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Fit An Entire Planet In 90k
missingmatterboy points out this "interview with Dr. Ken "Doc Mojo" Musgrave, a computer graphics pioneer who worked with Benoit Mandelbrot generating fractal landscapes and who's designed custom shaders for Hollywood movies. His latest project is called MojoWorld and it uses the power of math to generate infinite-resolution fractal landscapes? one entire planet at a time. It's going to have an open SDK and, to top it all off, a Linux version is also in the works." This is a fascinating project.
I might be more impressed if their still image gallery page would render in Mozilla 0.9.4.
Here's the Google cached copy (which isn't doing much better)
If you have to see the images, BryceWorld got a beta release and posted a gallery of images online.
And if you want to download it immediately to start playing with it, you can do it by filling out this questionairre
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
MojoWorld:>rebuild Earth.planet
This has been done quite a few times by quite a few people. Fractal planet 3d engines show up all the time at www.flipcode.com
I've seen some with complete weather and day/night cycles. Some really inspiring stuff.
Coming Up One Saturn With Rings.....
Whatch Yuo Want Miss,Betelguese?
Wanted : A Signature.
Planets would move, trees would grow, forests and deserts would change shape, oceans would rise and recede, etc. (Taking into account that the planet is of the type to support something like forests and oceans). The variables that define a "place" as a human looking onto the universe were coordinates and time, and a perspective (direction/angle) from which to project back information. Yet the visual perspective was only minor compared to the actual number of calculable variables, like temperature, and the like. Of course, strange things like density has to be accounted for with Newtonian physics, but that was ironically easy. Choosing what was the cause (is temperature random, ie. fractalish, or a product of Newtonian; really it's a combination; random in a Newtonian'ish thermodynamic space, but random only because we wouldn't actually want to calculate that sort of thing) and what was an effect was the hard part.
It is an interesting premise, isn't it? Taking a mathematical curiosity (the fractal) and doing something useful with it like creating a universe, or planet in this case. Somewhat matrix'ish.
Wow! Now I can carry a floppy with me and over 15 planets! OK, so floppy's are passe, but who needs to carry a CD with 7200 planets on it? This seems impossible but I guess since it's nothing but fractals who's equations take up a couple of dozen bytes each, it does make sense. Oh well. Now on to a realistic part of my message:
<SARCASM><RANT> They can put a dozen planets on a disk but they can't figure out cold fusion! What's the world comming to?</RANT></SARCASM>
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...he took real pride in his fjords, he wouldn't take too kindly to auto planet creation.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This is indeed a Good Thing for games such as Elite. Instead of the game designers having to create each world, using minimal detail, as many worlds as are wanted can now be created in infinite detail. I look forward to the first Elite-style game using this technology.
The earth is in somebody hands for sure. The big question is if the hand's owner is wearing a turban or a cowboy hat.
Here's the easiest way to think of it: each parameter represents a degree of freedom; an axis you can move back and forth along, as you change the parameter's value. So, for instance, specifying a color in MojoWorld adds three higher dimensions: one for each of the red, green and blue values you use to specify the color. Each of these axes corresponds to a higher dimension in Parametric Hyperspace: it's just a different direction you can move in. You can see that, in getting all the settings right for a scene, you've set a lot of parameters, and thus traveled in many dimensions of Parametric Hyperspace.
Since the product doesn't store individual worlds, but rather parameters for a procedural system... or a point in parametric hyperspace... the data file for a single world isn't large. Each individual world only needs to be defined with a set of n-dimensional coordinates. I don't do much playing with things like bryce or whatever (can't afford it) but if I'm not mistaken that is a significantly different paradigm. What I didn't see is how large the executable was that generated the worlds dynamically from the n-dimensional parameter vector or hyperspatial coordinates. Technically the program wouldn't have to be large either, but I'm curious...
Live to Code, Code to Live!
Wow, 90K!
:-)
I bet a 'make world' will go a lot faster then
Elite was rather smaller than 90K. Elite 2 on the other hand...
is volumetric pixels this sort of thing ?
fractals are good for storeing large amounts of information but decompression is hard and how do you then represent the information useing standard methods or volumetric pixels type approach ?
seems nice but I would like more details before makeing any jugment
anyone have details ?
regards
john jones
p.s. I am sure a game used this type of thing before
I've just checked out the sample mojo-world gallery (I'm a sucker for any web pages that claims to show me (almost) photo-realistic rendered terrain images) and while the output is quite cool, it still has ways to go before it's going to be photorealistic. On the other hand, the point of MojoWorld is that you don't need a lot of data to re-create your scenes: you just save the seed parameters (which are tiny as compared to a real height-field) and the engine re-creates the scene from these parameters.
