It has been a while since I’ve wrote something for this blog. One of the reasons is that I finally moved and got my own place now. When I started decorating the house, I knew I wanted something to add a few personal things. Thats when I got the idea to create some kind of artwork of my favorite guitarists. I remembered some kind of artwork that I saw in Centre Pompidou that made use of lines with different widths to create an image. I thought it was a neat effect so I tried implementing it with a spiral shape. Using a basic algorithm to draw a spiral, I sampled the color of a loaded image to see how light or dark the image was at the same point I was drawing the spiral. I used this to adjust the thickness of the lines.
The final result that I created with this tool can be seen in this photo. For anyone who’s interested, the artists are: Paul Wagoner, Misha Mansoor, Tosin Abasi and Paul Ortiz.
But there’s more! You can play around with this tool too, by visiting this page. I’ve added a few controls to mess around with the settings, and you can export the image to a PNG (bitmap) file or a SVG (vector) file. Both are pretty CPU heavy, so give it a few seconds before rage-quiting your browser!
I have to admit, I’m a big fan of Minecraft for a while now, and I love the way the creators, Markus and Jens, are very open about working on this game. When Minecraft 1.3 came out it had a new way of saving the huge and worlds. If you take a quick look at the wiki you’ll notice that there’s a lot of information for developers to work with the Minecraft data format. I was very curious about what I could do with the level data. A few weeks ago I created a small tool in Java that works with the level format, and learned quite a lot about the way Minecraft stores the world.
But since I love to work with ActionScript, I was wondering if I could do something with the level files in Flash or Air. I thought that with the ByteArray and BitmapData class available, I should be able to do fun things. So I started working on a simple map renderer. As far as I know, Flash doesn’t support reading directories, so I Air was my platform of choise.
I ported the JNBT library to ActionScript to read the binary format of the ‘chunks’ (16 x 16 x 128 blocks) that Minecraft uses to store the world in. The rest of the code is rather quick and dirty. Pretty much everything was hardcoded into a few loops to render the blocks to individual BitmapData objects. This is the result:
If you want to give it a spin, you can download the .air file here!
Edit: I got a few requests for the sourcecode. So with no further ado: here it is! You’ll need to compile ‘MapRendererMain‘ as an Air application. Included is my ActionScript port of the JNBT library, found in org.asnbt. You can use this library to read and write NBT files. The most important classes besides the JNBT library are the ‘SimpleRegionFile’ class and the ‘RegionBitmapData’ class. Feel free to fool around and let me know what you think!
Edit 2: There was an update to the world format a few weeks ago, making this tool useless. Only MCRegion worlds are supported. the AS3 NBT classes still work though!
Although it’s been a while since I quit my job at Ranj Serious Games, I am still proud to present the project that I have been working on for about half a year. It is a game called ‘Professionals 3 – Comfort Crisis’: a free, online, real-time multiplayer puzzle game, commissioned by OTIB. Kids from 10 to 14 years old can play with 5 different characters to bring back the long lost comfort in an ruinously city. The game features a large set of puzzles, spread out over many large, challenging and beautiful levels. Comfort crisis was built using PushButton Engine, and the isometric engine created by the Ranj team itself.
I was wondering when Adobe would add full 3D support to the Flash player, so I was not very surprised to see the first demo videos of Flash ‘Molehill‘ a little while ago. Needless to say, I’m impressed. Especially the fact that many 3D engines already support Molehill is rather interesting. Looks like Adobe worked pretty closely with the 3D engine developers.
On the other hand I must say it was about time that Adobe released this version of Flash. There are many nice WebGL demos out there and the JavaScript 3D scene seems to be growing every day. I think it was a good move to start the Incubator system. It gives developers the chance to preview the latest version of Flash.
Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on this new version and start experimenting a little bit. I am a little bit afraid the low-level programming might scare me off, but we’ll see. In the meanwhile, have a look at the impressive demo from the Away3D team:
Hello everybody!
It’s done! I’ve got a website again. Maybe I can be one of the big guys now. After a couple of years of inactivity around my site I can finally announce that I’ll try to start blogging again. This time I’m focused on writing about things I do for fun and for a living. Most of the stuff you’ll find here is about my work as a (Flash) programmer. I’ll try to share my knowledge with you as I hope to find interesting solutions, build cool games or just mess around with Flash.
this.example = true;
trace("A nice piece of code I've written to test the syntax highlighter");
}