Today, I was having an argument with my brother about multidimensional arrays and coordinate systems. The specifics are a bit complex to go over here, but at its core, he wasn't mentally picture the structure of an array correctly and so was reading his array's wrong causing them to display as if they were rotated 90 degrees.

I don't really remember having any issues when dealing with arrays, though these days, I generally stick to single dimensional arrays and use math if I need to convert from, say, a screen coordinate to its corresponding spot in the data structure. Particularly, and in the case of our argument, we were talking about reading in a map file. That got me thinking about this trinket I wrote several years ago.

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If I recall, this test was more about scripted AI and platform physics, but there was a loadable map aspect as well. Maps are something I've played around with for a very long time, one of my first programming mental puzzles being how to generate one that wasn't gibberish programatically. This was something that baffled me for the longest time, but I eventually did figure something out and even wrote a tutorial about it.

But, really, this whole little tale and code offering are because I had no idea what to talk about otherwise. I suspect I shall have less issues tomorrow (for reasons that will become clear), but that hardly helps me in the here and now.