edwardc

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I have been imagining the same thing too!

Just need to track down a e-ink display for this sort of fun project. Anyone know of any good ones that would make this easy?

Yes, there's nothing to prevent very small maps like what you saw - even ones that terminate with a dead-end before a road has been drawn (eg. https://random-roads--edwardcunningh2.repl.co/#1592758760947).

I considered adding logic to prevent this, but have decided to embrace it as a feature rather than a bug.

I quite like some of the small-ish maps, like this: https://random-roads--edwardcunningh2.repl.co/#1592759118928

Good one! Yes, you've hit the bottom there.

It is artificially limited to a 1001 x 1001 grid - just to stop it from growing forever (which could get quite slow on lower end devices). In practice I rarely encounter maps that go that far.

Thanks for the feedback - the minimal look is pleasing to my eye too!

I wrote a brief description in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23592538

Initially I had envisaged something a bit cleverer, but for an art project keeping it simple seemed to do the trick.

Thanks. It's plain JavaScript, rendering with an HTML canvas.

I did investigate JS 2D graphics libraries but decided in the end that this was sufficiently simple to not warrant one. It was harder than I expected to get the drag & zoom to work!

Thanks! You can see the code here: https://repl.it/@EdwardCunningh2/Random-Roads

It's not especially clever:

1. I define a set of possible moves (eg. straight ahead, left turn, junction, etc). One possible move is a dead-end, which looks a bit like a house in my interpretation.

2. Each move is assigned a relative weight (eg. continuing straight ahead 10x more likely than turning left).

3. Each iteration, for each of the roads under construction, a random move is selected. Some moves are impossible (based on other roads already drawn on the map) and so it will ensure not to select one that would result in a collision. At worst, it will terminate the road with a dead-end.

4. Repeat forever, until every road has terminated in a dead-end.

Most of the script itself is dealing with the rendering logic. To avoid collisions I maintain a 2D array of all visited points.

Well spotted!

I enjoy the large ones (eg. https://random-roads--edwardcunningh2.repl.co/#1589058113269) where I imagine the gaps left in the middle to be parks.

The Scream in Space 'experiment' uses screams uploaded to YouTube as part of a competition last year: http://www.screaminspace.com/ (and since this is HN, https://github.com/cuspaceflight/SpaceScream).