Stack's Tumble Log

Spacing Out Elves for Advent of Code 2022 – Day 23

Or Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies? Day 23 of Advent of Code had us simulate a group of elves spacing themselves out to plant fruit. This one is a little slapdash, but it’s still fun to look at. The ground and view could have been nicer, but the holidays always limit what I can attempt in a reasonable amount of time.

Path Finding for Advent of Code 2022 – Day 12

Day 12 of Advent of Code is a path finding problem, which is ripe for visualization. I used the A* algorithm for my solution, which should get to the closest path as fast as possible. It’s always crazy to watch these algorithms in action as they search and narrow down the solution near the end. Searching for a path. Running up that hill. Lessons Learned This is the first visualization with a…

Reading a Display for Advent of Code 2022 – Day 10

Day 10 of Advent of Code had us determine which pixels should be enabled on a broken display. These pixels make a string that is the final input. Some times challenges like this can be interesting to look at, because the puzzle has the display go through a series of iterations before the string comes to form. This puzzle was much more straight forward. Lessons Learned My renderer never had a…

Stacking Crates for Advent of Code 2022, Day 5

Day 5 of Advent of Code revolves around a crane moving crates around to different stacks. This was a great opportunity to try my new 3D renderer for generating visualizations. Over an hour of crate stacking goodness! What Was Missed? This was the first attempt at using the renderer, so a proper implementation was going to expose what features I didn’t know I needed. Animation is a bit weird…

Advent of Code In 3D!

In my previous post, I detailed how I combined CoreGraphics, AVFoundation, and Metal to quickly view and generate visualizations for Advent of Code. With this new set up, I wondered, could I do the image generation part completely in Metal? I have been following tutorials from Warren Moore (and his Medium page), The Cherno, and LearnOpenGL for a while, so I took this opportunity to test out my…