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.
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
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.
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. 