Long time no see! I’ve been swamped with school, but on the bright side, I can feel my programming power levels increasing. Slowly but surely.

Anyway, today I bring you the result of some independent mucking about with graphs and implementing them in Processing.

The first .gif simply A) generates an increasing number of nodes each time, randomly spread across the plane, B) connects all of them with edges, and C) draws them. Super simple stuff, but worth writing.

With that under control, I thought, “Hey, why not implement a way to find the Minimum Spanning Tree?”

And so, using Kruskal’s algorithm (which in turn needed me to implement QuickSort to sort my Edge objects and hacking in a crude disjoint-set forest), I produced the second .gif, which is creating a randomly placed graph of 3-17 points, finding the MST, and drawing it for us.

Here’s the code if you want it (But be warned: it’s honestly pretty bad. Not even false modesty. It’s bad.): http://pastebin.com/FxRNdwre

This was my first foray into writing a program from scratch that has tons of moving parts. I feel like I’ll be able to return to my game projects significantly more confident than before after all that I’ve learned.

So I just upgraded my laptop to a 500 GB Crucial SSD that I picked up during the Amazon Day sale, and let me tell you, I’m never going back. So far, it’s been an absolutely amazing experience. Boot up times are better, Unity loads stuff faster, and every program is up an instant, from Chrome to Spotify.

On the sad side, I’m dual booting Ubuntu and Windows, and had to reinstall both OSes to get that to work well (it has not been a past few days).

And to top it all of, games load faster. If you’re on the fence about getting an SSD (or any computer upgrades actually) feel free to throw me an ask and I’ll give you some advice.