I was recently invited to participate in FXpression 09. A flash contest on kirupa.com. The contest rules state that all entries must be composed entirely of circles.
I entered a modified version of my swarm code. See it in all it’s glory after the break.
I’m still working on the flocking code I blogged about earlier.
I wanted to get more flock objects on screen. But my nearest neighbour detection code was VERY SLOW. In the old version each flock object would do a closest neighbor check by for looping through EVERY OTHER ENTITY on screen. The number of calculations would increase exponentially as the number of flock entities increased. This set a limit of about 200 entities before things started to slow down.
So I decided to add a broad level distance detection level. My first attempt got me up to about 700, before things started to slow down. Which was not bad but I was sure I could do better. At this point my friend William stepped in and essentially re-wrote my code 3 times over (William is a math major, and a super smart guy). One of his broad hit level schemes let me get up to 2000 entites on screen at once (on my home computer). The version I posted here shows 1200.
See the mega swarm in action after the break.
Hey guys, I made a prettier version of the Swarm app I posted yesterday.
Check it out after the break.
Recently I watched a video on Ted.com. In the video Steven Strogatz talks about sync, in one segment he speaks about flocking behavior and lists the three simple rules that govern flocking. Later I found that this type of artificial flocking behaviour can be referred to as ‘Boids‘.
So yeah… I decided to code it up in Flash ActionScript 3.0.
The image on the left doesn’t really do the app justice.
Click more to see the app in action.
I want to thank all the people who showed up for my birthday party last saturday.
I had a great time, and I was drunk enough to believe you were all having fun too!
A special thanks goes out to Ron for the dead astronauts drawn onto Dark Side of the Moon!
Also, I’d like to announce that Boom Blox is a great party game for the Wii!
Recently saw this link on BoingBoing.
Some fellas used Adobe’s Alchemy
(this is the first I’ve heard of it) to compile Dooms C++ code directly to Actionscript.
The frame rate isn’t all that great, but I’m still incredibly impressed with Adobe for coming up with all this crazy stuff and the Newgrounds crew for getting it to work.
Click to see Doom in a Browser (FP 10 required)
Recently I had some time to goof off at work and I wanted something quick and dirty to play with. So I tried to generate a flame using Perlin noise.
Now I know a ton of people have already done this kind of stuff. But I wanted to give it a shot myself. I don’t think my attempt is half bad either.
Really this is just a Perlin noise field in a bitmap being scrolled and blurred on 3 layers. Sorta simple… kind of 
The source code is super messy and not very edit friendly, but you’re welcome to it if you want it:
You can see the swf in action after the break.
Well, I said I was working on Box2d and indeed I am.
Over the past week I’ve been working on this for my birthday invite (turning 29! Terror!).
I’m using computeSpectrum to read in the music (by Aphex Twin). The melody controls the frequency and size of the circles. The beat brings in the red squares. It looks better running so please don’t judge it by the image.
You can see the Application in action after the break.
Hey! I’m back from Poland! The second week was actually pretty cool! I actually got 2 days of sun!
By far though the best part of Poland was finally getting a chance to meet and really talk with most of my family. It was the first time in twenty years, and it was well worth all the rain and snow.
For anyone interested, here’s the Flickr stream of my trip.
In terms of Flash stuff, I’ve started looking into Box2D. It’s… complicated. Hopefully I’ll be able to start some experimentation soon, but right now I’m at the ‘WTF is going on?!?’ stage.
So I’m still in Poland. It’s going pretty well, but I’m already very much looking forward to going home. Given the chance I would gladly go home a few days earlier. As is I still have a week to go, ugh.
My reluctance to enjoy my vacation leaves me feeling pretty shallow. You know, everyone LOVES going on vacation. All I can think about is going home and hanging out with my dog.
Still though, I’ve had some pretty good times. I’ve met a lot of family I didn’t know I had. I took a lot of photos. Oh, I also bought what may very well be the awesomest movie poster ever printed! I’ll try to get a photo up in a post vacation wrap-up.
Oh, I forgot to mention! Since my vacation has started I have been sick 80% of the time and VERY SICK for 20% of the time. I’m only starting to feel better now. I’ve seen the sun for a grand total of 2 minutes (this morning… just before it started raining again) and the temperature has been below 10 celcius every day. Everyone tells me it’s the coldest two weeks they can remember in September. Polish news is predicting the bad weather will lift on the day before my flight back to Toronto… seriously.
So maybe my lack of excitement is at least a little justified.
Things are looking up though, I’m heading off to Warsaw tomorrow. It holds a lot of promise and I’ll have a total of 3 different tour guides (Family!) so maybe that’ll be awesomer!
See you in a week!
P.S
Thanks to Tanya/Radek for help with my rain jacket purchase. I would have been so screwed without that jacket!