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
In the previous posts in this series we dug into some data analysis on Magic the Gathering cards and tried to model the mana cost of cards in order to answer questions like “how much does ‘flying’ cost?”. We found a linear model that could explain the costs to some degree, however it struggled to … Read more
In the previous post on this topic, we raised the question on how much particular abilities such as “flying” cost in the widely known trading card game Magic the Gathering. We found luckily there is a nice, usable free database out there that should be helpful to answer this and while trying to take a … Read more
Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game I happen to like. It also so happens that there is a database of cards available online. Additionally I (like many programmers) kind-of got into Machine Learning recently. Lets see if we can combine these ingredients to come up with something interesting, shall we? Have you ever … Read more
