Below is a modular origami construction known as the 120-unit sonobe ball. It has the geometry of an icosidodecahedron but with the 12 pentagonal faces of the icosidodecahedron split into five of the little equilateral pyramids that sonobe units demand. The above was made from 120 Post-it notes, three sets of forty in each color. I haven’t seen anyone post a picture of one…
Review of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves
I’m the kind of reader of Neal Stephenson who likes Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem but has never succeeded in plodding through Cryptonomicon (I tried twice!) and who has never even tried to read the Baroque Cycle, not being a masochist. I’m a reluctant fan. I wish he would realize that just because the research he has been doing on the historical use of mercury in…
Draak Update
Below is gameplay video of a prototype of the puzzle game “Draak” that I am working on. Draak will be an iPad-only iOS game; the prototype below is written to Windows in C# on top of MonoGame. The initial idea for this game was about the art. I thought it would be cool to make a game that looks like an animated version of one…
Beziers in EscherDraw Video
Creating the draak logo in EscherDraw with bezier curves:
My Code for Doing Two Things That Sooner or Later You Will Want to do with Bezier Curves
I just added full cubic bezier curve support to the vector tessellation creation tool I am developing (see here). I’ll include some video at a later date (Update: here) showing this feature in action but first I want to document and make publicly available some of the code involved: namely, a bezier class in C# that supports two functions that are not the easiest things in the world…
Untitled Escher Game Update
I’ve decided my “untitled Escher game“, i.e. Zoop on a double logarithmic spiral, is going to be named “Draak”, which is the Dutch word for dragon. The title bears no relation to the game beyond the fact that I am going to use as its logo art based on the following novel tesselation of the plane that I discovered while fooling around with the tesselation…
An Application for Creating Novel Escher-like Tessellations of the Plane
Over the past several weeks I have been investigating desktop applications for creating novel Escher-like tilings of the plane. Basically I’ve determined that none of what is publicly available is useful to me. The game I have in development will involve an animated Escher-like tessellation of a double logarithmic spiral — see here. The “logarithmic spiral” part of it means the publicly available applications can’t help me: they are…
What I am working on…
I’m working on a puzzle game for iPads that takes the mechanics of a somewhat obscure game from the 1990s(*) and puts them on a double logarithmic spiral. The final app will be styled similar to one of M. C. Escher’s tessellations of the plane with the tessellation changing at level breaks. I don’t have a name yet… Gameplay will be like the following, which…
Discretely Distributed Random Numbers in C#
Random numbers generated from a discrete distribution are a commonly needed thing in game development. By “discrete distribution” we just mean the roll you get from something like an unfair die, e.g. you want a random number from 0 to 5 but you want 4 and 5 to be twice as likely as 0, 1, 2, or 3. If we think of each possible random…
Joe’s Internet This Week – 2
Random nuggets that crossed the threshold of my browser recently: The complete text of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics is now online, with a snazzy web ui. Which reminds me, in days before the ubiquitous comprehensive internet it was easier for there to be people of whom color photographs exist but which you haven’t seen. I just realized I’ve never seen a color photo of Feyman when…