I’ve been playing around with spring simulations recently in the hopes of building an interactive network diagram with behavior similar to the visual thesaurus. However, after numerous iterations of different experiments, I was unable to create a simulation which would remain stable as you played with it. In general, they would start out okay, but if you excited them, they would gyrate out of control and break. At first I thought there was something wrong with the way I was using my spring-damper equation, but eventually I came to the realization that it wasn’t the equation itself, but the way I was applying it. I was simply adding up the forces on every frame, calculating the acceleration and velocity and updating the positions on the stage. This method has worked fine for me in the past, but it really fell short when it came to spring interactions in which the force changes which occured between frames became very important.

A little surfing led me to Erik Neumann’s terrific website, MyPhysicsLab. Mr. Neumann provides a collection of demos, a brief explanation of how they work, and some sample source code you can sift through. I’ve adapted Erik’s implementation of the Runge-Kutta method and used it to power the flash demo below. I’m pleased with the initial results and hope to take advantage of this method in my network diagram project.

A couple years back I sent out a flash based party invite that featured a parallax snowflake effect that I was pretty pleased with at the time. Over this summer I was playing around with some 3D code in flash and did an improved version of my original snowflake animation, which you can see below. You can look around by moving your mouse. Kirupa has some great 3D tutorials for those of you wishing to learn more on this topic. I originally delved into this in the hopes of creating an anaglyph 3D game, but I couldn’t come up with any results with which I was happy. This was mainly because I couldn’t composite the two views in a satisfactory manner. When Flash 8 is released with different layer blending effects, I think I’ll try to ressurect that project and post some demo’s here.

This is an old flash piece I did that I thought was pretty neat. It takes advantage of the oft used “lens” effect of masking an image multiple times. I combined it with some other code I had lying around which flattens and rotates a sprite in the direction of it’s velocity. I’m pretty happy with the result, but the effect will probably be made obsolete with the imminent release of pixel level access in Flash 8.

This is my first post to DoesNotCompute, my online portfolio and weblog. I expect to roll out a lot of my work onto this site over the next few months, so please be patient with the current sparseness of the site.