Now the fireworks in me are all gone

I’ve been playing with Flash some more, and have made the leap to pure AS3. I’m using FlashDevelop, which is a really great IDE – far better than Flash CS3 itself for writing code. It’s amazing what a difference a good editor can make.

Anyway this is what I came up with, a bit of a rehash of some old Blitz Basic demos I did long ago. Click to launch fireworks
Fireworks.swf

Now I’m trying to learn flixel, a free AS3 framework designed for games. I’ve already made one basic platform game following a tutorial, and am now working on my own.

A Rorschach Test on fire

After much battling with ActionScript, this is the latest version of my Mandelbrot generator. Yes, it has skipped a few version numbers. New features:

  • Rough rendering first, followed by a better quality one
  • Various optimisations
  • Information panel
  • Actually being able to get back out again, without reloading the flash
  • Doesn’t resize stupidly
  • Just generally cleaner code

Hooray!
mandelbrot 5.swf

A day-glo pterodactyl

My Mandelbrot flash, now with (one-way) zooming. Click on a region to zoom in.

mandelbrot 2.swf

And while checking the lyrics to Mandelbrot Set for the title of this post, I found there is a Jonathan Coulton wiki! Sweet! Their article also confirmed my suspicion that the algorithm described in the song isn’t actually correct, it instead describes the production of a Julia set. Those are great though, and will probably be my next fractal project.

A heart-shaped box of springs and wire

I’ve used Flash a fair bit before, but never made the jump from ActionScript 2 to AS3. It’s quite a big change, and since I’m so used to programming in the very forgiving Python, it seems really fussy. But my god it’s fast! Anyway I’ve always wanted to make a Mandelbrot generator, even back when I was programming in BASIC and really didn’t have the skill. So here we go:

mandelbrot.swf (Ignore the pixelation, it’s just being displayed at the wrong size.)

I’m really quite pleased with this as I had to learn quite a few new techniques. Obviously it’s rather static, I still need to add moving/zooming but that shouldn’t be too hard now. The colouring could use some variation too.

Also, using song lyrics for post titles seems to have unintentionally become a theme, so I’m going to run with it. :)