Slow Zoom

Welcome back! To another edition of the weekly...

🐌 TODEPOND TIMES 🐌

What's new this week?

Zooming

I've been working hard on making a little tool called ScreenPond for the next video. It lets you create an infinite number of screens inside screens, similar to the droste effect. And this week, I've been adding the ability to ZOOM.

You can now zoom in-and-out of screens. And in some screens, you can keep zooming in FOREVER. I pulled off a few tricks to let you do this. It doesn't actually keep zooming in forever. Instead, when you zoom in far enough, the engine sneakily swaps out the world for a more zoomed out image again. It does it in such a way that it's impossible to notice any difference. I imagine it like Indiana Jones swapping out the treasure from a tomb or something.

Zooming out has a few tricks going on too. If you can zoom in forever... you should also be able to zoom out forever. Just before you zoom out far enough to see the 'edge' of the world, the engine places the whole world within a larger screen.

Now that zooming is done, all the most complicated features of the engine are complete! There are a few more interactions I need to make, and then... it'll be time to bash out the video. I'm looking forward to it!

Slow Sand

A while ago, I made a video about how to make a sand engine run faster, called 🦕 Top 9 ways to make Big Sand. One of the reasons I made the video was this:

I receive many comments telling me ways that I could improve the speed of my code. Sometimes they seem helpful, and sometimes they come across as a bit of a "gotcha". I think people sometimes have 'something to prove' on the internet, so they like to tell other people about the things they could have done better. (I poked a bit of fun at this in the ✨ NEW Cellular Automata video).

Although I find it quite fun to make my code faster, it's never the 'point' of my projects. It's not what I'm 'trying to say'. I hoped that the 🦕 Big Sand video would address some of those suggestions - and demonstrate that speed is not always number one.

But here we are, nearly 12 months later... and we've gone full circle!

Now... I get suggestions about how I can speed up the suggestions in the 🦕 Big Sand video! So I've been planning a sequel to it, and this time... I'll really show once-and-for-all that - I don't care about how fast or slow my sand is. And in fact... I'll make my slowest sand yet! (it'll be a bit of fun)

Thank you so much for your ongoing support. And welcome to all my new patrons! I hope you're pleased to be supporting my projects. I really hope that they can inspire some people, and promote a bit of creativity. Have a great week! 🐌

Days since tode went missing: 104