Ever struggled to figure out all the possible combinations of tiles you need to put together for autotiling? I’ve create a tool answers that question for a variety of cases, with visualizations.
Wang Tileset Creator
Ortho-tiles
Last time, we looked at quarter-tiles. This was an auto-tiling technique for square grids. Each cell in the grid is associated with a terrain (i.e. either solid or empty). Then the squares were split in four, and each quarter was assigned an appropriate quarter-tile.
Otho-tiles extends this procedure to work with irregular grids, even non-square grids. We just have to alter the procedure a little, and be ready to deform the quarter tiles fit in place.
Ortho?
Ortho is a Conway Operator. It can be thought of as the extension of dividing a square into 4. It divides each n-gon into n “kites” or “ortho-cells”. Each kite is a four sided shape containing the cell center, one corner, and the midpoint of the two edges adjacent to that corner.
The appeal of the ortho operation is it can take any polygonal grid, no matter how irregular, and convert it into a grid of 4 sided shapes. And it’s much easier to work with something that has a consistent number of sides.
Continue readingQuarter-Tile Autotiling
Since Oskar posted about it, I see an increasing amount of praise for his Dual Grid proposal for autotiling terrains. It works by drawing tiles at a half-cell offset to the base grid, creating a dual grid, and using marching squares autotiling to select which tile to draw based on the terrains the corners of the dual grid, which is the centers of base grid.
This is a great scheme. It’s simple, only needs a few tiles and can be extended quite easily. It’s used in many games.
But, it does have some drawbacks. The dual grid is difficult to get your head around. You have to worry about ambiguous tiles. And despite being a substantial improvement over the blob pattern, it still requires drawing quite a number of different tiles.
I’m here to explain an alternative, quarter-tile autotiling. Quarter-tiling has also been called sub-tiles, meta-tiles (when doubling instead of halving). I’ve previous described as micro blob, which is the same thing with precomposition. It’s best known for being the tiling built into the RPG Maker engine.
Quarter-tiling is pretty easy to implement, and requires substantially less effort to create tiles for, as it uses fewer, smaller tiles. That does mean it’s not possible to produce as much tile variation as marching squares. But there’s plenty of techniques for adding that back.
Later, we’ll look at ortho-tiles – an extension of quarter-tiles to irregular, non-square, grids.
Continue readingProjects Using My Software
Some of my tools and software have been arond for some time. Plenty of people use them them, judging from queries and stats I see, but few write back to tell me where it’s actually been used. Here I document some of the published projects. I’m always pleased to see more.
Continue readingUnity’s Problem
(Unity the company, not Unity the engine)
Unity have recently announced their third recent round of layoffs, and pretty much everyone is blaming CEO John Riccitiello for persistent mismanagement.
There may be some truth to that, but the fact is that Unity has a bigger problem than its CEO, or its technical flaws. A problem rarely mentioned that explains most of the rest.
Continue readingnice-hooks
I’ve created a new open source library.
I’ve been learning quite a bit about AI and AI Alignment recently. A few weeks ago I joined the Interpretability Hackathon. Sadly my contributions were minimal as I had to leave halfway through, but doing it made me appreciate how bad the tooling is in this area.
So I’ve created nice-hooks, a library for working with pytorch hooks and activations more effectively.
The Man Who Won: Chapter 1
Hi all, Adam here. I recently attended a creative writing class. It taught me that you don’t need to wait for permission to start writing. I thought I’d have a go at making flash fiction. Enjoy!
Tim was on one of his rants again.
Continue readingAnnouncing Sylves
I’ve released a new library, Sylves that handles the geometry of grids for C# or Unity. I’ve basically distilled all my knowledge from several different grid projects, and made a solid base for anything you might want.
Constrained Text Generation with AI
I was discussing how AI text generation, such as ChatGPT, might end up getting used in computer games. So far, designers are fairly reluctant to adopt the technology. One of the key problems is that you just can’t control the output enough. Language models will break character or respond in inappropriate and toxic ways. Finding a good solution to this is a huge research field, and not likely to get cracked soon.
For the foreseeable future, AI in games is much more likely to be used offline – assets and dialog generation generated up front, so it can be vetted before being integrated into the game.
But it got me thinking, can we vet the AI’s output in advance, but still get the benefits of intelligent decision making at runtime? It turns out, we can! I doubt it’ll be useful in every circumstance, but I can certainly see uses for it, like chatbots, games.
The code and demonstration for this article is available here.
Continue readingInfinite Quadtrees – Fractal Coordinates
A cool technique I’ve wanted to write up for a while is “Fractal Coordinates” described in a paper by Peter Mawhorter. Don’t be scared by the name, it’s essentially a variant on quadtrees that covers the entire 2d plane. Fractal coordinates have some interesting properties that are useful for procedural generation.
But first, let’s catch up on quadtrees.
Continue reading