TODEPOND TIMES: Resolution

Come one, come all! It's time for the weekly...

🐸🔎 TODEPOND TIMES 🔍🐸

What's new this week? EDIT: Woah it's a big one this week!

Resolution

I'm (still) working hard on the next video, 📕 Define Define. So I've been cracking away at SandLab, which is one of the engines featured in the video.

It's another falling sand game. So one of its core mechanics is: You can place sand by drawing with the cursor. When you do this, you don't just place one sand atom. This would take too long! So instead, the 'brush' places lots of different sand atoms at once. 

For example...

⭐ Sandspiel (by Max Bittker) lets you choose betweent 5 different sizes of circular brush.
⭐ SandPond (by me) lets you change the size of the square-shaped brush between a minimum and maximum value.
⭐ but SandLab... only has one brush size.

You can only place one sand atom at a time!

Instead of the brush size changing, the atoms change their size for you. As you move around your cursor or finger, the cells warp their shape ➡ They rapidly merge and split with each other to alter the world's resolution.

Wherever your cursor is... they try to keep that part a helpful resolution. The cell needs to be just the right size so that you can place down the amount of sand that you want! I'm really enjoying the space-warpy effect that this is creating.

Lines

Onto the next challenge... How do you make sand in a world that is constantly warping and distorting like this?

Normally, we can be sure that all the cells of the world are static, aligned, and in predictable places (eg: in SandPond).

Even CellPond is easy-ish to work with most of the time. Sand only falls down if it is perfectly lined up with the cells around it. And they are lined up nearly all of the time.

In SandLab, we can't assume any of this! So we need a whole new way of programming sand (which I went into a little bit last week). I've been figuring out a way of visualising a program in SandLab (and I used tldraw to draw up some rough plans). Maybe one day, we can turn it into a visual drag-and-drop programming language, similar to CellPond! (but I certainly won't be doing that for this video)

New Year

It's nearly 2023 (!!!) which means a number of things:

It's nearly 2023 (!!!) which means that our discord server, the LilyPad, is nearly one-year-old! Mad. I feel so fortunate to be part of such a lovely little community. Thank you to everyone who has taken part. If you want to join, just link your discord account to patreon, and you'll get invited.

It's nearly 2023 (!!!) which means that we're getting closer to 99 patrons! If/when we hit 99, then I'll make a special video to celebrate called 🏆 Top 99 ways to make Sand. In preparation, I've been making a list of interesting ways to make sand! (including on my dad's old computer from the loft)

It's nearly 2023 (!!!) which means the world continues to change. I've moved from twitter to mastodon (come and join me there for daily updates). And I've started investigating substack for people who want the TodePond Times, but don't want to use patreon (I'm still setting it up - use at your own risk)!

It's nearly 2023 (!!!) which means that... wait hang on a second! It's nearly 2023, so where's the new video? Sorry, my goal is to release a video every month, but I've completely failed that recently. I've adjusted the patreon description to reflect what currently happens most of the time: A new video every 3 months.

This monthly goal has always been for myself mainly. I really want to make things! And to get them out to the world. I feel sad when I don't do that. So I'm going to accept that I've been slow, and try to improve from there. The current speed is every 3 months. My next target is: Every 2 months.

So thank you so much for supporting me with that, and helping me to make all these things! Wishing you all the very best for the 2023... See you next year :) I wonder what it will bring!? 🐸🐦🤖 🐟🐍