Fractals | kometbomb

Generating game content

If you can’t draw graphics or create sounds for your games, here are a few interesting tools I came across recently that can help you.

sfxr

sfxr generates random sound effects such as explosions, sounds for jumping and so on. The sounds are nice and crisp and you can easily tweak a randomly generated sound to suit your needs better. A nice feature is that you can click on sound types to generate a sound for common actions in games.

Pixel Robots & Invader Fractal

Pixel Robots generates random sprites that resemble robots (well, duh). It’s a Java applet (made with Processing) so you can (or, have to) run it in your web browser. Hence, it is not too convenient to use for pure sprite generation purposes – but it is quite nice eye candy.

The author mentions the Invader Fractal as his inspiration. It is a quite similar thing, in that it generates a sheet of tiny sprites and runs in browser (it’s a Flash applet).

Both generators are quite nice in that their authors give good insight how the programs generate the sprites.

Richard’s Evolving Sprite Tool

I saved the best for last. Richard’s Evolving Sprite Tool, as the name implies, evolves sprites. The main idea is that the program generates a grid of mutated sprites and you can choose the one that looks good. The selected sprite then spawns mutated offspring. This continues until you decide the sprite is good enough. On the left, there’s an example of an evolved and hand-colored sprite (grabbed from the Retro Remakes forum thread).

It is also much more of a tool than the two previous generators, the user can edit the sprites inside the program. After the user has edited a sprite, it can be evolved further. Very nice if you’re short on inspiration.

Next thing Richard needs to do is to add a way to colorize and animate the lovely sprites.

kometbomb Note: Since this tool has gone AWOL, here’s something similar: Retro Avatar generator. For example, the avatar created from my name looks like what you see on the left (cute!).

~~Get it in the forum thread~~ (it really needs a proper web page!)

Let’s make a planet

For the last few days, I have been working on a planet generator. I originally got the idea from the method how you can easily tessellate sphere into triangles. This results in a spherical map instead of a cylindrical map.

The usual way of rendering a planet as a a sphere with cylindrical texture map (or height field) looks quite bad in places because the map is stretched on the equator and pinched near the poles. The method described below takes a different approach and generates a map of vertices connected by triangles.

The vertices contain the terrain information such as terrain type (sea, land, mountain) and height. More detail is introduced by subdividing the triangles into smaller triangles.

The starting shape is an octahedron. We then subdivide each side into four triangles, normalize the new vertices and apply simple physics to move all the vertices away from the others (reverse gravity) – this eventually settles the vertices quite evenly (it won’t be a perfect shape but it is good enough for most purposes). We don’t even need to start from a symmetrical shape, using a naive repulsion algorithm eventually makes the shape symmetric as long as it is possible.

The number of subdivisions can be variable and dynamic. I’m planning to make the generator subdivide triangles on demand. In a game, you would see approximate shapes from the orbit but when flying close to the surface, the shorelines etc. would have a lot more detail. You can subdivide infinitely which means there will be infinite detail.

Dragon curve

I use a very simple algorithm to decide the terrain type on each vertex, simply the first point of the triangle decides the terrain type on the new triangle. This results into the Dragon curve fractal. A more sophisticated algorithm would change the subdivision rules according to the subdivision depth. For example, the same rules shouldn’t apply when subdividing on a continental scale versus to a scale of a few kilometers.

Next, I’m going to model a very simple simulation of atmosphere including prevailing winds, cloud formation and temperature.

kometbomb

Programming and stuff.