Lego Mosaics Using R | Hacker News Reader

Lego Mosaics Using R

github.com

This is pretty cool. Enabled by the also very cool rayshader package in R (https://github.com/tylermorganwall/rayshader)

Rayshader is awesome but it is limited for rendering by the size of the screen. Waiting for an update where such a limitation can be done away with.

This stems from a limitation of rgl—if rgl ever gets around to supporting a virtual frame buffer (which has been in rgl’s TODO document for a while), rayshader would support that feature.

The LICENSE file in the repository root contains a copyright notice only.

No other file that I could see in the repository of those that I checked had any license terms either.

In other words, as it stands this is not open source under any useful definition.

Which is sad because it looks very cool.

What about https://github.com/ryantimpe/brickr/blob/master/LICENSE.md?

Oh, I overlooked that one while skimming over the other file names in the repo after looking at the LICENSE file.

The license information for R packages is specified in the DESCRIPTION file for a "standard" open source license--this project is licensed under MIT, as specified there. For the MIT license, you need an additional LICENSE file that just states the copyright holder and year, which is exactly what the author has provided.

So it is. All good then :)

Ideally though, for the sake of people looking at the GitHub repo, I think they ought to do the following:

1. Rename LICENSE file to COPYRIGHT and change the line

  License: MIT + file LICENSE

in the DESCRIPTION file to

  License: MIT + file COPYRIGHT

2. Put a full copy of the MIT license with both copyright notice and MIT license text in a file named LICENSE. This allows GitHub to recognize the license and tag the repo accordingly. Additionally it allows people to see the license by looking at that file regardless of language instead of having to know language specific conventions.

3. Optionally, delete the LICENSE.md file unless it is useful elsewhere.

Assuming of course that having the license text and not just copyright notice in LICENSE won’t interfere with R packaging tools once the DESCRIPTION file specifies to use file COPYRIGHT instead.

I think that is good advice but it’s not a great fit for R packages due to the requirements that CRAN has for package submission. I’ve wrapped up my recommended practices in usethis::use_mit_license().

Cool! I had wanted to do something similar to make use of a stockpile of bottle caps that I was collecting. However, it went beyond the time I was willing to invest. There's some additional difficulties with bottle caps of course because of the shape and non-uniform color.

Looks cool, just wondering (I don’t know R but plan to learn it soon) - Could this be a base, to build something like Minecraft in R?

Like, playable and all? Very unlikely. It's not going to be fast enough and R is not typically the language you'd use for games.

But to e.g. import a Minecraft world and render it with the rayshader package? That might actually be a fun idea!

Got your back! I've been working on a JS voxels side project which I just made available for R: https://github.com/javierluraschi/voxels

I still need to add support to add voxels from R and retrieve them, but should be straightforward, the hard part was putting together the rendering engine.

Ok, but, why?

Why not?

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