A couple weeks ago I released mobile version of my project APEXvj to stores. It’s made with Adobe AIR 3.2 and it works in iOS and Android. Since then I’ve been collecting feedback, reacting to those and continued to work on get it solid as possible.

The first release was in many ways total disaster and in other hand a priceless learning experience. This post will cover that and explain the design of gadget. I would also want to make one point (oh no…). This post covers many topics so if you find one boring just skip to next. It’ll also be pretty safe from hardcore coding stuff instead there’s a lot of pretty pictures :)

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After six years of experimenting I decided to capture all the effects and demos into video format. This way first world snobs with smartphones and tablets can view my stuff too. Site is made in flash-killer-HTML5 and it even has some flash-terminator-CSS3 stuff on it. It’s build upon WordPress and involves technologies such as php, mysql, javascript and less.

The content is mostly Flash which is coded in ActionScript 3, Pixel Bender and AGAL. Used Chrome, Firefox and mainly Safari for developing and testing. Photoshop for layout and Flash IDE for vector graphics plus some Illustrator. Screenium for video capturing and Media Encoder for compressing. Videos are streamed from vimeo.com and fonts from Google. I used Coda for html/css/js/php coding, Sequel Pro for database and FDT5 for AS.

Buzzword kids can try to categories that. :) Probably no need to point out more…

Anyway, you can jump between posts with arrow keys and view all flash stuff in HD video. I do recommend that you view them in realtime if you got device with flash player. They are much faster, sharper and small in file size that way.

Now that this project is done I’ll move on to next one.

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That’s 200 000 particle version. That might run on your browser.

So like I’ve written on this blog my particle engine can move large amount of particles from A to B and I can do custom tweening algorithms for that transition. Great… what then. I realized that using perlin noise for setting the B positions of the particles could turn this thing look quite interesting.

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Here’s how I can ‘individually’ move massive amount of particles.
1. Give them start and end point.
2. Tween between those points in vertex shader.
3. Send only time value to vertex shader in every frame.

No there’s no catch. The movement doesn’t have to be linear. AGAL can do this thing called mathematics and is quite awesomely fast in it. Familiar easing functions can be rewritten into AGAL. Upper flash is an example use case of Robbie‘s legendary ExpoOut function.

And here’s example of ExpoIn function.

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I just checked and yeah… I had almost a year break from releasing experiments. The very core content of my blog. What ever. Here’s another particle experiment. There are 87 380 balls doing their thing. I think this will lead to open source Stage3D particle engine lib and hopefully I end up adding these monsters to Away3D someday soon too.

This isn’t a perfect system yet and not fully optimized. Anyway.

What this thing does is:
1. Set start and ending points for particle vertices. (2304 in every frame)
2. GPU will tween between those points.
3. Plus all sort of funky stuff with colors and there’s light at the top of every particle stream. GPU will calculate distances to those and add more value to colors. As you can see.

Anyway that was the plan. In this case it started to behave funny when I adjusted my AGAL codes and the rule explained doesn’t fully apply anymore. So what I released here is a mistake, but I think it feels and looks great!

Here’s a link to that cool song.