Not magic, just a different kind of science.
It's a fact that there are just too many crappy technical resources out there. It's also a fact that there are probably too many good ones to read in any one lifetime (I've still only made it through book one of Euclid's Elements-- and, embarrassingly, I've never even started my copy of Principia Mathematica). Anyway, I […]
MoreUpdate: part 2 here. I posted a terrible demo a few weeks ago of a geosphere with some procedural mesh perturbation-- then I ran off and never explained it. Then, in my last article, I finally walked through the magic behind geospheres. In this article, I refined my approach to spherical terrain generation and finally […]
MoreUpdate: At long last, the SO answer has been found! Added a link. Lately I've been shrinking my goals so that I can actually reach them. I mean, I'd rather have fifty small projects that have all been completed than ten large ones that haven't (you wouldn't believe how many things I have 90% completed […]
MoreI've been having a ball going through the book Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach. I've hardly cracked the book, really--but so far it's been a lot of fun. One of the first procedural textures it studies is a brick texture. The book assumes you're using RenderMan, but Unity's surface shaders are actually very similar […]
MoreI don't have time to write this one up--I will later! But for now, here's a demo. Hit enter to subdivide the mesh into a more accurate sphere. Hit 'p' (repeatedly) to add procedural noise to the mesh. 'w' and 'd' rotate left and right.
MoreWe can represent 3D rotations in a variety of ways, arguably the most useful of which is the matrix. In three dimensional space, a 4x4 matrix usually defines the world transform of an object, because it can contain lots of information: translations, rotations, scale, and lots more. But when we're talking simply about rotations, there's […]
MoreIn a debate, a common tactic is to concede some small amount of truth against your own viewpoint. It softens up the opposition by getting them to agree with you early on. So here we go: Singletons are handy and can be useful. Now on to the debate. Common Problems with the Singleton Pattern 1 Many […]
MoreAS3 is certainly not strictly classical (there's a Class::prototype object for Pete's sake!), but it's got a lot of the classical garb. Anyway, today I was rummaging around in a class in our codebase called FunctionUtils and I decided, whilst fixing a few things, why not add a couple of the fun functional constructs?! Function::schönfinkeling […]
MoreYou know how Cocoa classes generally have static methods that serve as factories? return [NSArray arrayWithObjects:obj1, obj2, nil];return [NSArray arrayWithObjects:obj1, obj2, nil]; That's a dumb example, especially now that you can do @[obj1, obj2], but why not do the same in AS3? For instance: return TransactionResponse.FailedResponse();return TransactionResponse.FailedResponse(); This would replace something like: var response:TransactionResponse = […]
MorePerhaps the least helpful MXMLC error message yet: public function log(level:int, message:String, ... rest):void { trace(format(level, message, ...rest)); }public function log(level:int, message:String, ... rest):void { trace(format(level, message, ...rest)); } Apparently calling a function with ...rest on accident will present this compiler error...
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