2012-12-11
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Jason Scott (via thoughtwax):
The vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. It’s an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.
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In 2008, the German computer magazine c’t launched a competition to find the best program that could play Asteroids, the classic arcade game. It detailed the internals of the machine, and eventually chose from the entrants.
The winner, Helmut Buhler, was responsible for the video above. He realised that the random number generator at the core of the game was actually predictable, which means his code can fire shots before asteroids appear, or aim for both the asteroid and the smaller fragments that will spin off it.
If the sheer audacity of that doesn’t impress you, you may prefer the entry from Vladimir “Bleifuß” Panteleev, whose ship will scare the willies out of you as it slides at high speed just past vast rocks or the alien spaceship.
(Thanks to Paul Hammond for introducing me to these videos.)
2012-12-10
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An image of Asteroids, showing the normally invisible vector lines that join lettering and the centres of the asteroids and spaceships themselves, taken from a 2008 c’t magazine programming contest to program a player for the game.
2012-04-09
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The first appearance of the “computer-generated illustration produced at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico” of pulsar CP1919 (now known as PSR B1919+21), credited to Jerry Ostriker, in Scientific American’s January 1971 issue.
The image is best known as the album art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, as appropriated by Peter Saville, but this post (by Adam Capriola) is the most thorough attempt I’ve ever seen to go into its history.
2012-04-05
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Rendering High Resolution Maps in Kartograph (via):
This is going to be a quick run-through the creation of the latest Kartograph showcase which is a high res vector map.
After finishing the map configuration I loaded the generated SVG (7 megabytes) into Illustrator to add some labels and refine the colors.
2010-05-25
2009-04-06
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Sci-Fi-O-Rama » Digital Visions “Computers and Art”
via ffffound, but I wanted to preserve the attribution properly (although the image isn’t even on the original post any more).
