Alex Mason

In the spirit of a Let’s Play, I’m trying out a format where I read through an academic paper and interpret it as I go, like a discussion seminar of one. Too often I try to read things like this without making sure I understand, and understanding is measured by the ability to explain. I… Read more

It’s time to drop the simple capsule shapes and build something more chunky and rocky, while retaining some elegance and regularity. That means I’m drawing my own polygons. There’s no way to make an arbitrary polygon sprite in Unity, so I turned to the 3D mesh resource. I started by downloading Blender to see if… Read more

I took a break from the physics to see what I could get from Unity’s Trail Renderer. The width is a curve, so I figured I would play with it to start, but I’ll leave it at constant width when I’m iterating on other features. There are a lot of parameters! Time intuitively means how… Read more

In college, my majors were Cognitive science (emphasis in computation) and mathematics (emphasis in computer science). The hardest math courses for me were the ones with the most weird symbols. By “weird” I don’t just mean Greek letters, although lowercase Zeta, Xi, Wau, and Sigma all look the same. I mean symbols that are supposed… Read more

Last time, I hit a wall, literally with the shots, making them bounce, but also metaphorically because I couldn’t solve the problem where I had raycasts hitting colliders from the inside and scheduling incorrect bounces. I’ve thought about this while walking my dogs several times, considering how I might cast multiple rays to project the… Read more

If I’ve learned one thing from the recent crest of AI technology, it’s that perfect really is the enemy of published. I’d best clack out my thoughts, then. Some of these sections are more like the crude ore of future essays, but I figure this will help “train” my own brain’s “model” to dress them… Read more

Let’s aim the shot. i’ll need a way to see where I’m aiming, and to use the orientation to determine the shot’s velocity. After that, I’ll need to derive the post-bounce velocity, which is also hard-coded at the moment. For simpliicity, I will keep all this behaviour on the shot object itself, but later I… Read more

All the Wordle solver programs I’ve seen work by playing the game like normal and computing the guess that provides the most information toward the answer. Asking the game to tell you about the letters is easy. It’s practically cheating. I’m looking for a challenge. When you finish the daily Wordle, you can copy results… Read more