Author: ragpickerr
Keywords: rorshach ink processing fat ribz
Added: June 26, 2009

Yeah, brilliant cartoon, that has got some insights into the gaming-market, almost as a by-product. Have Fun.

Okay, I’m making a resolution to stop filling actionscripter.co.uk with any more talk about Processing. It’s looking like I might be spending the next few months writing a book on the subject, so I’ll bottle my gushing and channel it into print. Also, my generative art already has its own home on the web so you can go explore my code there if you like.

But one last thing to say – if you want a quick start with Processing, give Robert Rourke’s HasCanvas a go. It is perhaps the quickest way of writing a line of code and seeing the result. If that doesn’t hook you, nothing will.

Most entertaining way, to quit the dayjob

Indie-developer Farbs from Australia quit his job, to head for full-time indie-game-development. So far eventually not a new or interesting story. But the way he quit, is some kind of interesting, proving his gamedesign-skills in heart and action: We wrote a sort of “Mario clone game”, that delivered the message to his boss. Good job! Just have a play or read the original blogpost. (via)

People at the “Art and Genomic centre” in the Netherlands are working on a new kind of display-technology, that is driven by organic lifeforms: fluorescent bacteria. Huhh. It is part of the “Artist in Residence” program, and people from the Waag society Fablab seem also to be involved.

At least this really, really looks cool. They have an own blog, reporting about their latest developments. If there are breakthrough, then they’ll report it on the blog I guess.

The pattern traced out here is what you’d get if you took a pencil moving in ellipses, and used it to draw on a sheet of paper that’s also moving in ellipses. It’s a bit like a spirograph, but not constrained in quite the same ways. It’s more like a harmonograph; more on that later.

Have fun, play around with the settings, especially ‘ratio’; that’s probably the best way of figuring out what’s going on. ‘Eccentricity’, by the way, is a measure of how flattened an ellipse is - an ellipse with 0 eccentricity is a circle, one with 1 is a line.

The Long Version

I first stumbled on trochoids by playing around with plotting trigonometric functions.

I wondered what would happen if you took the basic parametric equations for plotting a circle -

x = radius * cos (θ)
y = radius * sin (θ)

- and added them to the equation for another circle, turning more than one circle in the time it takes to draw the first one, so we get something like the trails left by a point on a wheel rolling around another wheel (an epitrochoid or hypotrochoid), with these equations:

x = radius₁ * cos (θ)
+ radius₂ * cos (ratio * θ)

y = radius₁ * sin (θ)
+ radius₂ * sin (ratio * θ)

This makes some pleasing shapes, so I thought I would try animating it.

The most obvious thing to do is to change the relative phase of the first and second circles, but this just turns the whole thing round.

What’s more interesting is to animate the phase of the x component (the cosine) in the opposite direction to the y component (sine):

x = radius₁ * cos (θ) + radius₂ * cos (ratio * θ + f)

y = radius₁ * sin (θ) + radius₂ * sin (ratio * θ - f)

This makes the circle shrink to a line, then grow into a circle flowing the opposite way, and then go through the same cycle again.

Combined with the first circle, this makes the sort of animations you can see above.

Pleased with the results of this, in 2001 I made an applet to let people play with it, and that’s where things stood till September 2004.

Then I read a gorgeously produced wee book called Harmonograph: A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music.

Harmonograph provides an impressively clear and thorough introduction to the basics of music theory, and ways of visualising music.

It does this in 50-odd pages, replete with beautiful illustrations of harmony made by harmonographs, kaleidophones, Chladni plates and the like.

A harmonograph is an instrument invented in the mid-nineteenth century, using two or more pendulums to produce beautiful pictures. The pictures are especially beautiful when the ratios of the frequencies of the pendulums are close to whole numbers, just as chords are especially beautiful when the ratios of the frequencies notes making them up are close to whole numbers.

The pictures I was making with Trochor were almost the same pictures produced by a rotary harmonograph, except that the pendulums of a harmonograph steadily wind down as they draw, and Trochor was arbitrarily restricted to whole-number ratios between the two drivers.

A kaleidophone, like a harmonograph, creates images of harmonics, but these are made only fleetingly, in light. It consists of a metal rod fixed in a stand, with a reflective bead on top, which is struck and then stroked with a bow.

A beam of light reflected from the top of it casts patterns onto a screen, rather like those of a rotary harmonograph, but more complex.

