14 Nov 2007 : Project Blackhole version 8
Finally you can blow things up! Pythagoras' theorum is used to calculate the distance to any ship that is under the crosshair. If the ship is in range the laser will glow orange (in the left pane) and automatically locks to the centre of the target ship. After a few hits the target will explode, the explosion is done with png's which will be replaced with vectors at some point. The destroyed ship is removed from the render queue and never seen again.
18 Jan 2007 : Project Blackhole : Camera tests
The camera tutorial at Ahab's Math Tutorials formed the basis for this experiment. After rewriting the code into AS2 classes I worked on speeding up the calculations and most notably the way depth sorting was handled on the cube.
08 Jan 2007 : Ship viewer
This code was adapted from an excellent article at Macromedia explaining how to rotate a 3D object using Quaternions. Whilst being too complex to fully grasp the key thing about quaternions is they can be multiplied together to create a composite quaternion and supposedly require fewer calculations than with matricies. Apparently the camera positions in early Tomb Raider games are calculated using them.
I modified the code to add in my Cobra model (no easy task) and whilst I could rotate it using quaternions, I couldn't find a way to translate (move) it. There seems to be a bit of a debate as to whether quaternions are more efficient than matrix maths (Papervision didnt initially support them), however with matricies I'm on slightly firmer ground so I decided I would use matrix rotations from now on.
24 Dec 2006 : Image carousel
I'd used Jared Tarbell's cylinder image display on a couple of occasions previously, but as I was getting into 3D I was eager to see if I could produce something that gave more of a sense of 3D. The cylinder image display is a clever illusion using trigonometry and depth sorting, the pictures are just moving from edge to edge, but by changing their widths it gives the illusion that their path is circular.
My carousel was coded from the ground up in AS2, you can place the system at any position you want and still get the carousel effect. The pictures arn't properly distorted as Papervision does, they're just squashed, stretched and clipped, a neat little trick that saves oodles of processing power.
28 Jun 2006 : 20ltd holding page
The holding page for the new 20ltd website took the form of a sequence of dots that reveal just enough of a product so you know what it is, but not enough that you can identify the brands or models involved.
08 Jun 2006 : 20ltd Pin test version 1
Do you remember those pin art things you can buy in gadget shops which consist of a bed of pins closely packed so when you stick your hand in (and it always seems to be a hand) it leaves an imprint? A client was adamant they wanted a similar effect achieved in Flash, I put this quick demo together to explain that in order to do this we'd need bump/depth maps for each object, ie we'd need more than just a black and white photo. We swiftly moved on to a new tack.
17 Nov 2005 : Ingenious Ireland heart animation
This animation formed part of several interactives on the Ingenious Ireland website which explores Ireland's scientific heritage and aims to get children interested in science. The text is contained in an external xml file which means it can run in both Irish and English.
