TODEPOND TIMES: Thing Things

Hi everyone! It's time for another edition of the weekly...

🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸

What's new this week?

Thing

When I was younger, I used to enjoy coding little game engines and simulations. These often included the concept of a 'thing' that you could place into the game world. You could also call them an entity, an instance, an object, or many other words.

I always called them 'things' for some reason. Maybe I thought it was less fancy or something.

For example, you might want to place a frog into your game world. And you might want that frog to do various things, like obey the laws of gravity, bump into stuff, or whatever you want! That frog... is a THING.

I got so into this idea, that I branded everything I made under the Thing name, including the Thing Engine and the Thing Language. Those were dark days, before the Tode label was created.

Things

Although I haven't tried to make a newer version of the Thing Engine, I have made a few similar things.

For the 🌀 Time Travel video, I made a little physics engine. Everything in the engine, including the frogs, boxes, portals and walls... are things. Well, I actually called them atoms. And you can combine them together to make bigger things. For example, the portals are actually three things combined together - the middle, and the two edges.

CellPond uses the exact same system (I copy-pasted it from the time engine). It's not used for the simulation, but for the drag-and-drop user-interface. Every shape and component is a thing. This includes the squares, paddles, pickers, menus, and all the rest.

Similar to before, you can combine things together to make more complicated structures. For example, the colour pickers involve lots of different primitive parts 'glued together'.

Entities

For the next video, I've started formalising this system a little bit more. And I've been adding an Entity Component System to my personal library.

It feels a little bit sad to call them 'entities' instead of 'things'. But the more I code, the more I realise that it's best to just call things by their most common names - to help to avoid confusion.

I'm hoping that it will help me to make some wacky user-interface stuff! I can't wait to get cracking on it!

Hey thanks so much for supporting me and my projects. I can't believe we're nearly at 99 froggy heroes... I hope you have a great week! See you next time 🐸

Days since tode fell asleep: 65