model-synthesis VS gbs-control

WFC is based on my work on Model Synthesis. I consider how to create fully connected (navigable) road networks in my 2011 TVCG paper. Here is an example of a generated road network from that paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfc-DQorohc

Craig Reynolds said the name "Boids" was inspired by The Producers Concierge scene, so that's how you should pronounce it:

Boids. Dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice ridden Boids. Boids. You get my drift?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6mTMShVyk

The other really cool rabbit hole to explore for generating tiles and even arbitrary graph based content (I'm sold: hexagons are the bestagons!) is "Wave Function Collapse", which doesn't actually have anything to do with quantum mechanics (it just sounds cool), but is actually a kind of constraint solver related to sudoku solvers.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3rm1w0mn/qt3rm1w0mn_noSpl...

Maxim Gumin's work: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

Paul Merrell's work:

https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis/

https://paulmerrell.org/research/

Oskar Stålberg's work:

https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/784847588893814785

https://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html

There's a way to define cellular automata rules by giving examples of the before and after patterns, and WFC is kind of like a statistical constraint solving version of that.

So it's really easy for artists to define rules just by drawing! Not even requiring any visual programming, but you can layer visual programming on top of it.

That's something that Alexander Repenning's "AgentSheets" supported (among other stuff): you could define cellular automata rules by before-and-after examples, wildcards and variables, and attach additional conditions and actions with a visual programming language.

AgentSheets and other cool systems are described in this classic paper: “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It covered many of my favorite systems.

http://donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf

Chaim Gingold wrote a comprehensive "Gadget Background Survey" at HARC, which includes AgentSheets, Alan Kay's favorites: Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before:

http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...

Chaim Gingold has analyzed the SimCity (classic) code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

>SimCity reverse diagrams: Chaim Gingold (2016).

>These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

>The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010). If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

>Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

Agentsheets: Alexander Repenning (1993–)

Interacting agents are embedded and interact within

If we called it Model Synthesis it'd get fewer clicks…

I built a ESP8266 controlled GBS8200 as main scan converter. https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control You can get a GBS8200 for about 24$ + shipping and an ESP8266 doesn't cost much. And also it just needs basic solder skills. Not really complicated to build. Then you have a great VGA output. And that you can convert to HDMI with a cheap VGA-HDMI adapter. I personally use an old Eizo 5:4 VGA Monitor because of the aspect ratio but sometimes I do actually connect it to HDMI to record things in OBS.

Try searching for GBS-CONTROL. You should probably start looking here: https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control

Some games also require you to move the sync signal over to the next pin, some games require sync signal to both pins at once. It can take some fiddling for a few games but I've always gotten it working eventually. It could help to also go ahead and upgrade the board with GBS control. I have my Rush setup that way and it's pretty handy being able to adjust the picture wirelessly with my phone.

In my opinion GBS-Control. https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control

Try some of the other URLs after connecting to the local wifi. https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control/wiki/Software-Setup

Arcade "CGA" isn't real CGA, it's just analog 15 kHz RGB. You'd have to use something like this to convert the CGA from your computer into analog RGB if you want to feed it into one of those GBS-8200 boards. They're not very good unless you modify them anyway. I use an OSSC to convert analog RGB to HDMI, but that's more expensive.

After a bit of research, I almost pre-ordered a RAD2X HDMI cable, but that would likely be around $85 after shipping, and wouldn't get here for a while. Also, it only works with the Saturn, while I was hoping to find a solution that will work with other retro consoles. Luckily, I came across this video by Voultar showing how to build a GBS-Control.

If you know how to wield a soldering iron then a GBS-8200 plus gbs-control firmware does a good job too for a much lower price, but that does get pretty technical.

- Sometimes the web UI won't have 1280x960 checked, even if it's outputting a 960p signal. I don't know if this is connected to the vertical shift bug, or if .

Again I'd have to dig into the GBS-C source code to find out why mode changing behaves oddly. There will be a lot of learning to do, understand the software state and chip registers and how they correlate to profile settings and input/output behavior. I suppose I could file a bug at https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control/issues, but somehow I feel reluctant to do so, partly because I didn't fully understand the setup and don't know if many of these bugs wouldn't happen on a VGA CRT, partly just learned helplessness and not knowing if my bug report is detailed enough or will be ignored or attacked, partly because I'd prefer to chat with the developers in Discord/Matrix outside of a higher-stakes formal bug report or a forum I've never posted at before.