<story><title>Earth Primer</title><url>http://www.earthprimer.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pserwylo</author><text>This is very cool indead. Reminds me of my time as an undergrad at uni, where one of our projects revolved around making a game&amp;#x2F;sim like this. Everybody else was trying to make 3D adventure games, but we were interested in &amp;quot;good quality&amp;quot; (I put that in quotes because I just went back to look at the code and shuddered) 2D games, that were more polished.&lt;p&gt;Our game was called &amp;quot;Land of Life&amp;quot; [0] (or Geco, according to the source code, not sure why). It was a basic, fixed size, isometric tile game. To start with, you are presented with a desert. The only thing you can do is add mountains, and then hit play and watch clouds form and move over the mountains. If you constructed your mountains well, you&amp;#x27;d get nice oasis&amp;#x27; with rivers flowing out of the mountains, and greenery around it. If, you probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t get any rivers, but would get some small shrubs.&lt;p&gt;From memory, the only heuristics about adding mountains were: You can only make a mountain bigger if there are a certain number of mountains of a certain size adjacent to it. It was a bit like game-of-life in that way, hence the name &amp;quot;land of life&amp;quot;. This worked surprisingly well for constructing mountain ranges.&lt;p&gt;One main difference from our approach and the one linked to here is that theirs looks absolutely amazing and educational, whereas ours used heuristics that we dreamed up via trial and error.&lt;p&gt;[0] Screenshot (missing assets for river tiles, because I couldn&amp;#x27;t find the final source code) - &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of-life/master/screenshot.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&amp;#x2F;pserwylo&amp;#x2F;land-of-life&amp;#x2F;mast...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;p&gt;Here is a screencast [1]. I still think it is nice how the first river which heads off to the top right (rendered in black due to no river assets) gets surrounded by trees because it is a source of water in the desert. This is not based on any geological&amp;#x2F;ecological&amp;#x2F;climate knowledge on our part, but was still fun to tinker with.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of-life/master/screencast.webm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&amp;#x2F;pserwylo&amp;#x2F;land-of-life&amp;#x2F;mast...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Earth Primer</title><url>http://www.earthprimer.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisfarms</author><text>This looks pretty great.&lt;p&gt;Getting closer to a world where The Young Lady&amp;#x27;s Primer is possible :)</text></comment>