Procedural Room And Corridor Dungeon Generation For Roguelike Games.

Over at the blog of Bob Nystrom (author of Game Programming Patterns) he has an article discussing the finer points of randomized dungeon generation. He covers stuff that has frustrated me before in roguelikes, namely the randomization placing objects or even the protagonist in rooms with no exits, effectively ending the game. He also covers balancing corridors (like, hallways and such) with rooms to create more dynamic dungeons. It also gets under the hood of randomized dungeon generation, comparing and contrasting various generators. The article includes several active examples that generate completely random dungeons every time you click to illustrate the points. Really cool stuff.

Magazine Article About Controlling A Model Train Set With A TRS-80

 

In my recent jaunts to Portland's outlet warehouse stores  I wound up with a stack of old model railroad magazines from the 1960s through the 1980s... because of course I did. Flipping through them, they are detail-intensive and super esoteric, which means they're perfect for this blog. Unfortunately, I cannot even try to care enough about model railroading to this degree. However, this article "Computerization Of The Great Southern" in the March 1983 issue of Model Railroader caught my eye because it intersected with 1980s retro-computing, which *is* something I give half a crap about.

The article features Lorell Joiner (who apparently died in 2007) discussing the computerization of his Great Southern Railroad model. As you can see from the photo, the equipment involved is a TRS-80 computer. Apparently the Great Southern was kind of a legendary big deal in the model railroad world, and certainly looks like no joke:

The article doesn't go into any of the program code or anything, but does detail the engineering aspect of it using those awesome programming flowcharts that used to be all over computer programming books from the 1980s.