Rock Climbing

Improving Island Shaping For Map Generation

One of my goals for 2019 is to improve my existing pages. This week I improved the island map section of my noise-based map generation page.

Island map generation: you figure it out

I had offered lots of options: additive vs multiplicative, Euclidean vs Manhattan distance, and three mysterious parameters named a, b, c. It was simple for me to offer lots of options. The problem with lots of options is that there's a large "possibility space" to explore. You may or may not find something you like.

Based on feedback from readers, I decided to rewrite this section. I stepped back and thought about why we're adding and multiplying. What is the goal? How does it work?

Push the edges of the map down into water. I need to decrease elevations near the edges.
Push the middle of the map up onto land. I need to increase elevations near the middle.

The main idea is to start with noise-based elevation and reshape it into what we want. The noise-based elevation fits into a box , and we reshape the box into something like . The contents of the box, whatever terrain had been generated, will get pushed up and down when the box is changed.

I rewrote the entire section of the page to explain this idea, and I ended up removing the interactive diagram.

Island map generation: explain the main ideas

Related: Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work says that experts can use the interactive exploration to navigate the possibility space because they have already built up the intuition to know where to go. Novices on the other hand learn better with guidance.

End Of Campaign: Dark Heresy

We finished off our Dark Heresy campaign on Monday night. We had all sort of lost our interest in the game after almost a year of play. The last few months we have also had several challenges with getting together as a group to play, and that certainly didn't help things.

So, how did it end? Well, we had just captured a dangerous psyker named Molokoff from Hive Tertiam on Fenk's World and barely managed to escape the planet before it was pulled entirely into the warp. Once aboard our vessel, the Cudgel of Drusus, we turned the prisoner over to the Inquisition. That's when things went to Hell.

Literally.

As our ship entered the warp to travel to our next destination, something went wrong. Horribly wrong. Demonic creatures began to pop up all over the ship. We fought like heroes, but watched our companions go down one by one.

First to die was our 'tame' psyker, Volk. The power of the warp invading the ship began to overwhelm his mental defenses, and I was forced to put him down with a bolt pistol shell to the back of the head. Next was our favorite pilot, "Mad" Murdock (an NPC). On the hangar deck, as we were making our way to the main engineering area, he was dragged down by a horde of smaller demons.

Third to fall was our chirurgeon, Sister Scythia. She burned down a few demons with her meltagun before a flamethrowing fiend doused her with a barrage of unholy napalm. Probably for the best, as she was not very careful with her shooting and a meltagun firing off in the engineering spaces would have been catastrophic.

Fourth was our newest recruit, an Imperial Guardsman from the 24th Canopus Heavy Foot. Corporal Jones ran out of ammunition for his heavy stubber - which he toted about with his Bulging Biceps as if it were nothing more than an autogun. After spraying hundreds of rounds into the enemy, he heard that fatal 'click.' Before he could locate any more ammunition, he too was torn apart. Thankfully, he died before they began eating. I think.

Adeptus Arbites Belisarion Graecus was the last to fall. Using his skills with a bolt pistol, he took out demon after demon with precision aim. The holy inscriptions on the sanctified weapon glowed brighter with every shot, and the Emperor's wrath flowed through the explosive shells, overcoming many a demon's unnatural toughness. But all things must end, and Graecus finally ran out of shells as well. He met his fate, praising the Emperor and pistol whipping a final demon into death as the hordes tore into his armour.

The Cudgel of Drusus is marked as lost in the warp on Imperial records.

Brave Browser voted the best privacy-focused product of 2020

Out of all the privacy-focused products and apps available on the market, Brave has been voted the best. Other winners of Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards showed that there was a huge interest in privacy-enhancing products and apps such as chats, maps, and other collaboration tools.

An extremely productive year for Brave

Last year has been a pivotal one for the crypto industry, but few companies managed to see the kind of success Brave did. Almost every day of the year has been packed witch action, as the company managed to officially launch its browser, get its Basic Attention Token out, and onboard hundreds of thousands of verified publishers on its rewards platform.

Luckily, the effort Brave has been putting into its product hasn't gone unnoticed.

The company's revolutionary browser has been voted the best privacy-focused product of 2019, for which it received a Golden Kitty award. The awards, hosted by Product Hunt, were given to the most popular products across 23 different product categories.

Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt said:

"Our annual Golden Kitty awards celebrate all the great products that makers have launched throughout the year"

Brave's win is important for the company—with this year seeing the most user votes ever, it's a clear indicator of the browser's rapidly rising popularity.

Privacy and blockchain are the strongest forces in tech right now

If reaching 10 million monthly active users in December was Brave's crown achievement, then the Product Hunt award was the cherry on top.

The recognition Brave got from Product Hunt users shows that a market for privacy-focused apps is thriving. All of the apps and products that got a Golden Kitty award from Product Hunt users focused heavily on data protection. Everything from automatic investment apps and remote collaboration tools to smart home products emphasized their privacy.

AI and machine learning rose as another note-worthy trend, but blockchain seemed to be the most dominating force in app development. Blockchain-based messaging apps and maps were hugely popular with Product Hunt users, who seem to value innovation and security.

For those users, Brave is a perfect platform. The company's research and development team has recently debuted its privacy-preserving distributed VPN, which could potentially bring even more security to the user than its already existing Tor extension.

Brave's effort to revolutionize the advertising industry has also been recognized by some of the biggest names in publishing—major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, NDTV, NPR, and Qz have all joined the platform. Some of the highest-ranking websites in the world, including Wikipedia, WikiHow, Vimeo, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo, are also among Brave's 390,000 verified publishers.