Running Smoothly

Thank you for another month of your support! You are helping to build the pond! As promised, here's your weekly update of what's been going on behind-the-scenes.

NEXT VIDEO SPOILERS: Top 9 ways to make BIG SAND

I've been continuing to experiment with ways of making larger sand engines (for my next video). This week, I've improved how the GPU engine works. Before, the sand didn't slide very well. It got stuck on itself, and so made very steep piles. Now, it slides down in a smoother way. To achieve this, I changed the way that it fires events. There are 6 possible arrangements for events in the world (if you jam-pack it full of events). Previously, it cycled through these arrangements in order. I changed it so that it alternates cycling through them forwards and backwards. This 'shakes' around the sand a bit, which allows it to slide better.

I've also started to make the ninth and final sand engine for the video. It's going to combine all three of my devices together (desktop, laptop, phone) to make an even bigger world of sand. This slightly echoes the T2 Tile project approach of combining different pieces of hardware together.

LispTode

I've been continuing to make a lisplike language. It's almost there! It can do all the basic stuff that you need, and you can define lambdas and it recognises when you are calling it, but it doesn't resolve things properly yet. It only resolves functions that are defined at compile-time. To fix this, I need to add some extra functionality to MotherTode first (which I am using to make the language). Specifically, I need to improve how the argument operator works. This will help me to get the parser to dynamically adjust to what it is reading. Currently, you can only adjust the parser state based on compile-time knowledge. Here is the repo. 

Apple Compatibility

I've been trying to get my projects to work better on Safari and Apple products. I used a lot of free trials for some cross-browser testing websites to help with this. I found out that something was going wrong with the scoping of some of my older code. When I had the 'function' keyword in a block of code, it wasn't getting added to the global scope, like it does in Chrome and Firefox. I fixed that and it seems to help with Safari!

Also, it seems like iPhones don't support the new '?.' operator yet, so I removed those. There are still some breaking bugs on iPhone though, but I'm not sure how to fix them because they seem to be to do with WebGL.

Music

I've been trying to source music for my next video. I often use music from Anjunadeep because they let me use their tracks (because they get revenue from ads on my videos). If you ever see an ad on my channel, the money doesn't go to me. It's automatically put there by Youtube to subsidise music creators that I use. I really wanted to use a certain track from a different label, but unfortunately they didn't let me (fair enough). So... I'm still looking for a suitable track(s) for the next video. By the way, I have a public playlist on Spotify with all the music that I've used in the past.