von Klaas
Do you know what this is?
1010131311324233453234440451045000
No, that is not Lindsay Lohan’s phone number. It’s also not the postal code of some far-away country in the Caribbean . Although a country would have been a pretty good guess. The number you’re seeing up top represents the border outline of Germany. Well, sort of. Try and spot it:
If you’ve taken a glance at our background image on social media you may have noticed the funky triangular outlines of different regions depicted there. Truth be told, we have been looking at triangles quite a bit over the past weeks. After brainstorming different designs for game regions in LOCLET, we fell in love with the zig-zag style of triangular outlines (sorry, Hexagons, it was a close decision). So we set out to triangularize the world. Here is what that looks like:
A close-up of Europe:
It feels a bit like a crossbreed of Keith Haring and M.C. Escher. Although it looks nice and breezy, it was actually quite some pain to get there (and we’re still fine-tuning ;-). After days of digging into triangle grids, vertex and barycenter coordinates, breadth-first and depth-first search, edge extraction strategies etc., a cry of relief went through our office as the first non-distorted triangular outlines started to appear on screen.
We will not (yet) tell you what these regions are all about in LOCLET. Instead, we will distract you with yet another close-up:
And that concludes today’s post. Almost.
As an outtake bonus, here is one of the funniest accidents that happened along the way:
