Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

LightNews

Dan Miller

@dan0mighte.bsky.social

91 followers 170 following 170 posts

game dev. Software engineer. Systems obsessed. he/him check out my work and blog: http://linktr.ee/fraculation

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Reposted by Dan Miller

TheDuckCow @theduckcow.com · 2d

That's one small step for [mesh], one giant leap for [road].

Procedural intersections are officially in progress, major kudos to Picorims for the work thus far on this feature! #godot #procgen #gamedev

Details, if you are curious to follow along:
github.com/TheDuckCow/g...

Image of a road in a 3d godot editor looping around and connecting into a white triangle mesh without any materials or smoothing

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 2d

Holy shit. That looks very sigmoidy to me!

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 2d

I wonder how sudoku would work. Wikipedia states about 5 billion unique sudokus under certain symmetries. Maybe a few days of compute could graph that. But a node for each time a cell is filled in... that would explode

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 2d

Right, this thing really gives you a sense for the exponentials! I thought sokoban would be great for this at first, but practically every addition to a puzzle doubles the state graph. I'm hoping interesting puzzles still exist even with low node counts

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 2d

I wonder what the graph of chemical activation VS light exposure looks like for silver halide crystals 👀

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 2d

OH I see! You get SUPERHDR. It sounds to me like you are modeling physical reality more closely than traditional path tracing... It'd be poetic if the answer ends up matching the real world: more ambient light, scattering, etc. Or somehow replicating how actual film does tone mapping

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 2d

These are beautiful. What I assume is low ray sample count reminds me of a film grain style effect

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 3d

Those dang bot boats.....

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 3d

My post-hoc theory: Branches represent choices between different boxes. The initial state is somewhere in the center. The player can pick any of the 4 boxes to move to the goal at first (4 trunks coming off the center). 3 trunks come off each of those, representing the remaining 3 boxes, and so on

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 3d

candy

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 3d

@limeblossom.bsky.social gave me the idea to treat each box as unique objects rather than as interchangeable with each other. This creates more states so its a bit harder to analyze. But it also creates a ton of symmetries which I think make it quite pretty!

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 3d

Got a cool video capture of the graph solver running now that its optimized into the range of realtime

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 3d

It is interesting how alt-text labels for images is almost exactly what a generative AI needs to train. Not advocating to omit, but, I always have this gremlin thought in my mind as I write them out

Dan Johnson @coil.bsky.social · 4d

Irregular reminder that alt text on images is a valuable accessibility tool, and also lets your images show in search results or respect mute lists. For instance, I found the below image by searching "capybara alt text".

A brief guide on writing good alt text for images, which suggests including
1. Who or what
2. Their expression or emotion
3. A description of the image
4. Notable colors
5. Interesting features

The included example image and description: "A capybara looking relaxed in a hot spa. Yellow yuzu fruits are floating in the water, and one is balanced on the top of the capybara's head."

Dan's addition: saving the "interesting thing" for last is a bit like writing a joke - end with the memorable punchline!

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 6d

conveniently, due to the nature of the simulation bi-directional edges attract stronger than single-direction. This chain is composed of small groups which you can navigate between easily, but it appears one can only progress in one direction between the groups. (without hitting a dead end)

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 6d

I made it 3D with a custom solver, and its starting to look promising. I'm curious about whats going on in this little chain separate from the rest of the mass. There must be something interesting here!

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 6d

This is precisely the motivation for it, nice catch!! I hope to reach as incredible visuals as they were able to achieve. I've been thinking about that video for what feels like months

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 6d

It's web scale!

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 7d

I'm hoping this could be useful to analyze if a puzzle is "good" or "hard". I'm not seeing any useful patterns yet. I'm hoping to find something like a choke point or some other graph property which can map to something interesting about the puzzle

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 7d

This level is only a little bigger but its state graph is enormously larger (9000 nodes vs 30). The player has many more unique ways to solve because there are fewer dead-zones for the boxes

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 7d

Playing around with analyzing how many ways there are to solve a simple Sokoban. Orange = no boxes on destination, Blue = all boxes on targets.

A 3D graph showing a mesh containing nodes of color ranging from orange to blue, with something that looks like a gradient across it

A small sokoban level containing 3 blocks and 3 destinations

Dan Miller @dan0mighte.bsky.social · 8d

I know some technology that is great at creating synthetic contributions....

Reposted by Dan Miller

Ian Sundstrom @ian-sundstrom.bsky.social · 11d

🔴, a #pico8 bounce shooter, is out now!
Play it in browser on itch: iansundstrom.itch.io/redcircle
Development fun facts itt 🧵

Reposted by Dan Miller

Pail @pailknight.bsky.social · 11d

Day 1! Coin inspired dress ended up more like scales, but dragons like money too, right?

Reposted by Dan Miller

Ian Sundstrom @ian-sundstrom.bsky.social · 14d

Going to release 🔴, a #pico-8 bounce shooter with mostly procedural animation and gfx, sometime this week!

Reposted by Dan Miller

Paul Southworth ☢️ 🐟 @southworth.bsky.social · 13d

I love environmental storytelling in dystopian sci-fi games.

The New York Groove @nygroove.nyc · 13d

Yeah, everyone hates the AI subway ads as much as you do nygroove.nyc/ai-subway-ads/