@bit101@mstdn.social on mstdn.social
Now and then I'll just dig up some old standard creative coding technique, make a solid, reusable function for it, and add it to my libraries. Circle packing was not in there yet. It is now.
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bit101
@bit101@mstdn.social · Jul 05
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bit101
@bit101@mstdn.social · Jul 05
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most of my code libraries are contained in two modules. blcairo, which is all rendering code. It's got the cairographics bindings. And bitlib, which is pretty much everything else, but knows nothing about rendering. The biggest part of that is probably geom, which has points, lines, circles, rectangles, polygons, all kinds of shapes - but only as models of shapes. blcairo knows how to render them all.
This circle packing just returns lists of circles, which makes it very flexible.
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ipsquiggle
@ipsquiggle@sunny.garden · Jul 05
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@bit101@mstdn.social All lovely 🤩
Curious, what algorithm does it use? What kind of configuration? I haven't written this kind of code in a long time, but I recall many of my efforts at reuse were resisted, even something as simple as a particle often wanted a shape or api specific to a project, and it didn't feel right to create uberclasses.
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bit101
@bit101@mstdn.social · Jul 05
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@ipsquiggle@sunny.garden I write everything in Go, as part of a couple of custom frameworks I built that use Cairographics C bindings. I think it's pretty standard circle packing. Find a random point that's not in an existing circle, what's the largest circle you can create from there that doesn't overlap another circles. With a few other constraints and parameters.
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ipsquiggle
@ipsquiggle@sunny.garden · Jul 05
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@bit101@mstdn.social Do you get one circle at a time, feeding the existing ones back in, or do you provide the inital constraints and get a whole bunch out?
Is the circle a Very Standard thing in your framework? Is it an abstract circle or does it know about drawing?
Heh, I'm suddenly very curious about this.
I'm just think about how back when I was using processing, everything was "draw" oriented, and so maybe I had no data to reuse against. I think my approach would be so different now!
I really gotta get back to it sometime...
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Perpetuaλ β 🇺🇦 
@kf@sonomu.club · Jul 05
@bit101@mstdn.social it may be an old trick, but this version of it is very beautiful 🙂
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SOMETHING WONDERFUL HAS HAPPENED TO YOUR leah 
@millihertz@oldbytes.space · Jul 05
@bit101@mstdn.social is it an 8?
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Dave bauer
@davebauerart@mastodon.social · Jul 06
@bit101@mstdn.social And they look cool!