I made a panoramic viewer with a flat, cylindrical,  spherical and round view (aka the group 94 Nokia effect) The rotation of the panorama is done via the uv mapping , so I didn’t had to rotate the triangles ( Click to switch between wire frame and bitmapFill)

» View the experiment

Source code: PanoramicFun_scr

                          

I used the roll and the pitch so the airplane follows the angle of the Wiimote. Still wanted to add wings to my Wiimote, but it was getting late

You can test it here (if you don’t have the WiiFlash server running, you can control the plane with your mouse )

Download the source: WiiFlash_flight_source (You need the WiiFlash server to make it work)

                          

Today I played around with the new FlashPlayer 10 Drawing API (drawTriangles) and the  Matrix3D class.
I get the basics, but for making something more complex, I’m missing somethings. Especially the culling and UV mapping are hard to implement. Still a lot to learn.

So don’t ask me what I made, I just hacked some code together, with this as result.

Instructions: Move your mouse horizontally. Click to switch between wireframe and bitmapFill.
Source code: drawing_api_source

                          

Draw some noise! (With the emphasis on “noise”. I don’t know if I did something wrong, or is it just hard to draw a solid tone?)

Instructions: Download FlashPlayer 10 (if you don’t have it), draw the waves from right to left, and start playing with the “f”, “g”, “h” an “j” keys.

Download the source (Flex 3.2 project): draw_some_noise

And before I forget… Happy New Year!

                          

I never made something with Java before, but its very similar to ActionScript 3 (or the other way around ) and if you already use Eclipse for your ActionScript development, you will find it not hard to start with.

The ActionScript socket part is even easier:
Make a socket object, connect to your host an server port, and start listening to the incoming bytes

var s:Socket = new Socket("localhost",9999)
s.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, getData)
 
private function getData(event : ProgressEvent) : void
{
	var output:String =s.readUTFBytes(s.bytesAvailable)
	trace(output)
}

To send data to the server you just write the bytes an flush.

s.writeUTFBytes("Hello server")
s.flush()

et Voila:

Download the Java and Flash source: flash_java_socket_src
(This is my first java “app”,  don’t expect it to be great and free of bugs )

                          

My first experiment is some kind of painting tool, it uses the Wiimote to control the position and the ‘line’ thickens. It gets his colors from a random flickr photo.

Some of the things I “painted” with the app:

The tool in action:

                          

Why are we here? What are we here for? Can you make seamless Perlin noise tiles?

That last question kept me awake last night. After an hour thinking about using overlapping tiles with blurred edges and blend modes or writing my own Perlin noise, I decided to get back up and give it a try.  But to my surprise, when looking at the api, I found that the smart engineers of adobe already thought of that. The BitmapData perlinnoise method has a “stitch” property. So, no challenges here I guess.

public function perlinNoise(baseX:Number, baseY:Number, numOctaves:uint,randomSeed:int, stitch:Boolean, fractalNoise:Boolean, channelOptions:uint = 7,grayScale:Boolean = false, offsets:Array = null):void

Anyway, here’s an example with the perlin source

                          

The creatures I created are quite simple, they get born, swim around randomly, rest sometimes , eat green dots, breed and finally they die. With my first tests, the creatures didn’t do well, they breed to much and soon there where to many, or they died to fast and got extinguished. So I added 2 simple rules:

1. You live longer if you eat.
2. You have to eat before you breed.

And that did the trick. The result is a fine balanced ecosystem.

You can download the source as an FDT project, but you have to compile it with the Flex SDK, and use the SWC to access the graphics (I lost most of the graphics by a Flash crash, the last saved version of the fla is  in the source )

                          

Move your mouse horizontal over the particles to let them fly (you need the latest FlashPlayer 10 beta to view the example)

download the source

Rollover to play: