Day 22 of Advent of Code had us drop blocks from an initial position to a compact stack. The blocks are simulated to use 1 meter cubes, so I used equations for a falling body to simulate the actual pull of gravity to make the falling realistic. This looked great for the sample, which completed quickly. For the actual solution, the problem is so big that the video is 1 hour, 20 minutes long and eventually cannot show the bricks falling as they are outside of the viewport.

Day 10 of Advent of Code had us trace the layout of a pipe and then determine which spaces remaining that were completely enclosed by the pipe. Once the pipe was traced and closed, an application of the even-odd rule was used to determine the enclosed spaces.

I chose a simple solution of always just casting my ray to the left. This ended up simplifying my code, as there are cases where the ray only went over parallel lines, never intersecting a truly vertical line. In this case, I only needed to consider pipes that went downward for the even-odd counting.

Score Card 3.0.1 has been released! This minor release fixes an issue of scores losing focus when shifting to face up positions.

It turns out I never used the close method in Restructure in any of my production code. This led to crashes cleaning up statements, as well as fully deleting the database. There was even a lone issue on GitHub pointing me to the problem, but I never fixed it for over 3 years.

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.