Procedural Cave Generation in C# & Unity

Procedural Cave Generation in C# & Unity

Ever wondered what it is like to program computer games?

Or even better, what it is like to program programs that program your computer games for you? Then welcome to the wonderful world of procedural game design, such as Spore, Borderlands, and No Man’s Sky.

Recently, I have been watching and greatly enjoying this Youtube playlist of the South-African Sebastian Lague. In a series of nine videos, Sebastian programs a procedural cave generator from scratch. The program generates a pseudo-random cave, following some sensible constraints, everytime its triggered.

The following is Sebastian’s first video in the series labeled: Learn how to create procedurally generated caverns/dungeons for your games using cellular automata and marching squares.

It looks like Sebastian has many more interesting playlists on game development, so I’ll be reporting on any more pearls I find.

More in line with my blog’s main topics, Sebastian also hosts a series on neural networks, which I will most probably watch and report on over the course of the coming weeks:

Happy viewing!

Learn from the Pros: How media companies visualize data

Learn from the Pros: How media companies visualize data

Past months, multiple companies shared their approaches to data visualization and their lessons learned.

Click the companies in the list below to jump to their respective section

Financial Times

The Financial Times (FT) released a searchable database of the many data visualizations they produced over the years. Some lovely examples include:

Graphic showing what May needs to happen to get her deal over the line when MPs vote on Friday
Data visualization belonging to a recent Brexit piece by the FT, viahttps://www.ft.com/graphics
Dutch housing graphic
Searching the FT database for European House Prices via https://www.ft.com/graphics returns this map of the Netherlands.

BBC

The BBC released a free cookbook for data visualization using R programming. Here is the associated Medium post announcing the book.

The BBC data team developed an R package (bbplot) which makes the process of creating publication-ready graphics in their in-house style using R’s ggplot2 library a more reproducible process, as well as making it easier for people new to R to create graphics.

Apart from sharing several best practices related to data visualization, they walk you through the steps and R code to create graphs such as the below:

One of the graphs the BBC cookbook will help you create, via https://bbc.github.io/rcookbook/
Ultimately, you should be able to reproduce these BBC style graphics, viahttps://medium.com/bbc-visual-and-data-journalism/how-the-bbc-visual-and-data-journalism-team-works-with-graphics-in-r-ed0b35693535

Economist

The data team at the Economist also felt a need to share their lessons learned via Medium. They show some of their most misleading, confusing, and failing graphics of the past years, and share the following mistakes and their remedies:

  • Truncating the scale (image #1 below)
  • Forcing a relationship by cherry-picking scales
  • Choosing the wrong visualisation method (image #2 below)
  • Taking the “mind-stretch” a little too far (image #3 below)
  • Confusing use of colour (image #4 below)
  • Including too much detail
  • Lots of data, not enough space

Moreover, they share the data behind these failing and repaired data visualizations:

Via https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368
Via https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368
Via https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368
Via https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368

FiveThirtyEight

I could not resist including this (older) overview of the 52 best charts FiveThirtyEight claimed they made.

All 538’s data visualizations are just stunningly beautiful and often very
ingenious, using new chart formats to display complex patterns. Moreover, the range of topics they cover is huge. Anything ranging from their traditional background — politics — to great cover stories on sumo wrestling and pricy wine.

Viahttps://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-52-best-and-weirdest-charts-we-made-in-2016/
Via https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-52-best-and-weirdest-charts-we-made-in-2016/ You should definitely check out the original cover story via https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/sumo/
Via https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-52-best-and-weirdest-charts-we-made-in-2016/

StatQuest: Statistical concepts, clearly explained

StatQuest: Statistical concepts, clearly explained

Josh Starmer is assistant professor at the genetics department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But more importantly:
Josh is the mastermind behind StatQuest!

StatQuest is a Youtube channel (and website) dedicated to explaining complex statistical concepts — like data distributions, probability, or novel machine learning algorithms — in simple terms.