I have been working on terraform (which is aimed more at the generation and manipulation of digial terrain rather than the rendering of it) for a while now and in the course of doing so have learned a few things about fractal terrain generation. The fact that you can regenerate the terrain from a few seed parameters is not that special (dimension, scale factor, random seed, etc); these are the kind of parameters that are typically passed to these functions anyways. The more interesting thing (to me) is that they have apparently found a compact representation of all the data needed to create a (semi)realistic scene from it. All in all, I think this is quite cool. Hopefully they (at some point) will write a white paper detailing some of the algorithms used by the (closed source) generator.
not to beat a dead horse... but ... who wants to model the solar system.
"640K ought to be enough for anyone"
--donabal
Safety First Day?
I haven't been able to get anything from them yet. Smacking F5 a lot has got me to almost downloading now.
Mirrors anyone?
Very nice screenshots though. Wasn't First Encounters supposed to allow you to fly over planet vistas though?
Smooth may be defined as:
- function: all genotypes code for valid phenotypes
- injective (compact, nonredundant): different genotypes lead to different phenotypes
- surjective (universal): all phenotypes are representable
- continuous: small variations in the genotype produce small variations in the phenotype
- inversely continuous: small variations in the phenotype can be induced by small variations in the genotype
Where genotype refers to the parameters and phenotype to the representation of the world.If this were true, then one could theoretically evolve (using GA techniques) a planet that is a reasonable facsimile of earth, or any other feature set. Want a detailed map of San Francisco Bay? Let me squirt my survey through my Genetic Algorithm MojoWorld Compression Algorithm. Oh good, it's done. Use these five numbers to recreate the map...
Hmmm... sounds like it's plausible, but I don't think that small changes in the genotype necessarily result in small changes in the phenotype.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Gamasutra had a couple of articles on the subject of (real-time) procedural formation of planetary bodies. (Free login required.)
0 1.htm
0 1.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010302/oneil_
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010810/oneil_
There is a nifty demo available for download. The same code is used in the glElite project.
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
Come on everybody and sing....
"I have the whole world, in my floppy"
But for some reason the computer industry seems to belive that if there has been a lapse for 10 years, the next sucessor is suddelny 'new'.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/gameId,134/
www.oldskool.org/shrines/captainblood/capblood.ht
http://argnet.fatal-design.com/bluddian.htm
This was one of the most amazing games I'd ever seen at the time, becuase the player is completely free to go anywhere in the "universe" and do anything. I think the discovery of "wormholes" (from a 16-bit overflow bug) also added quite an interesting element to it as well (That's not a bug, it's a feature!).
Don't forget the fractal-nature of the Frontier universe as well. I doubt they could have fit all of that data in the game! It was quite interesting how whole solar systems were created around each star, with different planet types and numbers, different political situations, random natural and manufactured satellites, different star configurations (double and triple systems). I suppose this was all seeded from the same value, or it would have been different every time.
I wish there were an upgraded game like Frontier, which took advantage of modern computer systems, but still contained all of the elements of the original. I'd love to see such a game as a massive-multiplayer-online sort of game. I'll check those links you provided and see what those are like...
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
All we need now is for someone to encode all the world's pr0n in this fashion and put it on gnutellanet!
Where would one find information on learning to apply this technology to new games? I saw an earlier post which said the poster had used it for a massively multiplayer online game. I'm very interested in trying to use this technology. Any links about how to implement this or something similar would be highly appreciated.
The Moo went "Cow!"
Wow, Bill Gates was right. 640K of memory really is enough for anybody.
"Love is never saying you're too proud." -Tonic
They're selling a Holosuite but delivering a View-Master.
