Because two pages and two weeks working on one level wasn’t enough – here is a third page.
The previous pages:
This page picks up where “A Pyramid Diversion” left off, and how the diversion eventually led into the final image for “The Secret Pyramid”.
The First Two Gallery Versions of The Secret Pyramid
The first version is from the original 90+91 gallery, the 2nd is the version in the 90s theme set gallery.
There were many in-between versions, as I continued to make minor changes while working on the first two pages.
The Diversion Led to Something New
Although I consider most of the work I did for the page “A Pyramid Diversion” somewhat of a waste, the last part of it led to the following unedited image:
The similarity shading on it’s own is also pretty interesting:
This type of extreme definition in a similarity map is only possible if the set of levels used to generate the map are extremely similar. In this case, the original lines were compared against 29 other versions of the house area with 15-18 lines.
A New Look for The Secret Pyramid
I thought it might be interesting to see what the gallery version of The Secret Pyramid would look like with the blue/green house area above.
Before I tried to combine them, I changed the color of some lines in the new version, resulting in something like this:
Although it was a test of my limited photo-shopping skills, I was able to combine this with the original resulting in this:
The Blurry Green Line
I really liked this new version of The Secret Pyramid, but it didn’t quite feel right. The reason:
While the blurry green “line” from the shading was what drew me to the new image, it doesn’t really fit with the jagged lines of the rest of the image.
Instead of making this pseudo line look more like the rest of the lines, I decided to do the opposite.
Steps Are Now Diagonals
This prompted me to add an option to my program that replaces jagged steps that approximate diagonals with, ummm, diagonal lines.
While this idea had long been on my radar, I had trouble seeing how actual diagonal lines would fit in with the rest of the lines and used this as an excuse to avoid doing any actual programming. I was surprised by the results.
The Secret Pyramid with Diagonals and the Original Center
More Sabotage
Between the version above and the final version below, I decided to address one other minor issue I had with the original level:
The magenta outer layer is just a bit too thick.
To fix this, rather than do something simple like crop the image, I decided to alter the level itself:
- I removed 2 cells from each side of the grid, resulting in an 87×87 grid instead of 91×91.
- The single line that never entered the smaller grid was removed.
- The parts of the two other lines that went outside the small grid were trimmed off.
- Fortunately these lines both started outside the smaller grid and stayed inside it once they entered.
- Thus, I didn’t need to create any new lines – I just needed to change the endpoints of these two lines and trim everything before that.
- This reduced the total number of the lines in The Secret Pyramid by 1 to 61, but did not affect any of the numbers on the A Perfect Level page that can only be explained by divine intervention.
After I fixed this and made some other minor changes to the line colors, I combined the new center with the rest of the board, resulting in the final image.
First, The Beginning
Well before any of the images on this page existed, 37 days ago I saw the first version of The Secret Pyramid generated by my program:
Between this image and the final version I have:
- changed the color of every single line except for the cyan line.
- altered the computer generated similarity maps to increase the shading in the outer layer.
- made over 500 intermediate versions of the image
- generated versions of the central house layer with different settings and a completely different method of generating the similarity map.
- photo-shopped the resulting house layer over the original image.
- spent a full day updating my program to straighten out jagged lines that approximate diagonals.
- altered the level itself by reducing the grid size to 87×87, eliminating one line and altering two other lines.
- written 3 web pages including this one.
Admittedly, it’s a bit of a stretch to call the resulting image computer generated.
Nevertheless, here it is:
The Final Secret Pyramid
