zero point nine

An image fade/dissolve where the individual pixels move off the bitmap and disappear. Written a couple months ago to learn how to get around in AS3. Not to be confused with the built-in BitmapData.pixelDissolve method.

In the supplied AS3 class, the direction of the movement of pixels is ‘hard coded’ to go from right to left. (Here’s the full project, as well.) To move the pixels in the opposite direction or up and down, the bitmap is rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees and the wrapper sprite is rotated equally in the opposite direction – which is possible to interpret as a kludge.

To-do: Change the method used to select pixels that are to be animated. The way it’s done now is inefficient. If you look at the code, you’ll see what I mean.

Some other possible to-do’s: Dissolve images in an arbitrary direction; allow pixels to trail beyond the current boundaries of the bitmap; allow for the changing of parameter variables’ values while the effect is in progress; support for transparency.

Eating away individual pixels of a bitmap similar to what’s done here, it seems to me, could be the basis for some fun retro gameplay mechanics for a Flash-based game, à la Lemmings or Worms.

Version: 0.9

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Some of the most satisfying graphical effects are simple in concept and execution. Programmatically creating a half tone-style image from a bitmap (as seen in the blog masthead) turns out to be one of them. I got this right essentially on my first try.

Here’s the class in Actionscript 3. It’s essentially one public method which takes in a bitmap and writes to a sprite. With a few optional parameters. See the source code comment block for the details. I believe it’s pretty well optimized, but would love to see any improvements made to it for speed.

To do: Add the ability to use overlapping colors. Apparently, the dot patterns for additional colors are supposed to be set at different angles from each other — which is less straight-forward, programmatically speaking, than simply setting the ‘screen angle’ to 45-degrees, as I’ve done here. Please post any good ideas or improvements to the code below.

Version: 0.9

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

I recently spent a couple weekends geeking out to make this. It’s pure Actionscript 3, which meant excessive amounts of code to draw the UI.

You’ll need a webcam to test this.

Big caveat: This eats up a _ton_ of memory, as the video is simply made up of hundreds of frames stored in an array of BitmapData. Bigger caveat: The save and load feature is only practical for very short video clips, and will otherwise bring down the browser (!). It stores megs of data to a local SharedObject, which surely constitutes a criminal abuse of what LSO’s are designed to do. Hah. Rational: When doing personal stuff, I’m only half-interested in questions of usability and stability (Did I just say that?! LOL.)

To-do, hopefully: Port to Apollo. (But first learn how to use Apollo, haha). Offload video data from memory to disk using the Apollo file I/O API (Thanks, Béla, for the idea).

To-do, ideally: Find a solution to compress video to memory/disk on the fly.

Version: 0.8