A bird, a plane, a cruise missile, they all have one thing in common, they need to know where they are (or aren’t). But Superman doesn’t have pockets to keep his phone in, how could he possibly know where he’s going?

Moon Safari #4

Before you can go somewhere, you need to figure out where you are. We instinctively rely on describing our position relative to objects that the person we’re trying to communicate with knows about. “In my room”, “on my bed”, “under the Eiffel Tower”. The more stationary and universally recognised the landmark of choice, the more meaningful our description of position.

The Bare Minimum

After goofing around for a while, I discovered ssloy/tinyrenderer. This is an outline on how to build a really basic software renderer. However, I quickly realised that a lot of what was being done was rather (intentionally) handwavey for my taste and I decided that I would go about implementing everything in my own uniquely deranged way while documenting the process.

So for the first few articles I will be following the general outline of ssloy/tinyrenderer. My code will inevitably be slightly different from what ssloy came up with. For instance our line drawing algorithms look slightly different, since we took different routes to get there.

I like videogames and I’m overconfident, so naturally when a YouTube video of someone making Minecraft with various levels of “from scratch” shows up in my feed, I can’t help but feel like I could probably do that.

Around 6 months ago, I finally decided that I should probably do it, and showcase an awful game that I will justify as being impressive purely because of how much time I wasted reinventing the wheel.