While generating data in 3d space for manifold learning, I went across a problem of distributing points evenly on a sphere. It is a non-trivial problem but found a good enough solution for such placement. Interestingly, it ends up with a really cool animation effect when I decided to implement it on a mobile app. Figure 1: First animation effect: Rotation The algorithm There are two qualitatively...
Game Frame rate and character animations (part 2)
In part 1, we covered the principle of game frame rate and a useful game programming pattern for performance. This part shows the detailed implementation of a game scene with hundreds of moving characters using Android Studio and Kotlin. Image asset This game uses a free image from wild-refuge.net. Xmas girl 3 (URL) You can download any similar image (4 x 4 frames) and place it in the...
Fun coding challenge: print the American flag
Printing is an important part when programming. Printing the US flag to the system console was a small part of “the shape game” for kids, in which the players will select the correct name for a given shape. The flag of the united states Basic Requirements: You are required to print the American flag to the console using just “*” and “=”. The number of stars...
Smooth nature snake game – re-dev with Kotlin (part 1)
When my students proposed a snake game for their projects, I thought it is kind of boring. They are all the same old ideas. Nevertheless, how you want it to be do matter as the game mechanics and animations can be much varied. snake game Why I redev the snake game? Did I try to reinvent the wheel – Not quite! What I include in this post addresses several challenges to simulate a fully...
String interpolation in different programming languages
This article quickly lists out several example to create and manipulate a string from data in different programming languages.