31 karma · joined October 26, 2022
I'm working on vorfract, a game using irregular voxels.
My e-mail: jazzprogramming@gmail.com
But you can use your imagination (or ask Claude).
One day machines will probably do most of the work to be done better than we can. Which is fine. But then we'll also lose the meaning and purpose that work used to provide. I don't think it would necessarily lead to a dystopia, but that world would be a pretty strange place to our current eyes, to say the least.
But suppose some future holy grail AI can do much more than that.
Suppose it could find a cure for cancer, fix the climate, build fusion plants, Dyson spheres and so on.
But nobody can understand anymore how any of it works. We just ask and then trust the AI to deliver (as it always has).
Isn't it fun to imagine how life would look like in that scenario?
We would probably no longer care about code, engineering or even physics and mathematics among other things. We would probably mainly care about
But it's still a good example of where a comma (or lack of) can make all the difference.
- But when, Lord, when?!
- Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.
- Ahhhh.
- Bukowski
I've loved that from the moment I stumbled upon it.
Both funny and serious at the same time.
It's an early version so many (if not most) things that would be in a game are still missing at the moment (though planned on paper).
One interesting thing is that because the Voronoi voxels are so malleable, things like round or hollow worlds are a pretty natural outcome.
In parallel to working on it, I've been mostly using it to build and improve my own voxel castle with a pointy roof, slanted walls, custom built stairs, tables, chairs and all those nice things.
In the last update I added a CRT filter and some pixelation options as I find that appealing. As for the future (maybe as the next thing?), I guess I'd probably like to add the ability to build less blocky things like round towers (or flower vases!), but that is still very much a work in progress.
The Web version (WebGL) is completely free (and will stay that way):
Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.
Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.
Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).
Honestly, as a long time Voronoi enthusiast, the idea of turning a regular grid into a Voronoi diagram is kind of obvious and I admit that this is definitely something that I would like to have come up with myself, but the idea never occurred to me.
The implementation is obviously pretty complex though. And I remember trying to get into regular Go several times along the years and I've always found it very difficult to grasp it (the computer thoroughly beat me every single time!) and I lost the motivation.
I read your tutorial pages, but I learn best by doing so I guess only playing for some significant amount of time will actually help me have a more than skin deep understanding of the game.
I do wish there was a Windows desktop version as the web version is eating 90% of my laptop's CPU when playing against the bot.
I read that same sentence (and the whole article, which I loved) and it didn't trigger anything in me.
It reminds me a bit of the OMG GMOs! craze people used to have a while back (and might still have?).
What will 8 billion people be then doing with their time?
Will they be watching Netflix all day in the future?
Or building their dream castle & kingdom in Minecraft instead of IRL?
What new ideas am I thinking about?
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of things left to discover about voronoi diagrams, but for the time being, I'm mainly exploring what's possible to build by using voronoi cells as voxels and devising various tools for cutting them.
Since they're convex polyhedra, almost any shape is possible (in principle, if not in practice) by combining several cells.
What I find particularily interesting is that a solid 3D world can emerge from just a collection of points arranged in different patterns.
To be honest, it's actually more of a game development log, but it's the closest thing I have to a personal website.
It's hosted on an old Linux PC at home.
Browser version here, if you're curious:
I found it surprisingly good and considering how little I know on how to use HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, the usual web stack, it would have taken me months or more to learn how to build an equivalent site using the standard stack (and then have to maintain it).
Of course, if you're already familiar with web development, that's the best way I guess, but for those who aren't and don't have the necessary time to learn, there are probably alternatives using languages they're familiar with.
WebGL version:
If you're curious, you can see it here (needs WebGL2 + Wasm):
Even today he seems to be larger than life..
I so wish I could have seen him at the height of his career.
Thank you for this.