Something Wrong with the System

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:

Click to download Source

You can see the swf in action after the break.

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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.

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Hey! I haven’t posted for a while!   I was working on a huge project for McCain foods.

Now that it’s done I can share it!

The project is called ‘Rose Recommends’. It allows the user to plan out their meals for the week.  More importantly the application will show the nutritional information for each food item and the plate as a whole.  Now you can finally find out precisely how bad eating a plate full of Cottage Cheese is for you.

I spent a pretty exciting/stressful month working on this app, I hope you like it.

If you have any questions/comments feel free to post them down below.

I’ll try to get some experimental stuff up again soom.  I just need to enjoy the summer a bit first.  It’s almost gone!

Click to see the app!

Hey, sorry that I’ve disappeared!

I’ve been saddled with a bunch of major projects (with deadlines!) at work and I just don’t have the strength to code all day and then go home and code some more.

I was working on an interpretation of Grant Skinner’s curved line code which was just giving me headaches. What I have so far is just a clone of what Grant’s done. Except that my math is completely different 😀 Not better mind you, just different.  I made it a point to code my version without looking at Grant’s source, I did steal his ideas though!

You can see it after the break.

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Alright, here it is flipBoard Ver. 1.0!

This is an animated picture transition engine written in AS3 which uses as3flickrlib to connect to Flickr to pull images in real time.

I realized that the panels in the previous version were far too small and far too fast. Giving the impression that the panels were just kind of shimmering rather than actually flipping. This version has much larger and slower panels.

I’ve also added title and author support!

Another new feature is skipping images: If you click on the image you can force it to go to the next image without waiting for the timer. I’ve added a new transition style (circular) for these forced swaps.

After the break I’ll show off the working swf, I’ll give a link to the source code and I’ll describe how to use the application.

I’ve also included a bare bones example of my as3flickrlib implementation.

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I’m still working on this one, but I think I’ve made enough progress that I can show it off in its current state.

This AS3 app is pulling images from Flickr using as3flickrlib and displaying them in an animated pixel board.
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First of all, I made it to ten posts! W00, I really wasn’t sure if I’d make it this far.

Recently at work, I had to write an AS3 image viewer with zoom and pan capabilities. It was a lot harder than I had anticipated. I decided to write another (much better) version for the blog. I’m hoping that by releasing this code I’m saving a couple people a lot of grief.

You can zoom in/out with the buttons in the bottom right corner, or by using your mouse wheel (Mouse wheel might not work on a Mac! Let me know if it’s an issue or if you have a solution).

After the break you can see the application in action.

I’ll also try to explain some of the ActionScript parts I found interesting.

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Update May 27, 2008: Hey guys I just found a much better way of doing colour separation. The code below takes a very brute force approach. It seems the Flash engineers were one step ahead of me though. There’s a method called copyChannel() which essentially takes a selected colour channel from one bitmap and moves it into another. The below code is still a decent introduction to parsing through bitmaps and bitwise operators. It’s just not the efficient way to do this task.

After the Red tick failure this morning, I wanted to get right back into it and do something quick.

In this project I:

A) Load in an external image

B) Read in all of the image’s pixel values and split the data in to red, green, blue.

C) Feed the colour data into seperate layers

D) Animate ’em!

I’ll go into the code after the break.

But first:

I stumbled upon this link while looking into bitwise operators:

Bitwise gems

It’s a great resource and I’d strongly suggest looking into it, especially if you’re not familiar with getting colour data out of hex numbers.

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So first of all I’m not dead! I haven’t given up on blogging, experimentation or coding.

But I did run in a completely wrong direction with my latest experiment. This is actually a bit of an epic failure. It’s SUPER slow, doesn’t look great… meh.

But I did some cool stuff with colour transitions and the tentacles are kind of cool.

So check out the full post to see the working swf, my apologies if it’s really slow on your computer 😀

No source this time guys, it’s just too much of a mess.

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Ok, this was a totally accidental project. I was planning on doing a GSkinner style branching tree, and ended up with something kind of cooler.

Here’s an image from the app:


Click to see it in action

I’m especially happy with the seeded random code, it’s based off of the perlin noise function.

I’ll probably post the source code early next week. But right now it’s time for Team Fortress 2!

UPDATE:
Just finished playing, so I can go ahead and post the source. This one is more messy than usual.
Click to Download Source