Now, with the apparent “high” demand I quickly hopped to it and threw together a very crude EAN-13 (which is actually the same as ISBN) barcode generator and posted it in his forum post under the name of ‘BarTender.js’ as I didn’t think it could warrant a real script release.

Roughly two and a half months passed until Graham posted a reply and with it a modified version of my script, where the biggest change was making the text look a lot nicer, and he appropriatly re-named the script ‘BarMaid.js’. Nice touch.

While my original intention was to make a full-fledged barcode generator with support of different kinds of symbologies I knew I had to re-write the code completely. But, as scripting isn’t something that comes very natural to me, I am really struggling to come to terms with a lot of stuff. Though the progress is slow; thankfully, the journey is a pretty steady and enjoyable one.
As of now I have managed to re-write the EAN-13 routine, making it a bit more effective, and I have also added support for the Code 39 symbology, which is pictured at the top. More to come…

Jared Tarbell’s homepage Complexification is another page I had found earlier. He has made some amazing scripts using Processing and his random line, water color script very much resembles a huge city viewed from above.Anyway, I threw myself head-over-heels into this undertaking and spent two nights trying to make my own city generator and came up with this.Now, I must say that it looks fairly satisfying but it only works a fraction of the times I run it and I have no control over any of the parameters I should be able to control such as population density, map type (raster, radial or a mix of the two), road curvature, road classes and their potential to spawn new branches.

As in Introversion’s Subversion I guess that I would have to make use of some complex L-system but that is a little too much above my competence level, for the moment.

Every time the tool chooses a tile it will first pick a random number between 0-100. If the random number is less than or equal to the percentage input it will verify that no neighboring tiles require a connection and then pick an empty tile. If, however, there are tiles next to it that do require a connection it will simply disregard the sparseness. This way the percentage could be somewhat misleading but over a long enough period of time I guess it will even out.

The idea of making something, preferably complex, out of a limited set of rules, principles or objects is very appealing to me. It’s like art sprung out of (almost) nothingness. It’s called synergy – when the sum is greater than its parts. I think these patterns adresses just that; very simple and mundane geometric shapes, but put together, they create something more with seemingly infinte possibilities of variation.

Now, I thought about this for a while, wondering if I had the patience to construct my own symbols and shapes and turn them into a working font, I finaly decided I had not. What would be the point, it’s been done already. Although, I had one concern, as all these symbols where made as fonts there isn’t a very intuitive way to rotate a symbol or flip it around its own axis. Sure, it isn’t that hard to flip a character around, but say if there are a 1000 different symbols it becomes time consuming and counterproductive.

My solution to this problem was to create a script which allowed me to type with objects instead of letters. Each object would be assigned to a specific letter with the added ability to rotate and flip each object during typing using the arrowkeys.

This way I could reduce the number of objects to a minimum.

I added some other features as well. I can navigate around the artboard using the arrowkeys or simply clicking anywhere with the mouse. The script calculates the right position to line up the objects perfectly, it also takes any tile spacing into consideration, should there be any.

Fonticon works really well and can be alot of fun to play around with, building a picture from the ground up. I would say that this is a much more intuitive way of building patterns and you don’t have to make all your shapes and symbols into a working font either so the workflow should be faster. The only problem, and a pretty big one at that, is that I currently haven’t figured out an easy way to colorize them since each object is actually several small objects grouped togehter with a transparent “frame”.

Vectorraster 4 by Lost Minds is a great tool for anyone who wants to create beautiful vector-based rasters in all kinds of ways. It is user-friendly and allow for alot of experimentations by using text or custom shapes as raster dots. Well worth its $25 (Mac only) if you like to fiddle around with halftones.

I have recently added some functions to two of my scripts; aMaze and the Tile Toy. The maze script can now save it’s wall data to a file which allows me to use it inside my Tile Toy script creating mazes with a completely different look. The appearance of the maze is now totally based on what kind of tiles I create within Tile Toy.

At the moment it only supports ‘single file’ tiles therefore only five tiles are needed (since it is a perfect maze it has no need for a solitary tile). Actually that number is closer to four, as a four-way intersection seems to be very rarely used.

Finally my new script works!

The idea was to make a script that would, out of limited number of tiles, create seemingly infinite variations of map- or roadlike patterns.

The tiles needs some rules in order to pair them up so I drew some temporary lines representing roads just to make it easier to understand how to match them up with each other. I soon noticed that I only needed six different variations in order to make a continous map/pattern without any of the lines ending abruptly.

No matter what tile the script chooses, it will always be possible to put another tile on either side of it and make it pair up with the rest of the pattern since all the roads lie on the symmetry axis. This is, on the other side, only true if each tile is ‘single filed’. The number of tiles needed will increase dramaticly with every additional ‘file’.

In the single file tile set above there are 16 possible ways of placing the tiles:

• Tile #1: 4 rotations
• Tile #2: 4 rotations
• Tile #3: 1 static
• Tile #4: 2 rotations
• Tile #5: 1 static
• Tile #6: 4 rotations

But, in a tile set with a higher number of files simply rotating the tile in 90º increments won’t do since it’s symmetry axis will be offset.

Evidently, reflecting a tile both vertically and horizontaly yields the same result as rotating 180º.

The script has to consider the fact that each tile should be able to both rotate and reflect.