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The island shape is fully determined by the URL; there's no database behind this. Compressing the islands into sharable URLs was quite a fun challenge.
At the moment I just munge together each row into one long binary string, chop that into 6-bit chunks, and then convert each 6 bit chunk into a single letter chosen from a 64 character alphabet (because 111111=64).
I added a header with a version number to the encoded island to allow me to change the format in the future without breaking existing URLs.
In the future I'd like to generate a human-readable url so e.g. sunkenatlas.com/#evil-rocky-cove or /#perilous-sandy-archway would in a similar way be able to encode the islands deterministically.
But I think I'd need quite a large wordlist for this, as there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible 8x8 islands (2^64).
We can reduce that space quite a bit by ruling out islands with far too few or far too many tiles. But it's still Quite Big.
Any help appreciated on that front :)
