... and with a git push origin master or two, it's done :)

In the labs repository you'll find the source code and projects files for my recent posts, and some updated versions of the older experiments:

• Binary Clock
  A new version where the clock rotates. Double clicking toggles an 'inverted' layout.
• Top-down car physics
  Now with a scrolling drivable area and some objects to collide into. WASD or arrow keys to control the car, space-bar for hand-break, and 'f' to go full-screen.
• Force Fields
  The latest nd2d version.
• Sea Change music visualiser
  My previous post :)

Here's a little music visualiser I've been working on as a test project using Away3D 4 and Flint Particles. Double-click to go full-screen.

The music that loads is a track called Sea Change (hence the project name) by Rabbit Gold, you can load your own mp3's by pressing the up-arrow, or double-clicking when in full-screen.

I'll do a second post with some info on the code involved, and if you're intrigued in the meantime, the source is all up on github.

Sea Change
Source code

One more thing.. as you might have guessed, this needs Flash Player 11. ..And there's quite a bit of post-processing going on so it probably needs a fairly decent/recent graphics card to get the best out of it. Oh, and don't use the debug Flash Player :)

Having trouble viewing? Watch a recorded play-through on Vimeo.

Yes, sorry, it's another update on the force-fields experiment...

This time we're targeting Flash Player 11, using the ND2D engine for the rendering and a bit of post-processing.

The background noise is a post-process effect I based on one of the 2D PixelBender shaders by nicoptere. I plan to cover the process of writing the AGAL code for it in my next post.

There's a little interface where you can tweak a few parameters to control the motion. When it starts, all the parameters are set to animate from their minimum to maximum - disable the 'tween' checkboxes to stop the automation and change parameters manually.

Try it here.
Source code on github.

Here's a little update to the force-fields stuff I posted about last time.

For a change of pace, the physics engine used in this version is nape, and in place of vectors, the particles are now all bitmaps. I made these changes to see what performance improvements could be found; with bitmaps having far less rendering overhead than vectors, and nape looking like an engine specifically developed and optimised for AVM2.

Happily, this version runs almost 1000 more physics objects (at 30fps) than the previous version.

Go on, have a go
c - toggle controls
s - toggle stats
f - full screen

The physics-y circles are coerced into place by an x/y force-field, generated from the single-channel Perlin noise.

Any single-channel (or grayscale) image could be used; I'm using Perlin noise here because it works well with the current settings and lets you quickly generate different permutations with very little effort.

I get a fairly steady ~30fps in the browser when running in Flash Player 10.1 (or later). I wouldn't recommend running it in the debug player though, the frame-rate drops to ~15fps and things become a bit unresponsive - you have been warned.

All the code and a nicer application of it to come... at some point.

I've wanted to experiment with top-down car physics simulation for a while, but after finally getting started with it, I find myself getting a little bit distracted.

Built using the WCK Box2D/Alchemy library; the example above has you driving a front-wheel-drive car that likes to skid. You can alter the colours and blend mode used - it's then up to you to draw something pretty, or just drive around making a mess, before saving your image :)

Since it's a full Box2D physics simulation (and because WCK is so easy to work with), adding more physics objects is as simple as adding a layer of shapes, joints, or custom objects in the Flash IDE and republishing the SWF. I toyed with a couple of variations of this version: adding some shapes to knock around and a caravan-esq attachment for the car... but those, I fear, will have wait for another day.

I plan to go through the whole project on a step-by-step basis, with a walk-through of the source code, but it needs a fair bit of work and tidying before that. In the meantime I'll at least try to post a SWF at interesting points in the development.

Update: the source for this is now on github

As this is my first post, I should probably kick things off with a bit of Flash - so here's a clock experiment.

Click it to go full-screen.

It's a result of some expierments representing numbers as binary, where a coloured block lights up if the bit is active (1), and fades out if not (0).

This was the first version - a binary representation of h:m:s:ms. Four horizontal strips represent the hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. Hue, saturation, and brightness all vary over time - which helps slightly when trying to read it.

It wasn't the most user-friendly clock, reading it took a bit of practice... but it did have a certain charm. Also, I couldn't resist adding a bit of jpeg glitching to it.

I liked the original, but it wasn't very readable, so decided to try something different. Laying the digits out and wrapping them around a circle made it a lot more clock-like, and with a few other tweaks it became what you see above.

It also makes for a nice screensaver - if you're that way inclined. I discovered the freeware Instant Storm for Windows, and had my own built in minutes :)

Binary clock source
Try the screensaver

Update: the source for an updated version of this is now on github