Even if this article might seem to be a bit anachronistic - believe it or not - there are many people out there who still have to code in Actionscript 2.0 and who publish for Flash Player 8. And it looks like there are more and more projects where there is a requirement to save users’ drawings, compositions or webcam snapshots to a server in order to add them to galleries, mail them to friends or simply download them.

Since the number of inquiries for commercial licenses of my BitmapExporter class has increased considerably I’ve decided to revise the code once more. The new version has been optimized in several places so the overall performance should be remarkably better. It also turned out that some encoding optimizations that I had used seemed to create compatibility issues with Asian operating systems. (Patrick - I should have listened to you earlier …)

Here is a demo that allows you to play with different image types and the various settings that BitmapExporter offers:

BitmapExporter 2.0 Demo

The main features of BitmapExporter are:
- send any BitmapData object to a PHP server-side script with one line of code (currently alpha channels are ignored for performance reasons)
- if you only need PNG or BMP files a plain PHP installation is sufficient
- for JPEG support you will need a PHP installation with GD compiled in - this usually comes with the default package anyway
- option to automatically popup a download window for the user after the upload has been completed
- choice of 5 different encoding options depending on image content and size and desired encoding time / data size ratio
- highly optimized data encoding for maximum save speed
- automatic data chunking in order to avoid Flash timeout warning with big images (except for turboscan mode)
- adjustable time slice for background saving in order to play nicely with the application and not to hog resources

Well after a Sunday of tinkering I got a reasonable demo of a Back-Propagation Neural Net in Flash working. It’s quite like my Processing version but with the added advantage that you can see the error of the network as a graph and get the training just right by stopping it whenever you like. Also, I’ve added the ability to save and load XML states of the net - very useful after you’ve had a good training session. Full source code is of course linked on the page.

I’m also working on a collaboration - but as we’re rusty it’s going to be simple, can’t do rocket science in my spare time. We’re thinking a camera-tracking Breakout game.

I must confess, that I really love the works from Jodi. The recent works are hacks on Blogger. They put visual glitch into the blogs. It could be just a matter of time that they will be deleted, because they could be identified as spam. Three of the blog hacks are the moment “blocked” and maybe the others will follow. Administrators know it better making the art from Jodi an ephemeral form of art. I like the works from Jodi, because they show that we are using computers and software in only one or some ways out of millions. The digital things right in front can also have very unusual misuses and outcomes.

Something similar might be the Otawa ASCII-Game. It is a hard-rocking game with a far, far away style. It emulates games made in ASCII-consoles back in the days with all the clumsy movements and the stange gameplay. The black chars and white canvas put up a special mood served with outer space sounds. In fact they don’t really use ASCII I guess, because the game looks very different without the japaneese charset installed. But it’s still playable. Have a play and compare with the gameplay video.

Otawa ASCII-Game [via]

I must confess, that I really love the works from Jodi. The recent works are hacks on Blogger. They put visual glitch into the blogs. It could be just a matter of time that they will be deleted, because they could be identified as spam. Three of the blog hacks are the moment “blocked” and maybe the others will follow. Administrators know it better making the art from Jodi an ephemeral form of art. I like the works from Jodi, because they show that we are using computers and software in only one or some ways out of millions. The digital things right in front can also have very unusual misuses and outcomes.

Something similar might be the Otawa ASCII-Game. It is a hard-rocking game with a far, far away style. It emulates games made in ASCII-consoles back in the days with all the clumsy movements and the stange gameplay. The black chars and white canvas put up a special mood served with outer space sounds. In fact they don’t really use ASCII I guess, because the game looks very different without the japaneese charset installed. But it’s still playable. Have a play and compare with the gameplay video.

Otawa ASCII-Game [via]

I just did some new live visuals for a performance with Alexander Rishaug. Alexander's music tends towards the ambient, with rich textures and large soundscapes that develop slowly in time. Check out his Myspace for sound samples and bio. Alexander was the producer of the Generator.x concert tour for Rikskonsertene and was also responsible for hooking me up with Phonophani, so we have some good history together.

Our first gig was last weekend at an event called Algorithm, part of the Lovebytes festival in Sheffield. The event was in an intimate white cube space, and the audience responded very well to our set. The other acts were Senking, Aoki Takamasa and Pixel - all great people to play along with. My thanks to Mark Fell and Mat Steel for organizing a great event.

The visuals were built with Processing, using Sonia and my own SoniaHelper for sound input and analysis. My laptop lost its ability to output to an external monitor before the show, which added an extra bit of tension but allowed me to experiment with running Windows on a Mac. Someone lent me a MacBook running Bootcamp and Windows XP, and it turned out that simply exporting my files using Fat Jar and copying them over to the MacBook was all it took to migrate.

There was no noticeable performance hit, but I did have trouble with the ATI graphics card that made the image flicker when background() was not being used (see video below). This is an issue I have seen in the past with ATI cards, so it was not a problem with the MacBook. I chose to take the Microsoft approach: It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Check out the Lovebytes Flickr set for more images or see the YouTube video below for an impression. Sadly, the video was recorded at an angle that makes it hard to see the visuals, but it still gives an idea of the atmosphere.

this is an example about using the macbook’s sudden motion sensor within a 3d scene of instant player. it is based on java and daniel shiffman’s processing library. just add that library to your classpath or copy it to /Library/Java/Extensions

source code:
instantmotion.x3d
instantmotion.java
instantmotion.class

i am going to add more processing libraries to instant player over the next weeks (i.e. blob detection). using processing libaries in instant player is quite easy. the only problem is that most libaries are using PApplet as parent class and calling an awt window.

It’ll be sometime yet before one of the games I’ve been working on goes up apparently. The client generally takes their time over releasing games, usually so they can come up with some way to ruin the game before release.

Just links in this post, I haven’t any new experiments just yet - and I’m trying to push for a blog over at Nitrome, it’s just whether we get the time, these current games I’ve been developing are really tough work.

Colleagues of mine who are suggesting links to me can help me blog them by submitting them to my Link Monkey. It’s a PHP script that I’m using to bookmark links now and it formats the links so I can paste them into my blog easily.

Cool stop frame animation
Gallery on Brick Lane wanting artists to apply
Ebonics translator
Wikipedia’s list of the graphic novels for NBC’s Heroes
Video for OK by Shitdisco
Neko - Clever shockwave games
Cool vector art
Muon - Chris O Shea Sound reactive Processing spring thing, pretty.
Open Arena - Open Source Quake 3
Sci-Fi short about a video store in another dimension
Onslaught - tower defense game
Interesting, simple, circle collision game
Ball chucking game
Animated Live Journal gifs NSFW.

Create a game like Line Rider in Flash
Video conversion methods
Perlin Noise fire in Flash
Quaternions tutorial (in C++ though)
Shape based collision detection in Flash

fake still

Author: ghedolo

Keywords: processing.org

Added: May 26, 2007