Weekly Links #134

Hello, everyone. For once, I only have my own bad mood to blame for the shortness of this newsletter. As promised three weeks ago, my latest book, Make Your Own Programming Language, is live on Leanpub. It's only of interest to programmers, especially those with a taste for retrocomputing and retrogaming. But you know my opinion: piecing blocks together in GameMaker is still programming, whether you realize it or not. And game design works best when you have at least a trace of process, as opposed to banging things together until they stick. So give it a try.

In unrelated news, all everyone's been talking about lately is No Man's Sky. That's also the case of Michael Cook, who brings it up as an example of the language we use to discuss procedural generation. And you know... I couldn't help but notice the fatigue of many reviewers when they mention how many millions of billions of planets there are in that game, and how they're never going to see the vast majority of them. Which fortunately doesn't really matter...

I guess the creators of No Man's Sky forgot that the original 8-bit Elite was originally planned to have 282 trillion galaxies, or 2 to the power of 48 (presumably another byte was going to be used for the planets in each galaxy). And never mind that it would have made the artificiality obvious, especially on a home computer from the 1980s. But visiting 2000 star systems is a plausible goal for the determined player -- there are just enough of them to make for a huge playground, yet few enough that you can actually remember some of your visits afterwards... and care. While enough content to fill millions of galaxies (a sizable chunk of the observable universe) just sort of blends into an amorphous mass. A statistic, if you will.

As an aside, let me underscore again than an 8-bit computer from the early 1980s, with just 64 kilobytes of RAM, could easily have handled a procedural universe on a scale comparable with the one in No Man's Sky (if a lot less detailed). What exactly are we doing with a million times more memory and computing speed?