posted by Matthew Lloyd on 06.Jul.2008 No Comments
So today was an unusually rainy day in Manchester, so I was pretty much grounded to the house for the afternoon. So since I was bored I decided to play around with doing a proper A* implementation (none of that hacky Dijkstra crap this time) for another project of mine.
While I was testing it I got it to draw on to a bitmap the Open List and Closed List (for all of you are thinking “the what what a what what?” have a look here) so I could better see how it was working and if I could optimize it a little better. After playing around with it for a couple of hours I got it to a point I was fairly happy. However I also noticed that there was a clever little side effect of what I did. The drawing of the Open and Closed lists seem to grow and follow along the main path, it seemed to resemble a bush or a tree or a lightening spike or frost covering a window; All very organic shapes which are quite hard to replicate in their static state let alone animated.
So I changed the map I was working with to be just random noise of 50% probability of wall or not, randomly placed start and end points and let it run. It was pretty cool! So I played with it a little more to add some colour variation and to fade out as it went on and here is the final output
Update
Today I wanted to test it on more of an obvious map. I’ve upped the speed a little too. I’m using the map from GTA1 thats been made twice as complex (scaled down and copied 4x) to test the system properly. The longest path was 5 seconds, the shortest 12 milliseconds, you can see it here.
Published in Flash
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posted by Matthew Lloyd on 29.Jun.2008 No Comments
Created on June 29th and filed under Personal Life.
If you have read any of this blog, you’ll know I like fractals and music. I was at the Big Fish practise place at BeeHive Mill in Manchester this afternoon, and after practise I was waiting outside with my guitar and amp for my taxi. I turned round to see this image on the wall. Its a Mandelbrot that was spraypainted on the wall. I think it takes a special sort of person to spraypaint a mathematical anomoly on a wall.
posted by Matthew Lloyd on 25.Apr.2008 1 Comment
Created on April 25th and filed under Flash.
If your attempting the Exercises in Foundation Flash CS3 Video and you get a compile error along the lines of: “1172: Definition com.deviant:HueColorMatrixFilter could not be found.” Then you have come to the right place! You can download a full copy of the correct file here (Hue ColorMatrixFilter), all you need to do then is place it in the /com/deviant folder in your Exercise folder.
The authors seemed to have bungled that but never mind!
Download!
posted by Matthew Lloyd on 25.Apr.2008 No Comments
Created on April 25th and filed under News.
Earlier in the week I mentioned I was going to change this site such that I will not have my personal blog on here anymore. That said this morning I got an email from a prospective employer saying they found me when they google’ed “Actionscript” and “Manchester” which is the sort of search I want to turn up in… Well that and “Awesome Cool Rich People”… So I may keep this site and make slashflash.net my more experimental site instead!
Just while I’m here and writing my blog I thought I’d have a rant… because well… thats what bloggers are supposed to do! But on the BBC News page this morning I was somewhat shocked at their prioritizing. There were 3 main stories on the UK page; One about tobacco prices being “unlawfully fixed”, one about North Korea & Syria possibly having nuclear weapons and the US poking them with a stick, and another about the police search for the killer of a disabled man.
Now something to me seems wrong when the Tobacco story is ranked higher than possible nuclear war and the death of a cripple… Are people out there so hooked on the cigs they don’t really care what happens in the world as long as they get their cigarettes? Oh well…
posted by Matthew Lloyd on 24.Apr.2008 No Comments
Created on April 24th and filed under Flash.
On my Daily blog round I found out that Alternativa 3D was released last night! You can now build your own applications using the Alternativa 3d! Go check it out at: http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/04/23/alternativa3d-licensing/
