iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 17/09/2026

New blog post: www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09... I was looking at assigning "a" vs "an" articles for English nouns (for procgen purposes), and fell into a rabbit hole …

Diagram showing the first two letters of English words, and whether that word would get the "a" or "an" article in front of it

0238

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 14/09/2026

And here's an example of some code I wrote that was redundant with code I had written earlier. I had forgotten about the earlier code, but llm-buddy reminded me that I had already done this operation and don't need to do it again. It's essentially acting like a linter but on logic instead of style

Screenshot of an LLM pointing out that I had written some redundant code

050

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 14/09/2026

Here's an example of me being careless. It's not a type error, but the code is wrong. llm-buddy got me to look at it again. And yes, I'm careless sometimes :-(

A screenshot of llm-buddy.el telling me that x: centerOfLastRoom[0], y: centerOfLastRoom[0] is likely a bug, and should've been y getting [1]

160

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 19/08/2026

Busy regreening the desert in this simulation

3785

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 09/08/2026

New blog post about the writing of this page www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-08...

0202

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 09/08/2026

I turned down the exposure to see the details on the lit side, but the other side was too dark. I took this last week: I think I need to figure out hdr or stacking or something else to combine high and low exposures.

050

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 02/08/2026

I added some color and shape options to my procedural face generator www.redblobgames.com/x/1845-face-...

Screenshot of a procedural face generator tool I made, where you can control the mouth shape, face shape, and colors

171

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 01/06/2026

I'm amazed it can do this because the code doesn't have any variables named "covert agents". But it was somehow able to figure out that this function is for calculating the purchase price of covert agents:

010

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 01/06/2026

Yay! I have been trying to reverse engineer the SRE formulas for combat. LLM context length has become so long that I fed the entire executable into an LLM and asked it to guess which assembly code did what. It didn't figure out combat, but it did find inflationary vs non-inflationary prices:

Gemini attempt to reverse engineer Solar Realms Elite (a game I wrote a long time ago, and lost the source code for)

110

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 26/05/2026

One advantage of having web pages instead of academic papers is that I can keep improving them. Today I added drag handles to the cone/sector section of www.redblobgames.com/grids/circle... You can now adjust these visually instead of using the sliders. But the sliders still work too.

Before: adjust cone size by using sliders

After: adjust cone size either with sliders or by moving the drag handle

1554

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 20/05/2026

Whee, I'm now getting email spam "Is Your Sludge Treatment Consuming Too Much Energy?"

Screenshot of e-mail spam about sludge treatment

140

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 25/04/2026

Yes, that works except the next diagram has two arrows per tile ;-( especially on the left side:

Screenshot of a grid with up to two arrows per tile

110

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 25/04/2026

Trying to show a flow field and also an object following a path in that flow field. Too many arrows? It's growing on me.

Screenshot of a pathfinding flow field and a specific path in that field

4424

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 19/04/2026

2 reminds me of this map (from Tom Patterson) Location: www.google.com/maps/@38.237...

Tom Patterson's map of the Utah canyonlands

140

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 18/04/2026

The pseudocode on my A* and hexagon pages doesn't have types. I'm considering it, but it feels less like pseudocode…

3200

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 18/04/2026

New blog post: highlighting the interactive code samples on my hexagons page www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-04... (and why it was harder on the hexagons page than on the A* page)

Screenshot of code that's highlighted with colors that match the diagrams

1345

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 14/04/2026

What I'm working on: adding highlighting to code samples on my hexagon page. Standard syntax highlighter packages go from text to html, but I have html input, and it can be interactive, so I had to implement highlighting differently. Might be too much color though! Not sure.

Screenshot of my hexagon page without code highlighting

Screenshot of my hexagon page with code highlighting added

4314

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 21/03/2026

I continue to find this mesmerizing. Many years ago I learned about modulo circle multiplication from Mathologer on YouTube www.youtube.com/channel/UC1_... www.redblobgames.com/x/1847-matho... (click Animate; or drag the mouse on the diagram to see different parameter values)

2201

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/03/2026

Most pages are the same. But a few pages look a lot better. And a few pages look slightly worse. Another example is this comparison where the old formatting rule completely messed up this code comment but the new rule works better:

Old xml white space handling rule in my web site builder

New xml white space handling rule in my web site builder - looks better!

030

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/03/2026

A downside of using the same CSS+template for 30 years of writing is that sometimes I change something and it seems ok but leads to subtle differences on some page somewhere. Today: using Playwright+pixelmatch to look for differences. Example here (left side is diff, middle is old, right is new)

Image diff captured a change in whitespace handling on my site

2112

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 05/03/2026

The main page is www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf... I used msdfgen and webgl for this

393

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 05/03/2026

Blog post: I've been working on a guide to SDF font rendering, and I kept getting stuck. The blog post is about the things that didn't work www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-02...

Screenshot of several images from my new blog post

3367

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 22/02/2026

I've written up my understanding of SDF and MSDF fonts, and how to use them with msdfgen+webgl: www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf... (I'll post it on my blog soon too)

Screenshot of five different styles of rendering SDF (signed distance field) fonts

09121

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 19/02/2026

I continue to get distracted playing with shaders, but I am still making progress on this page.

