Kosmik

What is it?

Kosmik procedurally generates space imagery in a pixelized retro style, inspired by (and hopefully similar to) the visuals of computer games from the early 1990s, such as the original Master of Orion.

The current incarnation of Kosmik is a Mastodon bot posting a freshly generated image to @kosmik@botsin.space each day around 5 pm CET. The image shown above is the first image that the first Kosmik posted on Twitter in early 2022.

License

All pictures posted by Kosmik are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Credits

I developed the current version of Kosmik in Kotlin using

• openrndr as 2D graphics API and
• K.jpg’s OpenSimplex 2 implementation of Open Simplex Noise as basis for texture generation.

The font used in the signature is SinsGold by somepx.

References

Here’s a list of some online resources (likely to grow over time) that I found helpful during the development of Kosmik:

• Applying noise
  • Perlin noise: What is it, how to use it, and why it’s better than value noise
  • Texture generation using Perlin’s noise algorithm in Scala
  • How to Use Perlin Noise in Your Games
  • Generating Digital Worlds Using Perlin Noise
• Generating nebulae
  • Procedural 2D Space Scenes in WebGL
  • Game Development StackExchange: Space nebula cloud generation?
• Miscellaneous
  • PROCJAM Tutorials
  • The Nature of Code
  • MAFA Function Plotter