Anonymous asks:
something about how we tweak physics to āworkā better in games?
Ho ho! Work. Get it? Like in physicsā¦?
Anonymous asks:
something about how we tweak physics to āworkā better in games?
Ho ho! Work. Get it? Like in physicsā¦?
Hi! Here are a few loose thoughts about picking random numbers.
Not music nerds, obviously.
I donāt know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. Thatās about it.
The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve notes, but represent them with only seven letters? Where did the key signatures come from? Why is every Wikipedia article on this impossible to read without first having read all the others?
A few days ago, some of it finally clicked. I feel like an idiot for not getting it earlier, but I suppose it doesnāt help that everyone explains music using, well, musical notation, which doesnāt make any sense if you donāt know why itās like that in the first place.
Here is what I gathered, from the perspective of someone whose only music class was learning to play four notes on a recorder in second grade. I stress that I donāt know anything about music and this post is terrible. If you you so much as know how to whistle, please donāt read this you will laugh at me.
I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is.
I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because Iāve implemented it before, for flax, and that took several days of poring over half a dozen clumsy explanations that were more interested in showing off tech demos than actually explaining what was going on. The few helpful resources I found were often wrong, and left me with no real intuitive grasp of how and why it works.
Hereās the post I wish I couldāve read in the first place.
Decimal sucks.
Ten is such an awkward number. Its only divisors are two and five. Two is nice, but five? Who cares about five? What about three and four?
I have a simple solution to all of these non-problems and more, which is: we should switch to base twelve.
I was thinking about doing a problem for heteroglot ā my quest to solve every Project Euler problem in a different programming language. (Theyāre adding new problems much more quickly than Iām solving them, so so far Iāve made negative progress.) Then I discovered Iād already done two, but never wrote about either of them. Oops! Hereās a twofer, then.
This post necessarily gives away the answers, so donāt read this if youād like to solve the problems yourself.
Many moons ago, I started a ridiculous quest to solve every Project Euler problem, in order, with a different programming language. I called it āheteroglotā.
Partway through that, I gave myself the additional unwritten rule that the next language would be selected by polling the nearest group of nerds. This has resulted in math problems solved in such wildly inappropriate languages as vimscript, MUMPS, LOLcode, and XSLT.
Itās been a while since I did one of these, but I still remember that the next language Iām stuck using is COBOL. I donāt know who suggested it, but I hope he chokes on a rake. ā„
I figure if this is interesting to me, it might be interesting to someone else. So letās learn some math and/or COBOL.