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City of Pixels

I'm a great fan of procedural building, the art of building 3D/ Animations purely from code. It's a great mystery to me how it works, as a matter of fact, it leaves me as stymied as mathematics does. All the ifs and thens and whys and gotos confuse the hell out of me.

Which is why anyone who can build something out of code is my hero (the same goes for actionscript, html, java C++… insert your favourite programing language here _______).

My newest hero is a chap called Shamus Young, who set himself the goal of building an entire city from code, including lights and all the rest. On his blog, he calls it a simple project he played around with. To me, this stuff is grand and fascinating. What is as astonishing is the level of detail he goes to, creating many building styles seemingly at random and making the 10011010011 look terribly good.

Below, find a youtube video of the goals and making of the project.



Also well worth a look, the subversion project, a massive world-building experiment from Introversion software, who call themselves the last of the bedroom programmers. The project started in 2006 with the intention of making a second game. It's been going on since then, with the world being grown out of code and more code… they are currently, from what I understand, in the process of turning all of that code into an actual game! Check out their blog and tell me if you understand what they're talking about. In the latest post, they seem to be very excited about sliding doors for some reason…

PS: I finally understood yesterday why a bang in no longer mere onomatopœia for an explosion, thanks to Thomas, colleague, D- and VJ. His own, eclectic mix of Bang! and boom is to be found right here!

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