I’ve been spending a little time on my attractor applet to improve it (and improvement was indeed direly needed). Now it’s possible to reparameterize by holding left mouse button and moving the mouse. That will produce a live preview. Releasing the mouse once a desired shape is arrived at will render said shape using a large number of iterations.
Antialiasing is done using a logarithmic density map to control brightness and by fuzzing coordinates a bit using random(). I’ve still to implement blending of single pixels hit by more than one color to reduce the current flipping during rendering.
Click image for the updated attractor applet
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For some time I’ve pondered the next paradigm in gaming. Specifically if the current developer -> publisher -> customer chain will still be relevant (no). Of course it depends on the severity of the change, but the word paradigm does imply major-ass change and we do seem to be on the cusp of something.
Then this shows up. Crazy technical hurdles notwithstanding, I will consider this a strong contender for next paradigm in video games. Streaming games as video would make game development inherently single platform, which is a bit of a dream scenario from a production standpoint. Brick-and-mortars can be tossed into the nearest volcano. Customers become hardware independent. Poverty is eliminated and we each get our own unicorn.
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Continuing my dabbling in particles I’ve now created a flow field for them to move in. You know, to entertain the little critters. It’s fascinating how these flow fields acting on the particles give them the appearance of having flocking behaviour, with much less computational overhead (at least for non-quad tree optimized particles). Don’t look at the code. Your eyes might melt.
Click here for flow field applet
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I’ve updated my aforementioned particle class, so it can now iterate through an array of attractors. Pretty simple stuff, but it can yield some interesting visuals when a few randomly placed attractors act on the particles. The code isn’t pretty and it will likely run slowly on older machines due to the high number of particles. I probably should look into a more efficient way than just running every single particle against the full array of attractors.
Click here for the applet
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