46 Thousand (and 43)

It's that time of the week again! It's time for the weekly...

🐸🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸🐸

What's new this week?

Perfecting Perfection

I've now planned out the next video, 🔮 Spellular Automata. And - in preparation for it - I've mapped out everything that I need to make. The video is going to use PaintPond for some transitions, which I also used in the ✨ New Cellular Automata video. It's a simple tool that lets you draw stuff with a wobbly berd character. For the next video, I've done some improvements to it.

A simple change is: You can now swap characters (between berd and tode) by pressing the Tab key on your keyboard. And each character moves a bit differently. Like I said last week, berd is loud+messy+keen. Tode is calm+wise+clean. I've tried to reflect this by having them move in different ways. Tode is slower+smoother. Berd is a bit more jittery!

Another change I've made is: PaintPond now uses Steve Ruiz's Perfect Freehand to make the lines (that you draw) a bit smooooother. Because of how wobbly berd+tode are in PaintPond, I kept coming across a little bug that caused your lines to end with an extra dot. When Perfect Freehand is used normally, this bug is very rare (and tricky to reproduce). But when you use a wobbly character to draw a line, it happens quite often. So...

I had a look at the bug, and I made a small fix to it! My fix is a bit dodgy to be honest. It feels more like a temporary bandage for the problem, rather than an actual cure. But that's good enough for PaintPond! Maybe someone smarter than me can have a crack at it too.

Queueing for the Queue

The next video is going to be all about CellPond. And I'm hoping to do some more complicated+intensive stuff with it (compared to what we did in the 🤖 Nothing video). So... to prepare for this, I've sped up the engine a little bit.

In CellPond... the world can be made up of a varying number of cells. There might be hundreds... thousands... or even just one. And I want it to run (relatively) smoothly no matter how many cells there are. In the next video, I want to make some things that rapidly change the number of cells in the world, like some fractals.

One challenge is: How do we DRAW all of those cells to the screen? Previously, CellPond picked a certain number of cells randomly each frame, and drew only those ones. This means it wouldn't get overloaded by trying to draw too many cells at once. It always spent the same amount of time drawing, no matter how many (or how few) cells there were.

But this struggled to keep up when you had a lot of cells. It could sometimes 'miss out' many cells - just because of the random chance of not picking them. So I've tried to make it a little bit smarter. Now: cells 'queue up' when they need to be drawn to the screen (eg: when they change size/colour). And some cells get prioritised over others.

I still have more to do around tweaking+configuring this new system, but it's already helping things to look smoother!

Loading Loads

Another thing that I've been speeding up is... LOADING TIME. CellPond used to take a long time to load. This is because... when it loaded, it pre-calculated ALL the different colours that it might use. It calculates 2000 different colours in total (1000 cell colours, and 1000 border colours). This used my (rather slow) Habitat code, which I never intended to use for more than say... 20 colours.

I'll speed up Habitat eventually, but for a short-term solution... I just copy-pasted all of the pre-calculated colours into their own file. It's over 46,000 lines long!?!?!?! But it speeds up loading time a lot (and I'll make it a bit smaller for slow internet users (like myself)).

With these two 'speed-ups' in-the-bag, it's time to start making some wackier stuff in CellPond!

Thank you so much for your kind support! And welcome to all my new patrons! I hope you're pleased to be helping, and I hope you have a great week! 🐸🐸🐸