Text rendered with a signed distance field, setting the color based on the shader derivative of the distance

Text rendered with a signed distance field, setting the color based on the shader derivative of the distance, but less at higher elevations

260

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 17/02/2026

Taking a quick break to experiment with shaders

160

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/02/2026

Here's the animation showing both the "landscape view" and the "rendered font view"

2190

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/02/2026

Thanks! Turns out Chlumsky used it too, in his thesis work on MSDF fonts

Figure 1.5 from Chlumsky's thesis work on MSDF fonts shows a distance field drawn as a height field, with a water level showing where the font is rendered

010

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/02/2026

Here's a figure from Chlumsky's thesis. The horizontal part of 'e' (both upper and lower line) have distance fields stored in the red and green channels. The upper curved part (both sides) have distance fields in the red and blue channels. Every edge is assigned to 2 out of the 3 distance fields

Figure 6.4 from Chlumsky's thesis work on MSDF fonts

120

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/02/2026

They *are* magic, and I don't have a great explanation at the moment. Here's my rough idea— When constructing a single distance field at a corner, the distance field is necessarily round. But if we construct a separate distance field for the horizontal and vertical lines, then we can make it sharp

Comparison of single distance field vs two distance fields

110

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/02/2026

Trying to find a good way to build intuition around distance field fonts: how about comparing it to a map? The land is the filled text, the beach is the outline, the ocean is transparent (optionally a glow/shadow effect). Not sure whether this will make sense to the reader.

4231

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 13/02/2026

Making good progress on restructuring the page to be less of a diary and more of a guide. www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf...

Screenshot showing the difference between resizing a bitmap font and resizing a distance field font

190

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 13/02/2026

Ooh, neat! Might be interesting to see if they're evenly distributed across floating point bit representations (e.g. it's using all the bits effectively and not wasting some of the space). I was trying that with the font page I'm working on and found that NO, we were wasting lots of the "space":

Histogram showing which values are being used in a font data file

110

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 12/02/2026

My before & after, in "Captain of Industry", a game where I have to pay attention to all the waste products:

Screenshot of me dumping wastewater into the ocean, in Captain of Industry

Screenshot of my wastewater treatment system in Captain of Industry

150

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 11/02/2026

How about a glow effect? I think the main problem with the page now is the overall structure. The first section is commands to run. The first section should be about the concepts with visualizations, not a list of shell commands.

Screenshot of a glow effect applied to text

170

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 09/02/2026

Thanks! I think round corners work with soft outlines, and sharp corners work with hard outlines

Screenshot of soft outlines with sharp corners

Screenshot of hard outlines with sharp corners

Screenshot of round corners with hard outlines

020

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 09/02/2026

Here's an example where the font is rendered with MSDF (keeps corners sharp) but the soft outline is rendered with SDF (makes corners round)

Screenshot of a soft outline around text

280

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 08/02/2026

The contour lines show the signed distance field, and we can set the font thickness to a specific distance:

181

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 07/02/2026

These road intersections look beautiful!

214714

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 06/02/2026

I didn't finish in January 2026. Still working on it! :)

Screenshot of contour lines on a signed distance field rendering of a font

1200

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 19/01/2026

My January 2026 goal is to finish www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf... It's a writeup on what I learned about SDF (Signed Distance Field) font rendering. I started in 2024 but then never finished. So my goal now is to finish :)

511211

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/12/2025

It's a little bit of a hack but the idea is to replace just the "C" or "F" character at the end of the regexp match with the string "C (113.0°F)" or "F (26.7°C)". That string acts as a single character for text editing purposes. gist.github.com/redblobgames...

080

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 16/12/2025

I hadn't realized it before but #emacs syntax highlighting (font lock) can do a lot more than assign color. Here I'm parsing the string into a number, doing a calculation, then generating text to show the result

1345

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 18/11/2025

I was looking through my old projects and found this. I love how it looks and want to do more with this www.redblobgames.com/x/1638-voron...

Screenshot of a stylized procedurally generated map that uses little line marks to show mountains, grass, and water

3575

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 12/11/2025

Side project blog post—from 2010 to 2024, RotMG.com had used maps from my mapgen2 project. There are 2^33 possible maps. I didn't know which seeds they used. I figured … let me just try them all … how hard could it be? ;----) Spoiler: found some! not all. www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-11...

0231

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 11/10/2025

Yeah! I like <output> but don't use it fully, and haven't done enough for screen readers. I've mostly used this to display the result of <input> elements, like this:

Diagram from https://www.redblobgames.com/maps/noisy-edges/ showing the html structure for accessibility, including a <label> element surrounding an <input> and corresponding <output> element

030

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 05/10/2025

I've been fixing numerical precision issues in #mapgen4 but some of those issues led to interesting textures that I liked. (It may be hard to see them on the screenshots) I'd like to have interesting textures that are intentional instead of the result of a bug …

mapgen4 render with a floating point precision bug

mapgen4 render with floating point bug fixed looks smoother

2311

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 04/10/2025

I'm working on a slider that lets you control how deep the "folds" on the #mapgen4 mountains are

2192

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 03/10/2025

New blog post: rewriting the mapgen4 river render www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-09... I had been drawing river segments on the cpu to a texture, and then reading that texture on the gpu. I changed it to draw river segments on the gpu directly.

Old river renderer: draw to the cpu, then read from that on the gpu

New river renderer: draw directly on the gpu in a shader

0263