aappleby
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
(source - I wrote MurmurHash/SMHasher and have used the above in my own bloom filters and cuckoo hash tables)
Phyllis fades from color to black and white except for two houses. The fairground has a big top with tiny bleachers and a guy inside. The happy city has people with their arms raised in a V. People in the marketplace city wear hats and some are carrying bundles on their heads. There are weird cactus plants in the hanging city. In the half-fairgroud city, there's a statue on one of the trucks. The city that copies the dead has a set of pallbearers carrying a wrapped corpse down the stairs. The people on top of Argia are laying with their ears to the ground, listening for the animated sound waves coming from below.
And on and on and on and on. I just can't even.
The amount of _stuff_ crammed into each little city is almost unbelievable. Drawbridges open and close, glowing lines sketch patterns, camels walk across a tiny desert. Buildings fade into existence and then burst in a shower of sparks. Flags fly, smoke drifts, buckets cause ripples as they dip into underground pools. The city made of plumbing has tiny people in the bathtubs! There's a freakin' roller coaster with moving cars and a ferris wheel!
I absolutely understand the AI hate that's being commented here, but... in this instance, I just can't feel it. I keep finding more and more little details every time I click on a city, and I am astounded. I just now noticed there's a little guy in the city of strings hanging up new strings at the top of the hill. Damn. My favorite is Marozia, where dark buildings open like treasure chests and release shining towers and flocks of glowing birds.
Yes, there are also a lot of stupid AI errors - every spoked wheel has the spokes off-center for example. But holy crap, I just can't hate this. I don't care about who built it or the random bits of jank - this thing is _beautiful_ in a way that I haven't seen from AI before, and it warms my old GPU-powered heart.
Later on we had some "debug" cartridges that sat in between the console and a flash cartridge and intercepted reads/writes to a single address and replaced the data with whatever came in over a serial port back to the PC. That was enough of a backdoor to implement very basic dynamic reloading of art assets - I wrote a Photoshop plugin that added a "send to N64" button and some game-side support code and the cycle time for artists trying to see their work on a TV went from 30 minutes to 10 seconds.
I've used that when teaching short "Graphics 101" (not in the first session though) and the math comes out more intuitive than the usual "here's how to calculate a perspective matrix, don't ask where these numbers come from" version.
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/aappleby; my proof: https://keybase.io/aappleby/sigs/2jPn89fxnJCdcebbBm0nxTIPrs80ZxfB5INOGQ9fJIY ]