The biggest difference, judging by the illustrations I have seen, is that it is not restricted to circular motion:

Free to vibrate in any direction, it produces patterns composed of interacting linear waves and ellipses.

I have incorporated the idea of using ellipses, together with the damped spiralling motion and non-integer ratios of the harmonograph, into Trochor.

With 0 eccentricity, we are back to the rotary harmonograph; with 1, we have the linear harmonograph, producing Lissajous-type figures.

The equations of this version are as follow:

 x = (1-damping)ⁿ * (axis_1a * cos
(θ) + axis_2a * cos (ratio * θ + f))

y =(1-damping)ⁿ * (axis_1b * sin (θ) + axis_1b * sin (ratio * θ - f))

The code for this applet is available for anyone curious - but bear in mind I wrote most of this around eight years ago, and the rest three years or so after that, and it’s not necessarily the best code! I should probably re-do this in Processing really.

Once again I found a very beautiful video. Almost ten minutes of bliss. The video got a very simple idea, but is full of creativity. Enjoy!

ToonLoop Remix from Society for Arts and Technology on Vimeo.

Yes, you read that right: realtime stop motion. While stop motion is, by definition, associated with a painstaking process of creating animation frame by frame, a free and open source tool takes a different approach. ToonLoop provides the usual stop motion tools for creating loops, but takes a live performance approach to the recording and playback process, so you can turn your stop motion into a performance. The creator brought up the tool Saturday at the Open Video Conference in New York and got just the reaction you’d expect - a few confused (if delighted) chuckles, and someone asking, “That must be … slow.”

Now, if the framerate is low, you have no one to blame but yourself.

For fans of animation and live visualism, though, this is a dream. The first build was in Processing for Mac and Windows, but a new version for Linux (which should also work on Mac) is built on Python (with PyOpenGL, PyGame, Video4Linux and — oddly — Pure Data for MIDI).

http://toonloop.com/
Developers: Alexandre Quessy and Tristan Matthews
Toonloop Download
Source on Google Code
More documentation of the project at Montreal’s SAT [in French]

In fact, I’m not sure whether I should tell you to download the thing or just run with the idea itself. (There’s no reason Java/Processing shouldn’t still work, by the way, if you use the excellent GSVideo library - and OpenFrameworks and others could be likely candidates, too.)

The idea is brilliant - and yet more evidence that being a visualist can be a much broader category than simply being a “VJ,” with the two-channel mix paradigm the more conventional term suggests.

And performances evidently look like what you might expect. Below, Joy Penroz uses Toonloop in Mérida, Yucatán, México, via the ToonLoop site.

Bonus video: as I was looking for more work done with ToonLoop (there’s not much out there just yet), I came across another creation by Joy Penroz. It’s not a stop motion performance, but it runs with parallel ideas, looping to manipulate time in a modern pop take on the work of Dutch master painter Jan Vermeer. The contemporary “Milkmaid”:

THEMILKMAID from Joy Penroz on Vimeo.

Extra thanks to Michela Ledwidge and Austin Gambles on Twitter.

PDSounds.org is a new project, that can come in handy, if you are last minute searching sounds for a production. Compared to projects like the “Freesound-Project” all sounds on PDsound are dedicated to the Public Domain, so they are totally free of rights - compared to the Freesound, where the sounds are creative-commons-based and you at least have to give credits. Resulting in extra-work at the very end of the project.

So far the sound I discovered on PDSounds are very rough, not very precise, polished or special and still require extrawork to sound well. But maybe the quality of sounds will achieve a new level in some months or years.

I think the archive will be good to get inspired, or to linger around. The sound there are tag-based so exploring is possible. Also browsing the archive by user is given as an option, as well as a “sound chart” and a forum to get in touch.

All this is very fine. But in the end… recording own sounds is quite much more fun after all. (via)

Flash and augmented reality is no where near as fast as some people claim. Sure if you have a high end Mac, then it’s going to run great. But on my PC laptop with 1gb memory it’s not that fast. In fact it’s fairly choppy even with optimisations.

I started with this video tutorial. Which ran appallingly slow on my machine.

I then went to Mikkoh’s blog and downloaded his demo. That ran a little faster. It also works straight out of the box without needing to download anything else.

After that I wanted to see if I could get multiple markers going. For that I downloaded FLARManager by Eric Socolofsky. The most annoying thing about getting it to run was getting a build of Flex for Flash Player 10 that wasn’t broken. Aside from that, it’s pretty well written and it’s set up for optimisation.

