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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.
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?!
Hmmm, an Elite game which uses fractal planets?
What about, for example, Frontier: Elite2 which pretty much pioneered planet wide fractal terrain gen in a commercial game and ran on a 386.
Or, its sequel, Frontier: First Encounters which added texturing to make everything look a million times more ugle.
Or any of the recent fan-made clones, Millenium3 http:://m3fe.com or even The Eternal Project http://compsoc.net/~flend/tep/.
Well the thing is Ken Musgrave is one of the pioneers, if anything a lot of people that have posted code like this out there are based on Ken's numerous papers. He was a researcher with Mandelbrot, kinda developed "multifractals", given SIGGRAPH courses about terrain and procedural modeling, and has written several chapters for a great book "Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural; Approach". He also worked for a time for or at Digital Domain, doing code a for the moon on Apollo 13, and procedural smoke for Dante's Peak (not used) and Titanic.
Here is his webpage:
Ken Musgrave's websiteSaw Mojoworld briefly at SIGGRAPH and it looked neat.
Iterated function system. Compression by this method is covered by US patent 4,941,193 issued 1990. This is a clearcut example of how a potentially useful mathematical technique has been largely ignored because of its patent encumbrance. Just one more example of how patents are good for lawyers and bad for everybody else. I seriously doubt Barnsley has made any money from the patent, I suspect the book produced more revenue. In any event, whatever usefulness the technique might have is lost to us until the patent runs out in another 8 years or so.
The word "asshole" comes to mind.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.