers that write novels.
But the heart and soul of what I want to talk about here is making things that make things, where the artist sets the machine in motion and then steps back to observe what it creates.
A new blog by Isaac, who helped me run VGF when I was posting daily. It’s all about procedural generation. I’m only a little shocked that URL wasn’t already taken.
On this week’s episode of Diagrams that Will Give You a Panic Attack, behold Figure 1: Risks Interconnection Map 2011 illustrating systemic interdependencies in the hyper-connected world we are living in. The image is from February 2013 paper by Dirk Helbing on Globally Networked Risks and How to Respond.
A font designed to be unable to be read via OCR (Optical Character Recognition):
The name ZXX comes from the Library of Congress’ Alpha-3 ISO 639-2 — codes for the representation of names of languages. ZXX is used to declare No linguistic content; Not applicable.
Free Open Type Font to open up governments.
You can find out more (and download the font yourself) at the project’s page here
The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.”
Noritaka Minami // 1972 (2011) This project examines “the future” as imagined in 1972 by leading member of the Metabolism movement Kisho Kurokawa (1934 - 2007) and its current condition through the medium of photography
so if you are directly over a cone and its coming up at you to stab you in the face you would never see it? cool