Following up on Andrews post concerning Pixel Bender I’ve recently been playing with the convolution filter and I thought I’d share some findings. The convolution filter allows you to pass a matrix of values that are iterated over the pixels of a source image that influence the pixels in the original image. This is more or less what an image filter in pixel bender is doing.
September 12th, 2008 by Charlie / 0 CommentsEarlier this week, I started reading into Pixel Bender and did some nice tutorials for both creating pbj files and importing them into Flash. With this set up, the pbj is loaded at run time creating another type of external asset to manage. Mike Chambers posted a solution for this that allows pbjs to be embedded within a swf. Once I got everything up and working, I noticed swfs using Pixel Bender filters ran incredibly slow. This was disappointing since I was under the impression it was hardware accelerated. Using a PowerPC based Mac, I had a feeling Flash 10 only supported GPU calculations on Intel machines, and with a little research, it was confirmed.
September 11th, 2008 by Andrew / 3 CommentsIn some cases you just want to pass along an Event to it’s parent. Instead of writing a new relay function like..
myEvtDisptchr.addEventListener(Event.TYPE, _onEvent_handler);
function _onEvent_handler($evt:Event):void{
dispatchEvent($evt.clone());
}
..you can just use the inherited function dispatchEvent:
myEvtDisptchr.addEventListener(Event.TYPE, dispatchEvent);
you can also redirect an Event:
myEvtDisptchr.addEventListener(Event.TYPE, myOtherEvtDisptchr.dispatchEvent);
Simple.
September 11th, 2008 by Daniel / 2 CommentsSome of my favorite games? Toejam & Earl, Diablo II, Warcraft II, and Sim City 2000. What do they all have in common? Some semblance of random. Each game had a way of increasing playability by adding some sort of procedurally generated game map. You never played the same game twice. Awesome.
(Okay, maybe War2 didn’t have random. Did the map generator have a random button? Whatever.)
I’ve been meaning to investigate how some of these games worked their magic for awhile, but only recently really revved up the ol’ braingears to figure out how they worked. Here now I provide some links in regards to my research, and an experiment I tried. Hit the jump for more.
September 10th, 2008 by Jamie / 3 CommentsDue to some potential legal issues, Aral had no choice but to change the name of the upcoming online conference from Singularity to <head>. Early ticket discount is still in effect. Looks like it is going to be a great event.
September 8th, 2008 by Joshua / 0 Comments
