T w e n t y S i d e d

What do you do when you want to look something up but you don’t know what it’s called? Sometimes you can just type what you know into a search engine and it will sort things out for you. I just typed “part of the car that covers the engine” and I got:

It’s not a perfect result. A careless reader might look at the text and think the answer is “trunk”. But it’s still really incredible that a search engine can come up with answers like this. If you’re willing to read more than the first sentence, you can find what you’re looking for, even if you don’t know what a hood was called when you started.

Sadly, things are not always this easy. Right now I know what I want to make but I don’t know what to search for. I know what it looks like and how it behaves, but not how it’s created or what you call it. In fact, I can even draw a picture of it. It looks kind of like a stained glass window. Here is one I made by hand:

You generate this by putting a bunch of points on a plane and… doing some sort of math to them. I want to use something like this to divide my city into regions. Let’s see what Google has for me:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pixel City Redux #6: The Distraction”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In programming, sometimes things go very wrong and you have no idea why. Bugs happen all the time, and a lot of this jobOr hobby. Whatever. involves tracking down and fixing your mistakes. On any sufficiently mature project you’ll probably spend more time testing and debugging new features than you spend writing them.

So it goes something like this:

You’re busy playing the game you’re developing when suddenly you crash to desktop. Looking a bit closer, it seems like you got a division by zero error. It seems the variable named “distance_to” was somehow set to zero. The odd thing is,that variable is used for calculating the distance to the closest quest marker, and you know for a fact you weren’t anywhere near one.

So clearly this bug isn’t your fault. Obviously your code is fine. This is probably a bug in the compiler. Or maybe the operating system. Maybe even the processor itself. To sort this out, you’re going to need to send an irate email to the guilty.

But before you fire off that salvo of email abuse, you figure you’ll have a quick look at your code, just on the off chance that this is somehow your fault.

It’s true that you can “solve” this problem by having the program check for a value of zero before doing any division with this variable. That would certainly stop the crash, but it wouldn’t fix the bug. According to how things are supposed to work, it should be impossible for this variable to be zero. Stopping the crash won’t address the fact that something is going wrong.

The problem looks like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pixel City Redux #5: Debugging Bugs Me”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.