I finally had two markers working:

Note the framerate. I was using 8×8 pattern files, running at half resolution, quality set to low and still not that fast.

I discovered that the marker files were actually text files and wrote my own marker maker. You can get a web cam based one from the web, but their output is pretty dodgy. I built it using Processing. All the ARToolKits seem happy reading any marker file with any extension: .txt, .pat, .bananas, .anything.

I tried without success to get Chung’s Simple ARToolkit to work. At one point I had recognition of a very basic marker (which was pleasingly fast), but nothing since then. It just won’t recognise my markers. The most fustrating thing about it is that he’s set the JARToolKit object to private, so you can’t access it directly and do anything else with it. Why!? No multiple markers! Why don’t you trust me Chung!?

The original jARToolKit seems to be happy in the code folder of a normal Processing sketch, so I might see if I can rebuild the simple ARToolKit as a class in a normal Processing sketch. Though I’m skeptical about it seeing any of my patterns.

Commodore and Apple: Late love with obstacles

C64iPhone is a full C64 emulator, that is even officially licenced from Commodore Gaming. You can play all the vintage games with it. It comes initially with five games at the moment. So here’s the website. But there is more to this story.

I was wondering, why nobody else did this thing before, C64 on the iPhone. It seems, that several people tried to do a port of the Frodo-emulator for the iPhone SDK sufware emulator - just for the fun of doing it. According to reports form Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer a developer from Manomio also worked on this project, but later rejected it because
a) there the licences from Commodore were unclear and
b) the terms of the iPhone store would not allow a project like this.
But the itch under the fingernails stayed.

So he went to Commodore and Kiloo and began clearing the rights. He also contected Apple right away, if an emulation-project like this would be possible to release on some future day. The got really exited at Apple and confirmed the project. And here we are now.

And you know what? Apple rejected the app!

It seems, that Manomio will have to remove the BASIC-interpreter in the app and make this whole thing only possible for emulating games. What is the coder in you now saying? Buhu. Why is licensing-stuff an obstacle for expressing creative code? I call this a major fail (at least from the Apple iPhone policy).

This here is the official statement form Apple, that were send with the rejection:

Thank you for submitting C64 1.0 to the App Store. We’ve reviewed C64 1.0 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it violates the iPhone SDK Agreement; “3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

So let’s wait what will happen to this project. The last word isn’t spoken yet.

Update: There is also another version, that say, that the App was rejected, because the ROM-Files (the games actually) are interpreted the be “Emulator App”, and not this official iPhone API. So this is the rule from the iPhone SDK agreement I quoted above. Really lame, but there seem to be also a lot of other apps live on the App Store, like apps, that play .SID-files, that would be also break this rule. Let’s still wait for new developments.

Author: Helium23
Keywords: desaya florito processing flow field fluid dynamics Marcus Graf Dez Effects Black burn
Added: June 20, 2009

Today I finally had the time to take a deeper look under the hood of the Flixel game-framework for Flash/Actionscript. My opinion? Highly recommended! Not only the mini-game “Mode“, that ships with Flixel, is a great one, but also all details of the source-code is well balanced and implemented in a professional way. You just need two hours to pop into game-development, even if you have only little understanding of developing games and Actionscript-code.

Screenshot from the example-game “Mode”

At Flixel you work with “states” and can add Sprites and Text to the states. There are also some handy halpers for doing animations as well, for example particle-systems. Things, game coders should instantly be familiar with. Here is the documentation.

Let’s look at a simple sprite object. Everything is implemented: health system, physics, animation handling, collision handling. It’s all there and it feels just right.

I do not know, how to best express my initial love for this tool.
A) It is open source.
B) It is possible, to extend it every time on your own for your projects.
C) It can be used for any project you like.
D) Even the preset-stuff that ships along is great.
E) There is a well maintained support-forum at Flixel.org, and I am sure, that it will grow into a community. Leaving one question open: Why pay for other tools? Flixel also integrates seamless into the free open-source code-tool (IDE) FlashDevelop.

Friends, I got a new toy to play with! Thanks Adam for this brilliant Flixel.

I started to write a little processing tutorial, showing how to write a great
sidescrolling space shooter like in this screenshot below.

please give me a little bit of feedback and show me all the great games you make with the
help of my tutorial

download

tutorial.pdf
examples.zip

screenshot