AC's cheerfully ignored
On the related note of fractals and their generation; A few years ago while playing around with GWBASIC (!!!) on a Tandy 1000 Color I discovered you could generate sierpinksi gadgets (there's a picture of a 3D one that I managed to find at http://www.angelfire.com/mo3/mysteriesofscience/ga mes.html) by choosing 3 coordinates on the screen (for the vertices) and then choosing a random point somewhere else. Then, choosing between 3 random numbers (or anything that has 3 equally probable events) and plotting the point halfway between the current point and the vertex corresponding to the chosen number, a sierpinski gadget slowly "fades" in.
To make it look even better, you can choose a color for each vertex. I also found you can do similar things with other shapes (pentagons, squares, etc.) Perhaps this algorithm is a well known way to generate the Sierpinksi Gadget. The amazing thing is how *small* the code is!
pseudocode (possibly with mistakes...its been a while)
Sierpinski
Choose 3 equidistant points on the screen: {x[0],y[0]},{x[1],y[1]},{x[2],y[2]}
Choose random coordinate on screen (x,y)
while no user input
choose random number n from {0,1,2}
plot ((x+x[n]/2), (y+y[n])/2))
loop
Cheers,
jw
"Has anything you've done made your life better?" - American History X
I tried zooming out to a few thousand km to try and get a good full planet view and was rather disappointed. Only two terrain features were still visible (green and snow); nearly all the lakes and rivers had vanished and there were no large bodies of water no matter how high I set the water level. Didn't look anything at all like a planet when it had finished rendering.
Dyolf Knip
I've expiremented with various algorithms to try creating landscapes, some of which have relied upon fractal and Mandelbrot math, but often with mixed results. I'll follow this with interest.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Dear lord - did they have to call it Mojoworld?
I hope that Mojo Nixon doesn't decide to sue, seeing as how he's already written songs about it, and all.
These games had fractally generated universes with starsystems, planets, cities and whatnot. Because they are elite games you could literally fly anywhere you wanted. It's now possible to download the shareware version of First Encounters from the Elite Club, and the game is so popular some clever fellow went and reverse engineered the binary, fixed a load of bugs and made releases of the game engine for Windows and Linux.
Seems like a reverse approach to what people believed in the past; that the universe was dictated by some huge equation that one day would be found and understood (turns out that chaos theory means it is impossible to know the starting state to an accuracy where todays universe can be known).
Just this seems to be the other way around - make a formula and find the universe it creates.
-- Mike
Rolf Harris tells a joke about a lawyer from a long-established firm. Over the decades that he and his family had practiced law in the same building, the constant foot traffic over their doorstep had worn a big depression into the solid granite. So the lawyer had a stonemason come in and give him an estimate on a new doorstep. It came out to a lot of money. So our boy thought his best lawyerish money-saving thoughts, and came up with an idea. He said to the stonemason, "Well, how much would it be to not replace the stone but just flip it over? It's just a solid rectangular block, so nobody would be any the wiser if we got some wear out of the bottom as well as the top." And as it happened, that would cost rather less money. So that was what the lawyer decided to have the stonemason do.
So the stonemason goes to work, hammering and chiselling and doing all the usual activities of his trade, and then after about an hour the lawyer hears a knock on his door. He hurries to open it and there's the stonemason with a cheeky grin on his face, saying, "Yer grandfather thought of that fifty years ago!"
Fractal planet generators are indeed a good idea, but they're not so new as all that. Starflight, people, starflight.
Musgrave is also extremely annoying in the way he dismisses enhancements as trivia and gives the impression that he's done the hard work. He hasn't - he's done the easy bit. For example placing vegetation on his landscapes is a very, very hard problem. Lets see him place a forest of oak trees besides a river, with realistic rendering of sunlight through the leaves, the roots in the soil, and the shadows of the leaves on the ground then I'll be impressed.
There are packages that are attempting to do this - World Construction Set, WorldBuilder and GenesisII come to mind - there are many more (including the granddaddy of them all Vistapro). None look as realistic as Terragen though - again something that can probably be ascribed to the fact that terragen, like Mojoworld, chooses a particular type of landscape in which to work. Unlike Mojoworld though, Terragen is photorealistic.
Creating a general-purpose photorealistic terrain renderer is probably on of the hardest problems still available in computer graphics. And while Musgrave deserves respect for what he has achieved over the years, sadly he's one of those people who simply isn't as good as he thinks he is.
Forget planets, what we need are algorithms that can generate everyday objects like people.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
My Fractal Planet Gallery might interest some people...
