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A look back at 2022

Main themes for the year:

  • Replatforming, refactoring, reusing
  • Genuary: driver for later explorations
  • New tools in the toolbox
  • Textures and colours
  • Curves and divisions

Replatforming, refactoring, reusing

In 2021 I started shifting away from MarkLogic to Saxon, but I didn't have replacements for a lot of the built-ins so most of my work was still on the old platform. In 2022 I committed to a Saxon-first strategy, and ported huge chunks of my framework and old components and projects. I added back in a lot of replacement implementations for the built-ins I needed. I started adding capabilities to the Saxon branch only.

Some projects this year were dusted off and reimplemented versions of older works, but not done with a better understanding of how to accomplish certain things. A lot of code got massively refactored and improved along the way, unlocking other capabilities.

Circles, areas scaled by ΞΆ(c=1.08,N=3) Blades arranged along spanning graph
Shiny circles packed into space Chevron-filled blades arranged vertex-to-vertex.
Voronoi divisions as nested blobs Voronoi divisions as bones
Gem-like regions with some regions of high-density and tiny regions, with a few larger blobs on the outside. Weird assemblage of fossil bones.

Noise

I finished ported over the noise libraries late in 2021 and they got some more workout this year.

Boxes with noise-driven size and orientation Noise-driven line dithering
Boxes of various sizes with shadows; rays of russet light from the top left corner. Sunset over Edinburgh, as cross-hatches.

Mutations

The refactoring and extension of the infrastructure for mutation functions allows me to apply specific (or random combinations of) transformations to affect the overall layout to add interest. A reimplementation of the fractal flame algorithm (which is all about iterating random mutation functions) and the way it produces the output made it run in more palatable amounts of time, so I was able to create some more interesting outputs from it.

Fractal Flame Fisheye Maze Swirled Leaves
Circle of white dots surrounded by loops. Maze with fisheye warping. Curved triangles in a swirl.
Hyberbolic Spherical Demon