Red Blob Games

Video games also use classical AI rather than genAI— pathfinding (including A*), state machines, constraint solvers (including WFC), utility systems, behavior trees, blackboards, tree search (minimax, alpha/beta), heuristic functions, planning (GOAP and others), cooperative & adversarial approaches…

A comic about computing. A transcript may be available at the link in the post.

oh shit! I did something terribly wrong, does git have a magic time machine?

permalink: wizardzines.com/comics/oh-sh...
from our zine "Oh shit, git!": wizardzines.com/zines/oh-shi...

I find it easier to keep these straight (topography on top, bathymetry in the bath) than stalagmites / stalagtites :)

The actual map is text characters. I have blurred it slightly because otherwise the bluesky scaling algorithm does horrible things to it. Red is cities, and that's an airport.

I just finished the first pass at a procedural landscape generator for a flying game, Kerosene Thunder. The goal is realistic 1960s landscapes ~1000km across, at 500m resolution. This is a thread about how it works now. #procgen #textmode

"The Good Place" The Trolley Problem (TV Episode 2017) ⭐ 8.5 | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy 22m | TV-14

btw "The Good Place" had an episode about this www.imdb.com/title/tt6951...

I'm currently using

body { font-size-adjust: ex-height 0.48; }
svg { font-size-adjust: none; }
tt, code, kbd, samp, pre { font-size: 0.9em; }

but still need to test it on more systems

I had used it long ago but dropped it after realizing no browsers other than Firefox were going to support it :( Glad to see the other browsers now support it :)

I had to turn it off for SVG <text>

matklad.github.io/2025/07/16/f... convinced me to try the "font-size-adjust" feature — it's now live on redblobgames.com . I'm using it to to keep the body text and code (monospace) text matched.

caniuse.com?search=font-... shows Firefox (partial) support started in 2008, Chrome in 2024.

Shadertoy

The terrain above is based on an erosion noise implemented by clayjohn and Fewes in this Shadertoy:
www.shadertoy.com/view/7ljcRW

It's really impressive, more people doing terrain generation should know about it!
#ProcGen

Hooray!

I LOVE PINK TROMBONE

Max Brodeur just presented our paper on smooth rolling knots at the Bridges Conference on Mathematics and the Arts.

Max worked on this topic during his semester project together with Michele Vidulis and Liliane-Joy Dandy.

More info here: go.epfl.ch/smooth_rolli...

I wish I had my old notes. I was a physics crackpot in high school too. College physics cured me ;(

I think "something so wrong with you that you just can't not do it" was the signal that helped people get a job. But if you're doing it because you want to get a job, it's no longer a good signal. (Goodhart's Law)

Designing for the Eye – Optical Corrections in Architecture and Typography The Nuberodesign Blog

Related: www.nubero.ch/blog/015/

A comic about computing. A transcript may be available at the link in the post.

what's a shell?

permalink: wizardzines.com/comics/shell/

If you had a fourth coordinate w=1 for points and w=0 for vectors, then

point = (point1 + point2) / 2

will end up with w=2 for the intermediate sum, but it will go back to 1 after you divide by 2, so you end up with a valid point.

I've wondered if this could be optimized out somehow…

Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations Article explaining simulation algorithms that produce complex organic behaviours, starting with the classic physarum algorithm from Jeff Jones.

I wrote this article explaining algorithms for physarum-style simulations
bleuje.com/physarum-exp...

How I've learned to build software quickly:

- Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand.
- Start with a rough draft.
- Try to soften requirements.
- Make small changes.
- Practice specific skills, like reading code and scripting.

More details: evanhahn.com/how-i-build-...

A comic about programming. A transcript may be available at the link in the post.

debugging tip: change one thing at a time

permalink: wizardzines.com/comics/chang...

I built this demonstration of how an LSP server might facilitate bidirectional editing for code-based CAD tools after reading
@kevinlynagh.com's recent musings about the topic.

Devastated to report I read the docs and learned everything I needed to

The "don't travel" seems hard to measure. There are so many friends I'm not hanging out with, so many hikes I'm not taking, so many museums I'm not visiting. Instead I sit at home at my computer. But I don't think there's a good way for society to measure that.

YouTube video by Morphocular The Concept So Much of Modern Math is Built On | Compactness

not sure when that happened but mathematical education videos are really good these days. in the past it used to be 3b1b for precise stuff and some more pop channels for intuition/history but now i feel like even precise stuff has good and approachable treatment. really a golden age

dear imgui 1.92 released!
github.com/ocornut/imgu...
New protocol for backends to create/update textures, with support for 13 renderers. Dynamic font scaling. Dozens of font/atlas related changes. Dozens of other changes. Expect some turbulence.
(misc video from January...)

👽😄

Failed experiment in tectonic plate collision. I was trying to do something quick&easy but it didn't work as well as I had hoped. www.redblobgames.com/x/2319-mapge...

If none of my experiments fail, I'm not being ambitious enough. So I'm ok with having many failures. This was a fun experiment.

Calm Like a Duck quote: Calm on the surface but under the water I'm paddling like hell

Michael Caine: Ducks look calm as they glide along the surface of the water but they're paddling like hell underneath. When you're doing your preparation right, it sometimes looks so good that people watching you make the mistake of assuming it's all...effortless. In my experience, it never is.

View with files on the left and diff for that file on the right

I've still never gotten into `fzf` (and maybe I never will!) but I think it's really cool that you can use a fzf 1-liner to make things like this little UI for reviewing git commits

jvns.ca/til/fzf-prev...

historyofenglishpodcast.com has 183 episodes already :)