Once you watch one of Josh’s “Stat-Quests”, you immediately recognize the effort he put into this project. Using great visuals, a just-about-right pace, and relateable examples, Josh makes statistics accessible to everyone. For instance, take this series on logistic regression:

And do you really know what happens under the hood when you run a principal component analysis? After this video you will:

Or are you more interested in learning the fundamental concepts behind machine learning, then Josh has some videos for you, for instance on bias and variance or gradient descent:

With nearly 200 videos and counting, StatQuest is truly an amazing resource for students ‘and teachers on topics related to statistics and data analytics. For some of the concepts, Josh even posted videos running you through the analysis steps and results interpretation in the R language.

StatQuest started out as an attempt to explain statistics to my co-workers – who are all genetics researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill. They did these amazing experiments, but they didn’t always know what to do with the data they generated. That was my job. But I wanted them to understand that what I do isn’t magic – it’s actually quite simple. It only seems hard because it’s all wrapped up in confusing terminology and typically communicated using equations. I found that if I stripped away the terminology and communicated the concepts using pictures, it became easy to understand.

Over time I made more and more StatQuests and now it’s my passion on YouTube.

Josh Starmer via https://statquest.org/about/

Daily Art by Saskia Freeke

Daily Art by Saskia Freeke

Saskia Freeke (twitter) is a Dutch artist, creative coder, interaction designer, visual designer, and educator working from Amsterdam. She has been creating an awesome digital art piece for every day since January 1st 2015. Her ever-growing collection includes some animated, visual masterpieces.

Year 4 of making daily art! Wouldn’t ever thought that this would go on so long! Thank you all for your support, kind messages and likes! Let’s see what 2019 will bring!
Via http://sasj.tumblr.com/post/181589324890/year-4-of-making-daily-art-wouldnt-ever-thought

My personal favorites are Saskia’s moving works, her GIFs:

Geometric Animations / 190209
Via http://sasj.tumblr.com/
Geometric Animations / 180626
Via http://sasj.tumblr.com/
Geometric Animations / 180115
Via http://sasj.tumblr.com/

Saskia uses Processing to create her art. Processing is a Java-based language, also used often by Daniel Shiffmann whom we know from the Coding Train.

People Analytics: Is nudging goed werkgeverschap of onethisch?

People Analytics: Is nudging goed werkgeverschap of onethisch?

In Dutch only:

Voor Privacyweb schreef ik onlangs over people analytics en het mogelijk resulterende nudgen van medewerkers: kleine aanpassingen of duwtjes die mensen in de goede richting zouden moeten sturen. Medewerkers verleiden tot goed gedrag, als het ware. Maar wie bepaalt dan wat goed is, en wanneer zouden werkgevers wel of niet mogen of zelfs moeten nudgen?

Lees het volledige artikel hier.

Free Programming Books (I still need to read)

Free Programming Books (I still need to read)

There are multiple unread e-mails in my inbox.

Links to books.

Just sitting there. Waiting to be opened, read. For months already.

The sender, you ask? Me. Paul van der Laken.

A nuisance that guy, I tell you. He keeps sending me reminders, of stuff to do, books to read. Books he’s sure a more productive me would enjoy.

Now, I could wipe my inbox. Be done with it. But I don’t wan’t to lose this digital to-do list… Perhaps I should put them here instead. So you can help me read them!

Each of the below links represents a formidable book on programming! (I hear)
And there are free versions! Have a quick peek. A peek won’t hurt you:

Disclaimer: This page contains one or more links to Amazon.
Any purchases made through those links provide us with a small commission that helps to host this blog.

The books listed above have a publicly accessible version linked. Some are legitimate. Other links are somewhat shady.
If you feel like you learned something from reading one of the books (which you surely will), please buy a hardcopy version. Or an e-book. At the very least, reach out to the author and share what you appreciated in his/her work.
It takes valuable time to write a book, and we should encourage and cherish those who take that time.

For more books on R programming, check out my R resources overview.

For books on data analytics and (behavioural) psychology in (HR) management, check out Books for the modern data-driven HR professional.