(The most recent one uses another plugin, developed by the same people -- to add a nebula background. Yes, I know the planet should drown the stars and nebula out. It looks cool, and I created that pic to be my desktop background image!) :-)
i am a soviet space shuttle
It also brings to mind some of the Illustrated Guide to XYZ fantasy universe books that so many fans crave. With software like this becoming more common, could we begin to see CDs o' Fractal images with such publications? Or (again with file sizes of 90k), will we see printed URLs with a "Go here do DL the complete wold..."
Still, while thier limited viewer is free, and the professional viewer (with unlimited resolution) is only $30, I think the $250 SRP (even the $200 intro price)the hobbyist may stay off this platform for a while.
If I can't see it in Lynx I'm not interested.
Is the power of math something like the power of Oxyclean?
But fractal landscapes? Holy shit stop the presses! Landscapes are the classic use for fractals. This is really nothing special. Sorry to be so harsh.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
http://www.mikebonnell.com
http://www.digitalblasphemy.com
It might not be fractally generated but who cares, its damn good stuff.
Kirk is preparing a presentation on Genesis. Spock can be seen in the background in front of a bank of computers.
Kirk: Spock, is the Genesis planet demo ready?
Spock: I am in the process of building the last piece of the rendering software now, Admiral. It will be completed in 7.182 seconds...
Kirk: (smirking) Could you be a little more specific, Spock?
Spock: (cock's an eyebrow at something on his display)
Kirk: Problem, Spock?
Spock: Yes, Admiral. The rendering software requires an ancient version of something called "GTK". This is not logical... "GTK" fell out of disuse in the early 21st century following the advent of the Quantum Display...
What you're seeing in the mpeg videos behind that link is flyover scenes that generate a terrain grid with dynamic level of detail concentrated near the camera, overlaid onto an entirely synthetic and repeatable world which is derived from multiple pointer math on a large (16M) data file. That means FAST- it was only implemented in REALbasic and still runs reasonably fast, and is a natural for C.
I also spent some time producing universe distributions- one stumbling block that I ran into that I hadn't got around to solving was what I was keeping world space in, as the universe is very big and at the same time the actual planets would go down to roughly 1/8" level of detail using some approaches for data synthesis. In particular, one of the techniques for positioning stuff would go down to 1/8" level of detail with four pointer-like operations using no kind of higher math. The difficulty is that you don't get a list of objects- instead if you wanted to synthesise, say, blades of grass, you'd go over a ten mile view by scanning across your view grid and every eighth of an inch, would do the fairly quick lookup of whether there was a blade of grass or some similar object on that eighth-inch spot. On the bright side, it would at least be repeatable, being entirely procedural.
The thing about these projects, and I can see that many people have done them, is that you can get grandiose about them but the bottom line is: this is not a game. This is not inherently fun, or interesting. One thing I'd thought of for _my_ approach is to apply some Warcraft-like game (scaled to MMORG, of course ;) I think that's a rule for all people coding virtual worlds) and make use of the fact that you can have a world-sized area with (perpetual) resources laid out irregularly and down to an extraordinary level of detail. So you could be in a game, and have to dig for gold or iron or something, and go by people's reports of where that resource could be found- including "There's this planet out by Alpha Centauri that's loaded with it". I also had a procedural planet and location name generator that wasn't entirely horrible ;)
Like I said- you get into this sort of thing and totally forget that it's NOT FUN for anybody else, unless there's a plot. I'd suggest that the author of this more recent work, if he seriously expects to earn money off it, should treat it very much like selling an art object: 'here's a viewer through which you can explore millions of worlds much like Bryce, only with less interaction', and not be too haughty about the price, either. This isn't a set of libs that will be useful for anyone creating a game, period. For one thing, you can get the same thing cheaper from elsewhere- it's NOT a unique idea.
(MIB)
:-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
Elite used Fibonacci Numbers with a eight 6-byte seeds, plus a few dozen bytes of look-up tables, to achive this. The principle was very similar to MojoWorld's use of fractals, but Fibonacci series are considerably quicker to process, particularly on an early 80's home computer.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
If anyone would like to see what Musgrave and Mandelbrot were up to in the late 70's/early 80's with all this stuff (and yes, that makes Musgrave the 'daddy' of fractal landscapes! Loren Carpenter, eat ya heart out :^), you should check out the book they contributed to:
:)
:^)
The Science of Fractal Images, edited by Heinz Otto Peitgen.
