31–40 of 92 posts
Super awesome, love the tilt-shift camera effect! I was also wishing I could zoom in to human size and run around HAHAHA
The post glosses over the "backtracking" and says they just limit it to 500 steps but actually constraint programming is an extremely interesting and complicated field with lots of cool algorithms and tricks. In this case we could solve it with Knuth's Algorithm X [1] with dancing links, which is a special kind of backtracking. Algorithm X should, in theory, be able to solve the border region described in the article…
e.g. https://www.minizinc.org/ offers a high level modelling language that can target a few different solver backends
might be pretty good results to completely ignore writing a custom algorithm and drop in an existing industrial-grade constraint programming solver, model your procgen problem using a high level language, and use the existing solver to find you random solutions (or exhaustively enumerate them). then more time to iterate on changing the problem definition to produce more interesting maps rather than getting bogged down writing a solver.
That "Carcassonne" game sounds really fun. I'd never heard of it before.
The post glosses over the "backtracking" and says they just limit it to 500 steps but actually constraint programming is an extremely interesting and complicated field with lots of cool algorithms and tricks. In this case we could solve it with Knuth's Algorithm X [1] with dancing links, which is a special kind of backtracking. Algorithm X should, in theory, be able to solve the border region described in the article…
there's also a bunch of dedicated constraint programming solvers / high level modelling languages for these kinds of constraint-y combinatorial optimisation problems e.g. https://www.minizinc.org/ offers a high level modelling language that can target a few different solver backends might be pretty good results to completely ignore writing a custom algorithm and drop in an existing industrial-grade constraint program…
[0] https://potassco.org/clingo/
In this rabbit example I made 8 years ago, the WFC solver ensures that the animation must loop, which means you will always end up with an equal number of births and deaths.
I say this having had a couple of fun "hex-based strategy game hobby projects" over the years (sidenote -- trying to cover a sphere in hexes is actually a non-trivial matter). Invariably I ended up with "to make a map from scratch, first you create the universe" where I'd go through all of the ages, compute waterflows and precipitation, and on and on. Maybe I made the requirements too unreasonable and that's precisely why I never yielded a working game from it.