This is one of those offshoots from another experiment that ends up taking over for a while!

I’ve been revisiting one of my favourite topics lately - recursion - and have been getting together a bunch of sketches for a big personal project I’m working on (more on that another time). Anyway, I inadvertently stumbled across quite a nice way of making things grow in a convincing manner, and whilst this script doesn’t actually use recursion ‘per se’, I thought it was kind of cool so I ran with it. // Read More

We’ve all been there. You’re building an image gallery and you need to create consistently sized thumbnails from a set of images, of various sizes and orientations and with differing aspect ratios - or you need a fullscreen background which always fills the stage, regardless of a user’s screen resolution and browser window size - or maybe you just need to fit a DisplayObject into a rectangular area whilst maintaining the correct proportions of the original image. // Read More

[Update 02.07.09]

I’ve uploaded the Boid source code. Sorry for the delay.

I’ve also included some basic examples of how you can create nice behaviors using the Boid class. If you set Main.as as your document class then you’ll see that within that you can specify the demo to run when you compile.

The basic demos included are:

• Chase - Boids chase each other
• Flock - Boids flock together with some wander
• Graphics - How to use custom graphics with a Boid instance
• Seek - Boids seek the mouse position
• Wander - You guessed it, they wander

I’ve commented all of the methods and properties and there is also documentation (open index.html in the docs folder) to get you started.

Before you mention it, yes, there is some redundant code ;) (such as the constrainToRect method which doesn’t really work) but I need to do some optimisations anyway so I just left it as is for now, rough and ready.

Download the Boid class and demos

[End of update] // Read More

Just a quick (and slightly belated) announcement.

The distinguished Bandcamp has recently been regaled with another round of audio-visual snacks. I’ve had a lot of fun working on them, and there will be even more in the not too distant future.

The whole Bandcamp site in fact is bursting with more and more tasty new features which you should check out. In terms of my little contribution on the music visualistions front, there are currently four new full fat flavors to feast on… // Read More

Click and drag the images around to rearrange the grid // Read More

I’ve recently started weaning myself off of Flashdevelop and onto FDT, mainly because it’s cross platform but also because it means I can use the same IDE for coding and compiling Actionscript and Java.

The other clinching factor was it’s plugins, notably Subversive for SVN browsing and team collaboration goodness.

This evening though, I tried checking out a Google code project and got the following error: // Read More

Flash Player 10 is required to view the demo

Download the PaperSprite class (Updated 09.01.2009)
With it you can easily create two sided 3D DisplayObjects using Flash Player 10 and the new 3D API… // Read More

Download the source code of this demo…

It was a rainy Sunday and I found myself playing around with perlin noise for a couple of hours.

The idea was to create a simple flow field using the BitmapData perlinNoise method, and use this to influence the movement of autonomous agents. There is no complex vector math or steering behaviours, just some simple logic for how a particle or agent reacts to the current pixel it is positioned over. // Read More

Original image by Edwin Tofslie

I was having a few gradient alpha mask disabilities today and thought I should share my misery and consequential solution with anyone who might run into the same problems! // Read More

Download the source code (Demo included)

I’ve received quite a few requests to update my circular group94 style menu to AS3 // Read More