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SPARTAN: Procedural Tile Generator (pnjeffries.itch.io)
167 points by jsnell on Jan 19, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



Nice seeing itch.io here. I make itch.io, check it out if you're into indie games: http://itch.io


I thought "I recognise that username..." so I poked around your site and saw you wrote LessPHP. It's very useful thanks!


itch.io is stellar. thank you.

any chance you would consider a spiking or daily/weekly popularity chart?


Sure, I'm in the process of reworking the game browsing pages and having a weekly (and maybe daily) list of top sellers/top downloaded is something I'm considering.


please let me know if I can help.

for delicious I built a new popular spiking algorithm - it was essentially recent popularity normalized by total popularity. it worked really well.


It would be awesome to see this turned into a library for dynamically generating aperiodic Wang tiles[0] for one "idea". (ie: grass or cobblestone that doesn't appear to repeat)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile


I imagine that there is additional research in the area, but what you would want is not so much a Wang tile as described in the article, because then all of the triangular tiles would have to be mirrored.

With the existing set, to get anything looking realistic, you would have to define the "left-yellow", "right-yellow", "up-yellow", and "down-yellow" variants of the yellow triangle, with the left and right variants being tileable.

I feel like it should be possible to define a variant of Wang tiles where only complementary colors can be matched.

That said, although aperiodic Wang tiles force all possible tilings to be aperiodic, I'm not aware of anything that says that a regular set of tiles, for which periodic tiles are possible, require that all tilings be periodic. That is, it should be possible to create an aperiodic tiling of less difficult tiles. In fact, this is obvious by a projection of the Wang tiles onto less pathological tiles -- we can take the set of 13, call the first six "black" and the second seven "white", and obey the Wang tiling rules and produce an aperiodic tiling consisting of just black and white tiles.


http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cohen/WangFina...

Microsoft research published a paper on using aperiodic Wang tilings to generate textures.


Wang tile patterns may be aperiodic but they still look "geometric".


Would be nice to see a cross platform release in the future! :)


At last, a solution to a problem that's plagued the developers of 2D sidescrollers since 1980!

It would be more useful today to have something like Photoshop content-aware fill, something that generates plausible tiles given a sample image. Check out ZenBG, which does that. http://mudcu.be/bg/


The download wallpaper link doesn't work on mac os 10.9, safari 7.1.

Console displays this on load:

[Error] Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server. (livereload.js, line 0) http://mudcu.be:35729/livereload.js?snipver=1

No error on the actual download button click.


I want to see a comparison to other similar tools with longer history: - Filter Forge - Substance


There's only a windows build available. If we want more games on our platform then we should also release tools for it rather than just for windows.

Other than that this would be a cool library to include in a game for runtime texture creation.


Good luck. Game developers tend to be more interested in things that aren't contributing back to the various communities that enable them to do their jobs.




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