Problem Definition Consider a 2D tile-based game with a side-view perspective. In my case, that game is about worker assignments: The player places tasks anywhere on the map, workers look for reachable tasks to work on. This makes for an interesting pathfinding problem: During a single simulation frame (“tick”), we may need to compute hundreds … Read more
I was looking for an excuse to get my hands dirty with NVidia CUDA. Turns out, its not that hard to wrap your head around if you know some C++ and parallel programming. Thanks to RustaCUDA, it can also be nicely used from Rust (because, why not?). In this little exercise I will implement a … Read more
If you excuse the clickbaity title in this post I would like to introduce a few different perspectives on what Entity Component Systems (ECS) actually are. I will start with the more usual definitions and by the end of the article discuss how its approaches to encapsulation and abstraction in comparison to Object Oriented Programming … Read more
(Safe) rust is known for its rigorous enforcement of borrowing rules: Any piece of memory is always owned by exactly one scope (that is responsible for freeing its memory at some point) and can in addition be in use by either a single scope that is allowed to modify it (mutable borrow) OR by arbitrary … Read more
I’m a huge fan of the Bevy Engine for developing games in rust. Recently, I came across an unstable rust feature that I find utterly fascinating and that can make certain Bevy code much more ergonomic: Arbitrary Self Types. This post assumes basic knowledge about the Bevy ECS and that you do not shy away … Read more
In the previous post on the topic we looked into how to combine ingredients such that they fulfill various (linear) nutritional (lower- and upper-) bounds while optimizing some (linear) objective function such as total cost of the ingredients. We have seen that Linear Programs are a great way to describe these sorts of problems and … Read more
Optimize your own Dog Food In this post we’ll look into how to make your own dog food, seen as an optimization problem. I’ll give a short background intro into this way of feeding your dog (called BARF), which I’m by no means an expert in. What you thus can not expect from this article … Read more
We consider an issue that appears frequently in game development and simulation projects: We have many moving points in a 2d world and need to find out which points are in range of which other points. We’ll call this the “range query problem” here (even though that is a bit imprecise). This has several applications: … Read more
Finally the pinball machine can be considered finished 🙂 although I’m sure there will still be things to do every now and then. Here are some visual updates.
