My hexagon guide has many conversion routines — axial to cube, cube to offset, hex to pixel, etc. Sometimes these steps can be combined into larger steps or separated into smaller steps. There's a balancing act between:| Red Blob Games: latest blog posts
Last time I talked about de-optimizing mapgen4 so that I could more easily create experiments. I wanted to share one of those experiments. I recently assembled some of my existing ingredients into something that was just plain fun to watch, and I wanted to share this simulation of traders moving around a map:| www.redblobgames.com
Lately I’ve been experimenting with map algorithms. I have three starting points:| www.redblobgames.com
My guide to hexagonal grids[1] is one of the most popular pages on my site. I keep a list of things I want to add to that page[2]. One of them has been spiral coordinate systems. I had thought I would wait until I actually use them in a real project, so that I would have real world experience with the thing I’m writing about. I’m afraid of writing about things I’m unsure about, or information that’s incomplete. But I haven’t used them yet.| www.redblobgames.com
I know a lot of people hated the Flash Player web plugin, but I found it to be quite useful for my experiments. It gave me vector graphics in the browser so that I could share demos without asking people to download an executable from me. And it ran long before SVG / HTML5 was widely available in browsers. I had been porting some of my old Flash code to Javascript[1], but that takes time that I could be instead spending on new projects. So I’m glad to see that the Ruffle Flash emulator[2] h...| www.redblobgames.com
It's time for my annual self review. In last year's review I said I wanted to improve my site:| Red Blob Games: latest blog posts
When I first wrote my hexagon guide[1] in 2013 I used d3.js[2], which has a nice animation system. I had some trouble with CSS transitions in SVG back then, so I was using Javascript transitions using SVG attributes instead of CSS. This looked something like:| www.redblobgames.com
I had previously posted about drawing outlines around fonts. The goal is to make labels easier to read in situations like these:| www.redblobgames.com
In the last blog post I wrote about how I wanted to test the parameters of msdfgen, which generates multi-signed distance fields for fonts and other shapes. While testing the emrange parameter, I found lots of bugs in my renderer.| Red Blob Games: latest blog posts
In the last few posts I have shown some of the experiments I did with font rendering. Those experiments were all in the renderer. I'm using msdfgen-atlas to generate the textures used by the renderer, and I wanted to experiment with msdfgen's parameters. Instead of generating new font data and then reloading the browser, I decided to try "headless" rendering controlled by a shell script.| Red Blob Games: latest blog posts
For some time now I’ve been unhappy with how much more friction there is when posting to my blog[1] than posting to twitter[2]. I keep wanting to blog more but I don’t. Part of the problem is content. I did blog more in 2018, when I was working on projects that had more to share. Part of the problem is expectations. On Twitter it’s expected that I write very little (280 character limit, up to 4 images or 1 animation). That constraint makes it easier to post. On my blog I tend to write l...| www.redblobgames.com