Stacking Crates for Advent of Code 2022 - Day 5
- Date
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.
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 if you don’t have easing functions. I implemented a small set of functions on the 3D context, so that I can ease in and ease out animations as the crates go up, over, and down.
Rendering text was an easy implementation when using CoreGraphics and CoreText, but for 3D renderers, it gets more complex. I built a createTexture function that generates a CoreGraphics context of a given size, uses the given closure to let you draw as you need, and then converts that to a texture that is stored in the texture registry. There is a bit of overlap here with the 2D renderer, but for now, the utilities exist as copies between the two implementations.
Ooops!
There are a couple of rough edges if you manage to watch through the whole 1 hour video. I try not to rewrite too much of my original solution when I’m creating the visualized variant. I typically add the structures and logic from the initial project and slightly adapt it to work across both the console and visualized versions. Because of that, I’m typically stuck with weird state. If you watch the crates go up and over, they use the height of the tallest stack, even if that stack isn’t traversed. Crates travel further than they need to.
Also, because the movement is generated from a state when the moving crates are removed and not placed in their destination, you’ll some times see crates travel down through their own stack and move across at the wrong height. I’ll chalk that up to a quirk and leave it.