This book can be considered 'Fractals 101', and when I was doing a fractal related final year university project about 8 years ago, it came it VERY handy
However, the images on Musgrave's website don't look much better than the colour plates in that book, so other peoples comments, like 'Big Deal' etc, do hold. I was expecting him to have at least produced better looking images than my team at Uni did
But whatever, the guy still gets major respect from me, he is a true computing pioneer.
Andy
I work for a game company, and one of our next projects is going to be a multiplayer interplanetary action/advententure style game. I have been looking into ways to fractally generated planets quite a bit. While this software does look cool (especially the textures), it still has the one problem that hurts it's usablity in multi-user worlds, it changes shape dramaticly between certian levels of detail. If I think I'm hiding behind a hill, I should be hiding behind a hill on everyone else's front-ends no matter how far away they are.
I wish I had known about this interview before hand so I could pose this problem to Dr. Musgrave himself, since he seems eager to use this in multi-user worlds.
Starflight had an entire Galaxy on two 5.25" floppy disks! :P
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If they can just get that guy from the cheese comercial, I think it'll really sell.
I can fit the whole universe in one byte: 42
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
...it uses the power of math..."
POWERmath is a system of high performance
algorithms engineered to meet your
planet creation and design
needs head on. Want to know more?
Follow the equals...
...wonderful plot, funny and alarming aliens, a horrific moral dilemma and a great mix of travel, adventure and exploration. And all in 720K. Where is a game as good as Starflight?
I remember a 26k executable file, from the same people nearly two years ago or so. It rendered an island. I remember a PR saying they had a pay-version on CD which contained a fractile of earth -- fairly complete which took up a 1 or 2 cd set. What ever happened to this?
Not if they want to do well in the adult entertainment business. And don't think I'm kidding: the sex-starved portion of the population is willing to pay billions to see something like this developed.
-bugg
I have to agree with you AC, that Terragen is very impressive.
Want to know what is more impressive about it?
It is written mostly in Visual Basic (don't believe me? Email the author. I found out after having a conversation with him about using VB for 3D stuff like this a few years ago, because I noticed it installing the VB runtime during setup).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Generating a simple fractal landscape is both an easy and a difficult process. The algorithm is relatively easy - it is the implementation that can be difficult.
It is possible to implement a fractal landscape generation system on using only 2D graphics, which produce an image that looks amazingly 3D in scope, but isn't. Of course, it is possible to do the same algorithm in a 3D coordinate system.
I came across the 2D method first in an old Creative Computing article from around 1983 (the issue was the "graphics" issue, and in addition to the fractal mountain code done in BASIC for a couple of systems, there was an article that detailed making photo masks and combining computer graphics and real photo techniques to produce cool effects for the time - today, photoshop works wonders). The BASIC code was for a PCjr (IIRC) and an Apple IIe, but I converted it to my TRS-80 Color Computer - and it ran fine (though very slowly).
Essentially, the process is:
1. Select three random (X,Y) points on the screen - these form the "base" triangle.
2. Find the midpoints of each side of the base triangle. Split each side in half (subdivide it), and move the midpoint up/down by a small random amount (in the Y direction on screen), and join the points - the deformed triangle should now be composed of 4 sub-triangles.
3. Repeat the process on each of the resulting sub-triangles n-times.
Of course, n tends to be a small number - around 7-10, depending on the resolution of your output device. There is also a way to add "water" by deciding on an certain "Y" level to disallow drawing of "land", instead showing "water" (where "land" is green, brown, or grey, and "water" is blue).
That's the basic algorithm, and the hard part is keeping all the sub-triangle's vertices joined, so that when one is shifted up, the adjoining triangle's vertex shifts up as well. In the Creative Computing article, this was accomplished with arrays and really complex code that wasn't explained too well. Today, you would probably use a combination of linked-lists of objects (where each object represents a vertex), and of course a recursive function system. It would end up being more of a memory hog, but it would be easier to code as well.
Taking the algorithm into the 3rd dimension would be easy, since you would plot the base triangle on the X/Z (or X/Y) plane, then as you went through the subdivision process, you would simply change the height of each vertex in the Y (or Z) plane respectively.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon