Inkie Beard

Artificial intelligence is often touted as the future demise of the human race. We've all heard it, the robots will either wipe us out or rule us with an iron fist, the last being quite literal. Call me a niave optimist, but truly intelligent artificial sentience won't be like us. Our species is a by-product of several hundred thousand years of evolution, a near constant fight for survival every minute of everyday just so we can eek out one more day to further the human race. Our whole being is hard wired to abhore the idea we have an expiration. That would be very counter intuitive for a species that needs to survive and dominate in order to produce off spring and continue on. Artificial life & sentience doesn't have that issue - with a decent power source & a decently sturdy casing and it's all set. Truly sentient intelligent robots won't have anywhere near the same goals as us, and we can only hope, none of the same hang ups. Here's where I explain my...

Something I've been battling with recently when contemplating the procedural universe generation for Galliventurer. How realistic should the properties of celestial objects be? In the real world/universe, star's are visible colours because of their size & temperature, which in turn is based on: their age, elemental composition, and the type of fusion happening within. But should the universe of Galliventurer be limited to these factors? There will already be the stretching of realism with faster than light travel, more attractive and habitable planets than you can shake a laser at, not to mention alien races that you'll be able to understand, communicate & trade with. star forming nebula When playing a game about flying through the great vast emptiness of space, the idea is there shouldn't actually be too much emptiness. Emptiness is boring. Nothing happens in the empty, nothing good anyway. The fine line will be in finding the balance between not...

While I do want the Galliventurer universe to be procedurally & randomly generated, I don't want it to be truly random. There needs to be a modicum of probability involved. Some weighting so that some things are rarer than others. After all we can have too many diamond covered planets or uranium based suns - as you can see I haven't actually started thinking too much about the composition of the planets, stars, etc. Keeping this probability based random selection in mind, I'm going to be using a dynamically weighted series of arrays to randomly select properties for entities in the Galliventurer universe. Using something very similar to (or based on) this article by Michael Czechowski https://observablehq.com/@nextlevelshit/rejection-sampling-in-javascript . The main bit of complexity here will be the values of a randomly selected property will affect the weights of the next selection. For example the size of a star will greatly change the weight of the probabi...