20 Aug 2008 : Project Blackhole version 9
Two steps forward one step back. All the code is now converted to AS3, there is still a lot of optimising to be done. The laser is currently broken, so things will no longer explode and planets dont render anymore. As soon as all these bugs are fixed I'm going to start preliminary tests with nonoba multiplayer api.
25 Jul 2008 : Papervision materials experiment
This experiment's aim was to learn a little more about Papervision's material types. As well as using a bump mapped globe from the FITC Amsterdam workshop, I rendered a flash animation onto the side of a cube and used a bit of trigonometry to rotate the camera around the scene.
24 Jul 2008 : Papervision car experiment
A quick test using Papervision's Ford Focus. I inserted a floor and walls, and using the arrow keys you can blast around as if you're in a rally. Well almost.
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.
