I've gone down that rabbit hole and written countless versions of space invaders. What's really cool to me is that - to get it right - the secret is moving only one invader in the pack every 1/60th of a second, this gives the pack movement the same feeling as the original. The genius of the original coder in creating this illusion never escapes me.
Nice, just the other day I coded up some quick 2d shooter demo and realized I have no idea how to draw interesting sprites for it. What you're doing here with drawing the generated vector onto different sizes of grid is brilliant. A sort of structured pulsation. Same simple technique can be used for both "breathing" animation of a critter and for animating it into bigger, badder forms. Bravo.
At this point (actually before even writing the comment) If your blog had a RSS feed I'd have subscribed to it... but (at least according to my RSS plugin) it doesn't, so I fear I will miss out on your next inspiring writeups. Consider adding one, if you feel like it :-)
Inspired by Jared Tarbell (linked from another comment here from levitated.net).
I found it surprisingly easy to get good results. The major components are the eyes, bilateral symmetry and otherwise random pixels within a small rectangle, if I remember correctly.
They look very close to block-printed Chinese or Japanese characters to me, like something you'd find hanging off the side of a building, lit by fluorescent tubes. It looks very cool. I bet it would look even more like script if it weren't symmetric!
The image/animation that sticks to the top, showing visually what is being talked about as we scroll is really nice work, and I typically hate fancy pages changes during scrolling.
Very interesting article, and quite fun for those of us with a penchant for 8-bit aesthetics and retro-computing roots.
One thing that came to mind while reading this, was: isn't this just a human digital manifestation of Mother Nature's desire to just evolve everything into a crab shape?
Think about the symmetry and function of various appendages of the space invader, and how - eventually, all space invaders just look like crabs.
Are we seeing some sort of confluence in the Matrix here?
This is brilliant, your algorithm produces really great results - and your write-up is super! Would be great to have it as a simple function that we could use in our games ;-)
This is a REALLY good writeup, I’m incredibly impressed not only with the work itself, but the care put into explaining and demonstrating it. Much respect to the muffin man.
Ahh... Brings me memories. Back in the 80s I did something similar after reading Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker and his Biomorph evolution app. I wanted to recreate it but doing something more fun. So I hacked an Atari Logo space invaders game that used genetic programming on the invaders that survived most of the hits based on their shape (some pixels worked as shields) and motion. After 5 levels the game was almost impossible to beat.
37 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadI wonder how well you can do by having a pseudo-random kernel walk and then mirroring it.
At this point (actually before even writing the comment) If your blog had a RSS feed I'd have subscribed to it... but (at least according to my RSS plugin) it doesn't, so I fear I will miss out on your next inspiring writeups. Consider adding one, if you feel like it :-)
https://muffinman.io/invaders/#/size:15/main-seed:began-ever... is a favorite so far
Ironically, this is much like saving the planet by creating invaders… the hacker way, without using brute force AI.
You deserve your upvote.
Much better than you'd expect from the article.
Also, TIL about [oklch](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value...).
live version: https://abetusk.github.io/iao/vadfad_1gen/
source: https://github.com/abetusk/iao/tree/main/vadfad_1gen
Inspired by Jared Tarbell (linked from another comment here from levitated.net).
I found it surprisingly easy to get good results. The major components are the eyes, bilateral symmetry and otherwise random pixels within a small rectangle, if I remember correctly.
One thing that came to mind while reading this, was: isn't this just a human digital manifestation of Mother Nature's desire to just evolve everything into a crab shape?
Think about the symmetry and function of various appendages of the space invader, and how - eventually, all space invaders just look like crabs.
Are we seeing some sort of confluence in the Matrix here?
Top-notch work, all around!