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[Max White]

Eh, it gets to a stage where all you can do is build an entire house out of black boxes.
Make a single unit work, and work mother fucking well, then build another on top, and another on top of that. By the end of it you can't remember any one box, but you know they work.

[MaximumZero]

Thanks for the tip, that'll at least make my code look a little better.  I would like to at least appear to know what I'm doing.

Spoiler: This stuff is harder than it looks. (click to show/hide)

The real confusion comes from having to shuttle information in and out of the main program body, through the map object and it's list of objects in the map, and then turn that information back around and send it to the Console, all without refreshing the screen every cycle.

I suppose the sensible thing to do next would be to eliminate them from the lists and update the screen.  Then make the guys move around.  Then make them only move when I take a valid action.  Then I can move onto more high level reactions.  Perhaps the most critical lesson in programming, besides inspect every goddamn letter, is to take nothing for granted.  There is no such thing as a small task, and you must inform the program of every single meticulous step involved in every single action.  You must become one with the machine.

Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

*smacks his case*

Gorram fan noise, anyway.

[alway]

Perhaps the most critical lesson in programming, besides inspect every goddamn letter, is to take nothing for granted.

Very much this. I've helped enough people debug their code to know that the problem is almost always in the one place they are 100% certain works and so didn't bother testing as the possible origin of the bug. That and preconceptions about the code will impede one's ability to debug it when it fails to run as expected.

[MorleyDev]

A check will be faster than a write. How about you keep a buffer of the current frame, a buffer of the next, and then flush and only draw the cells that are different? You're still iterating for everything on the screen but that's peanuts compared to the cost of drawing in the first place...

[Siquo]

You must become one with the machine.

Drunk mans talk, but this is it. I tried to explain programming again to people today, but this is what it's about.

[Stargrasper]

You must become one with the machine.

Drunk mans talk, but this is it. I tried to explain programming again to people today, but this is what it's about.

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

[Siquo]

Well, there's this one guy who apparently said: "If you're 'in the flow', stop programming".
It's especially useful advice for enterprise level projects, and exactly the reason why I'm going to quit my current job.
No inspiration AT ALL.

[kaenneth]

Computer programming is like giving instructions to an evil genie.

On the plus side: it does exactly what you tell it to do.
On the down side: It does exactly what you tell it to do.

[Stargrasper]

Computer programming is like giving instructions to an evil genie.

On the plus side: it does exactly what you tell it to do.
On the down side: It does exactly what you tell it to do.

Which sometimes makes it do some unexpected but kind of neat things.  Like that one time I was drawing points in a circle and was calculating position with trig functions.  For some reason, my very green programmer self had typed that the variables involved would be ints instead of doubles.  It leads to a kind of bike wheel spokes effect.

Tutorial is coming.  I just need to find both time and motivation.  Both are a bit lacking right now...

[Aqizzar]

Computer programming is like giving instructions to an evil genie.

On the plus side: it does exactly what you tell it to do.
On the down side: It does exactly what you tell it to do.

Well, it's more like a retarded genie.  It's not that it interprets your orders against your wishes, rather that it has absolutely no idea what you're trying to tell it.

[Vactor]

Here's a little something I made this weekend.

Right now it makes cylinders with arbitrary radium, facets, and length, with the option of twisting it into a helix around another cylinder(or helix) at arbitrary distance and wavelength.

This is a tool I hope to use to generate maps for an artsy game project i've been hatching.

The funny part about this is that the picture in the spoiler below was the easy part, the hardest part was designing and debugging the cylinder builder.  Once that was in the twisting and modifiability just fell into place.

Each cylinder in this is its own procedurally generated mesh, this keeps my draw calls low, even with around 1million polygons on screen i'm getting 64fps (fps cap)  the triangles can be brought down quite a bit if i need to as well, since right now each cylinder has way more faces than it needs.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[kaenneth]

That is some sexy curves right there.

Can you do things like animate the wavelength of the curves to make them crawl along each other?

[Vactor]

That is some sexy curves right there.

Can you do things like animate the wavelength of the curves to make them crawl along each other?

nothing that fancy, as these are being made to be a static map, but the way I built the cylinder generator it wouldn't take much to do something like that, it wouldn't be able to handle as many verticies, as right now it builds the meshes once.  Helixes twisting around a cylinder would work easily, as they already have a rotational matrix built in them, and would just need to have that variable changed each frame, but the helixes twisting around a helix would require the meshes to be rebuilt every frame.

The project I designed it for needs them to be static, so I didn't design it with that functionality in mind.  I probably would have done it a bit differently if I was planning on having them move and flex.

[eerr]

Would it be faster to draw if you simply made mappings for each cylinder into pixels?
Ex: a math function returns RGB,depth the pixel for X,Y coordinate for each cylinder?

[MagmaMcFry]

Would it be faster to draw if you simply made mappings for each cylinder into pixels?
Ex: a math function returns RGB,depth the pixel for X,Y coordinate for each cylinder?

You want to make the graphics engine draw cylinders instead of polygons?

First, graphics drivers work REALLY good with polygons and drawing cylinders instead of polygons probably wouldn't even be faster.
Second, your graphics would probably be acceptably fast if your graphics driver were written to handle cylinders separately, but what about the spirals and spiral spirals?
Third, it's already fast enough.