knotwork star gamedev reportback
i made a new icon!
(i'm actually probably gonna tweak it a little more before i'm totally satisfied with it. it needs a little less red.)
so around ten years ago i wrote this wonky c program that drew a closed loop and then split it apart into inner and outer loops and then ran intersections against each segment and split everything apart into a bunch of intersections and rendered a woodcut / celtic knot style polystar, and that's how i got that seven-sided star that's been my icon online for, oh, years now
but lately i've been kinda feeling like i needed a change.
it was weird revisting that problem. about half of the way through i realized i'd reimplemented everything i'd done before, and i was now facing the problems that i couldn't manage to figure out last time; there was this sense that i'd been following in my footsteps going "i did this last time" only to eventually realize that oh right, last time i ran into intractable problems and gave up, and if i wanted to actually succeed this time i'd have to actually think about how to do it, rather than trying to dredge up my memory of how i did it ten years ago. ten years ago i was kind of dumb and i've definitely gotten better at programming since then.
(there's this whole thing how if you want to space out woodcut gaps evenly you can't displace a fixed distance along the line intersection, you have to get a line's normal and displace the line along that by the fixed distance, and then get the intersection of that displaced line. this was something that i couldn't really figure out how to do, in c, ten years ago, and that meant that my old icons from that time didn't actually handle the case where there were multiple crosscut intersections on the same shape -- the gaps would be different sizes based on the angle of intersection. that is no longer the case for the new generator.)
also, for basically the first time ever in doing one of these, the result is online for people to check out! it's over at my itch.io page!
it's not perfect, since it's kind of blindly picking crosscut over/under pairings and some of those are literally impossible to render correctly, and also there are still some bugs, but on the whole i'm pretty proud of it, given that i got the bulk of it assembled and working in like a week.
(i'm actually probably gonna tweak it a little more before i'm totally satisfied with it. it needs a little less red.)
so around ten years ago i wrote this wonky c program that drew a closed loop and then split it apart into inner and outer loops and then ran intersections against each segment and split everything apart into a bunch of intersections and rendered a woodcut / celtic knot style polystar, and that's how i got that seven-sided star that's been my icon online for, oh, years now
but lately i've been kinda feeling like i needed a change.
it was weird revisting that problem. about half of the way through i realized i'd reimplemented everything i'd done before, and i was now facing the problems that i couldn't manage to figure out last time; there was this sense that i'd been following in my footsteps going "i did this last time" only to eventually realize that oh right, last time i ran into intractable problems and gave up, and if i wanted to actually succeed this time i'd have to actually think about how to do it, rather than trying to dredge up my memory of how i did it ten years ago. ten years ago i was kind of dumb and i've definitely gotten better at programming since then.
(there's this whole thing how if you want to space out woodcut gaps evenly you can't displace a fixed distance along the line intersection, you have to get a line's normal and displace the line along that by the fixed distance, and then get the intersection of that displaced line. this was something that i couldn't really figure out how to do, in c, ten years ago, and that meant that my old icons from that time didn't actually handle the case where there were multiple crosscut intersections on the same shape -- the gaps would be different sizes based on the angle of intersection. that is no longer the case for the new generator.)
also, for basically the first time ever in doing one of these, the result is online for people to check out! it's over at my itch.io page!
it's not perfect, since it's kind of blindly picking crosscut over/under pairings and some of those are literally impossible to render correctly, and also there are still some bugs, but on the whole i'm pretty proud of it, given that i got the bulk of it assembled and working in like a week.
