Altcoin, Peeps and a peeled Octasphere? 8-P

The unfolding altcoin scandal has shown exactly how nimble old money really is; I’m seeing commercials on TV promoting crypto right now as a way to fight back. The house always wins; bitcoin and etherium were great ideas, but the powers that be have 99% of the advantages in life, at least until a jacobin revolt resets things and then another set of bastards claws their way to the top. Stupid ape dominance games! Worthless rant aside, what shall I do this afternoon, now that I’ve let a whole morning pass by? Peeps is not out of the question, and the new model world map.

For peeps I want to go topdown for now, looking down into their enclosure and the chicken condo. In top down, z is down, x and y are screen width and screen height. The chicken condo is the leftmost quarter and their night box is the top left most quarter of that; The proportions are not to scale and I may change the top quarter to 40%. My goals are to start over from scratch to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to do all the stuff I’ve been copying and pasting; actually, ruthlessly pruning code I’m not using and don’t remember what it’s for while making sure things still work will do. I can keep my PRNG stuff that way, which I want in case I want my animation to loop and restart from the same initial seed, which will not work with math.random().

1. Top-down run and chicken condo is a grid of 1 pixel rectangles; the border pixels are metal grate grey or wood wall brown, while the floor is tan and the bedding is yellow. The ground is green, although it is actually yellowish green and poop grey… This is not the most efficient way to do this, but it’s the way I’m going to do this for now.

2. A dozen peep objects as yellow-filled circular arcs with a grey outline in stroke(). These objects have a peep location: (px,py), and a destination (dx,dy), which they move to one step at a time, sliding along obstacles in their way, like the wooden wall of the chicken condo. If the peep can’t move, choose a new destination.

3. Peeps have some radius for their round bodies, so we need to account for that, no merging with walls.

4. Once I have that, I can worry about the peep facing, a vector between px,py and dx,dy from which I can start building and drawing the peep as polygons(triangles and quads). As I make more complicated peep meshes I can worry about going back to 3D, first looking down into the Z depth, then building a simple camera object with a direction. I’m very iffy about this but I can keep two sets of books for all my points, one based on the world and another based on the camera location and angle(s).

For NMWM, the polar distortion is bothering me. I shouldn’t let it, but it is, so there are several ways of doing this better; Cube-sphere, Square to Octasphere and Rectangle to Octasphere, the latter of which lets me keep more or less the same rectangular world map. The right and left sides of the map are two different hemispheres, east and west or north and south. There’s still distortion, just not mind-numbing levels of distortion. I like Square to Octasphere most, especially if I mirror things so that the corners of one square meet in the center of the other square. That and my old standby pointy oval world map, but perhaps as an evenly peeled orange! 8-P A peeled octasphere with space for small polar projections at w/2 and the top and bottom of the canvas.