Hi,
I have not done much generative stuff with Flash for a long time,
but I can see what you are trying to acheive...
I guess you are looking for simple controls that let you control
parameters for drawing stuff on your canvas?
Whether you use Flash or Flex for your components - you have choices
- the end result is the SWF and the bottleneck will probably be in your
code that draws the result onto the stage. Look at the "components" you
can use in the Flash and Flex IDE's Flex has more stuff, but I reckon
you could create your dbCinema app in either Flex or Flash - using the
components wired up to control your parameters...
As a crude example of using components with AS2 in Flash -
http://glenpike.co.uk/play/cerebral2.html - you can probably still do
the same in AS3 / Flash with the component set. The code was not
optimised, just experimental.
There are lots of blogs and ideas out there about optimising Flash
code for "intensive" operations - that's going to be your nemesis if
anything. Read blogs by people like Grant Skinner, Ralph Hauwert,
Quasimondo (Mario Klingemann), Joa Ebert, Andre Michelle, Branden Hall -
all worth looking at for their experiments and lessons in "coding
interesting stuff as fast as possible".
For example, start with some of these and also look through their
other stuff, follow links from and to these pages:
http://webr3.org/blog/haxe/flash-10-massive-amounts-of-3d-particles-with-haxe/
http://www.gskinner.com/talks/quick/
http://www.quasimondo.com/
http://blog.joa-ebert.com/
http://blog.andre-michelle.com/category/actionscript/
http://www.hypeframework.org/blog/content/hype-gets-a-new-domain/
The above is not an endless list of people - just a starter for
direction in pushing pixels fast...
Nicolas Cannasse, Joa Ebert and other people have done some serious
work with leveraging Flash to do heavyweight maths faster using
different methods - look at the first link... If you are into writing
your own DSP style code, look at Pixel Bender which utilises CPU / GPU
resources to do calculations. Look into Alchemy (Adobe Labs?) for
leveraging API's or writing your own code (maybe with some C/C++) that
can be loaded as a SWF at runtime.
For inspiration - there is tons of stuff out there - dammit I lost
my bookmarks for these a while ago... Jared Tarbell is worth
mentioning again along with Robert Hodgin off the top of my head - both
of these guys used Flash a lot, but then also use Processing - I reckon
it is possible to look at their work and see if you can do similar / the
same with Flash, although Robert mentioned his frustration (FOTB 2008)
at not being able to get the performance / flexibility with Flash that
he could with Processing. Joshua Davis' Hype framework (someone
mentioned) is worth looking at in the context of his work as he has
given away code (in conjunction with Branden Hall) to allow people to
start experimenting in a similar / same way as he does his own work (I
guess / speculate on the last bit).
1000's of other people out there, guess you have to google a bit -
if you find some good links to stuff, please post back as I lost mine...
Hope this helps a bit, but I reckon you can do it and you are not as
limited as you once were with new features in Flash - translate Hobnox's
1D processing power to 2D - Aviary, Flashfilterlab, etc.
Anyway, just experiment - if you have the time, I am jealous. Maybe
I should be playing instead of writing these emails ;)
Most of all have fun and let us know what you come up with...
Glen
Jim Andrews wrote:
I'm a bit confused as to how to proceed with Flash. I've been using
Director for the last 11 years.
You can see the sort of (Director Shockwave) apps I like to create at
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/sw/sw.htm and
http://vispo.com/jig/arteroids/exe . These apps contain menus, spin
controls, drop-down menus, and similar types of controls, and
generally lots of them. But they also contain, in the case of
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/sw/sw.htm , high-performance generative art.
They're both very 'interactive interface' oriented and also very
high-performance-art-oriented. Windowing, menuing, dialog boxes, and
interactive controls are important to them. But so is lots of room for
the art.
I don't really care about filesize being bulked up by Flex. High speed
access is common, these days. But if Flex is slow in performance,
that's the more important thing, to me. Is it? How is it in terms of
speed?
How would you approach making the above sorts of apps in Flash? Would
you create them as ActionScript projects or would you use Flex?
ja
http://vispo.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jer Brand" <[email protected]>
To: "Flash Coders List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 12:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Flashcoders] Flex generative art???
Flex is for RIA's and helps you with layouts and common controls and
doesn't
really provide anything useful for generating art with either vectors or
drawing to a sprite. With the framework itself bulking up the size of
your
swf and consuming additional resources, it's not really a good thing.
The generative art I typically use straight ActionScript with a
library of
choice -- Hype (http://www.hypeframework.org/) being particularly
awesome
for that kinda thing.
There's nothing stopping you from using Flex / Flash Builder as your
editor
though. Just create an "ActionScript" or "Flash Professional" project.
If you're just looking for ActionScript generative art, I'm fairly
partial
to http://levitated.net/
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