June 02, 2009

Ysaneya's galaxy

When I'm not working on my own blog —which, let's face it, is most of my time— I read some blogs by other people. One of them recently had something which I can only characterise as impressive. Take a look at this. This is a post by Ysaneya, who is working on an MMO space game, Infinity. His posts are almost always impressive, but when it comes to a procedurally generated galaxy... wow.

Be sure to check out the Youtube video as well!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Niiiiiiiiice......
It comes close to my own dreams about 'Bloody Heavens'. Only it wasn't going to be a MMO (just single player) and I knew I'd never get any far, since such a project is too big for one person. :-)

KrisDS said...

What I like about his solution is that, in essence, it isn't hard to do: generate random stars at random locations, then let them survive by chance based on their location. The survival rate at a given location is (mostly) governed by a grayscale bitmap (acting like an alpha mask). By changing the bitmap you could create arbitrarily shaped galaxies. From the classic spiral arms to perfect cubes, or even Super Mario. :-)