By now, you must know all about the benefits of becoming an Autopian member: it helps to support good, independent media in these trying times, I’ll draw you a car for your birthday, you’ll get some great swag and merch, and you’ll be privy to special content, events, and bespoke, personalized, hand-written erotica from the Autopian writers of your choice, pending how that lawsuit pans out and if I can get everyone to agree to try it, which, so far, no one has. Prudes.
For those Autopian Velour and RCL members who renewed, I want to tell you about an updated perk! This is the one that replaces the hand-drawn car drawing on your birthday. This past year, you got a unique, custom-generated robot image made with hand-drawn graphics by me and rendered on a real 1982-vintage Apple ][+ computer. This year, we’re going to finally do what David wanted me to do in the first place: make randomly-generated cars.
When we announced the randomly-generated robots last time, here’s what I said about David’s reaction:
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to tell you that David has issues with this part of the project. David, quite reasonably, notes that this is a car website, and we should be delivering car images to our members, not robots! David was a bit indignant about this, and even spit-took some of the PB Blaster cocktail he was drinking in rage when he found out about the robots.
So, it’s about damn time we did this with cars, according to David, at least.
Making the graphic elements is by far the most time-consuming part of all of this; I made a proof-of-concept one, using five discreet parts that can be mixed-and-matched: a top/windshield area, left side/headlight, right side/headlight, grille, and lower bumper/tires. You can see the elements here in the upper left, with the assembled cars (in various color combos) below:
The goal is to have between five and ten different bits for every element there, so, let’s be hopeful and say I do ten each, and if we count the left and right lights together as one element, I think that comes to over 10,000 combinations? Is that right? And then we have four color options for each element, too, so that makes it even larger, and I don’t feel like doing that math. But it should be a lot.
The colors may look strangely blurry and weird, which is all thanks to the strange way the old 1977 Apple II design handles color. I go over that in painful detail in the previous robot post, but the quick explanation is that all Apple II color is really a by-product of the weird way NTSC televisions produce color. It’s all actually patterns of monochrome dots!
Here, look:
Anyway, I think it’s fascinating. And, also as before, the cars will be generated, complete with a randomly-generated make-and-model name, via BASIC program, and these will all be photographed via a camera connected to the Apple II’s game port! Look!
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See? We’re not screwing around here! I have a lot to do here, and the program I use to make the graphical elements was giving me disk errors, so I had to quit out of it and just save to disk the chunk of memory where I think the shapes are stored – luckily I guessed right, but it’s hardly ideal. Oh well.
Anyway, for all you third-year members, we’re so happy you’ve stuck around, and I look forward to getting you your one-of-a-kind 8-bit car as soon as I can!
Cute little cars. I suggest these parts:
Front fascias with and without grills for Jeeps, EVs, and rear-engine cars.
Round, square, and modern squinty headlights.
Differing tire widths and track.
Various rooflines, including the Beetle arch obviously.
And as a flourish, various occupants, including aliens, robots, and Adrian.
Is this what happens after I give my robot three Slurp Juices and a Chicken Nugget? I want to make sure mine mutates into a 911.
And a question, why photograph the screen with a flash? I would think that you would get a better pic without it since the screen is providing the image directly, not by reflection. If you can’t disable the flash function for whatever reason, you can put electrical tape over the flash lens.
I think you may have missed the great compromise answer that would satisfy both yourself and David:
Robots With Wheels. And they could be powered by big honkin’ lead acid batteries, making them Robot EVs.
Robot EVs, with Chain Saws! Now that is Autopian.
Love the new idea, Torch. Any chance I can get the artwork from my original membership date and birthday?
It’s my birthday and my art is NOT on the way!
Of course with 8 billion people on the planet and divided by 365 making approximately 220 million a day, birthdays are not that special.
Yours is.
I like these cars, but they don’t have tail lights. How can you deny us tail lights!
I’m joking, but if you change this up every year how about a car with a random tail light generator next year.
I was going to mention something about the blue car being the only one with turn signal-colored turn signals.
Great Zot, Torch! You have a working II? I’m integer basically jealous. I’ve only seen a few, the neighbor kid’s parents were teachers and they could haul one home here and there. It was IIe’s by the time the school got the grant in 1984, just in time for my freshman year. I have a IIgs pulled from the bay of e’s when it was a little pond so I can run my old floppies.
Off to show the kiddos a real game – Sneakers.
It’s a ][+ so not as old as just a ][ but close!
I just picked up a IIGS (my first Apple that’s not a Mac) and was wondering if you’d be willing to post/sell the program to members to have at home (for, you know, both of us with compatible computers).
I have a working monochrome Z80 CP/M computer with 8″ hard drives. It runs WordStar, Lotus 123, and several text and ASCII graphics games. So there.
Woohoo! *does happy dance*
I’ll take you up on that offer. The more disgusting, disturbing, offensive, and grotesque, the better!
The Mack Hardigraw author is up for it. What about the rest of the team?
You mean Hack Mardigras?
I mean, heck — Murilee Martin had a whole BOOK of smut! (I still haven’t read it, but.)
I love smut. Especially if it isn’t even primarily sexual in nature but none-the-less is adult fiction because of its content being uniquely violent, gross, or taboo.
I recommend “Baby in a Blender” by Terry Musalata.