Zach Archer Blog This blog is GO!

20Jul/070

Music of the Spheres

I took a couple weeks off, played a booty bass show and did some other things. Onward!

Play with the swf. Move the camera with the mouse; Click the mouse to summon a new message.

Creating this graphic demo was not a huge ordeal. I probably spent more time futzing with Subversion than writing code; and by the way, this project may evolve into my personal website, so it has its own SVN repository now.

I've pinpointed two interesting problems with my 3D engine: 2D Symbols (such as the letters) do not exhibit foreshortening, yet 3D symbols do. (This is almost a good effect; like a low-fi hack that ends up being more stylistic than a hi-fi equivalent. Maybe I'll conveniently forget about this issue for now...)

And, my Matrix3D class has a buggy method: either multiply() or rotate(). An early version of tonight's .swf turned the cube in space, but it would also re-apply the camera angle to the cube, turning it in crazy unexpected ways. ... TODO.

I just looked at the PaperVision API (.pdf), they have a Matrix3D object that is much more advanced than mine. I'm still glad I wrote my own engine, it was fun and I feel more competent with 3D math and matrix operations now.

I removed the glow effects in an attempt to boost performance. I should have whipped up a little FPS counter several posts ago, of course... The performance on my G5 (dual-core 1.8ghz PowerPC) is already less-than-optimal, and there's not a ton of stuff happening on the screen. This worries me a bit.

Filed under: Flash Leave a comment
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0)

No comments yet.


Leave a comment


Trackbacks are disabled.