AI Battle again

Look what I’ve found on my hard drive – AI battle simulator! This was AS2 ExternalInterface-powered thing, that allowed anyone to program blue and teal balls to move around simple maze, pick up green balls and throw into each other. Unfortunately, only three people actually wrote scripts for this thing.

Today, I ported it in AS3 and made it load SWFs that contain “bot” code, instead of relying on JavaScript. Thanks to wonderfl, however, you can still program “bots” in the browser. The sad fact is, wonderfl is the only flash community in the world where experiments like this can prompt any interest, so naturally I am taking it there.

FLARToolKit adaptive filter experiment sources

For those who asked about sources of my little experiment from last week, here they are. Make sure you are using FLARToolKit revision 2570 with these.

If you wasnt reading FLARToolKit mailing list, here is short summary: FLARToolKit converts color image to ”binary” image before doing any magic on it, using fixed threshold filter. In fact, this threshold is simply hard-coded to be 80 in many examples, and you will need to write more code to detect good values for threshold if you want your application to run regardless of lighting settings. The filter in this experiment avoids the problem by using local average brightness as a threshold for every pixel; the downside is that it enables FLARToolKit to “see” far more details, thus wasting even more CPU time. As a work-around, I tried to narrow down search area in the image using last detected square, but this only helps when marker motion is limited.

Well, check it out, play with it, and let me know what you think.

I <3 wonderfl

That’s right, one of FlashMove threads went wrong and got me on wonderfl few days ago. And these few days turned out to be the greatest time I had experimenting with flash for a week.

However, it was a bit of disappointment to discover tons of glitches ranging from failure to delete stuff to server outage. So, just to be safe, I copied best scripts to google servers. Well, fat thanks to KAYAC Inc for wonderful site, and let’s hope for the best future for it.

Convex hulls

What kind of freak would code things on Dec 31st? That’s right, it’s me.

So. Suppose you are making a game using 3D engine for graphics and 2D engine for physics (that uses convex shapes only). So, most probably, you would need to project your model onto your physics plane, find convex hull of resulting points set and create corresponding shape from that. Since today (rev 891 I think) you have one part of this done for you by sandy, namely 2D convex hull.

Check it out, and see ya’all in 2009.

Golconde

A bit late to Rene birthday, but here goes any way: Golconde digital revision. As much as I like Rene’s work, an inspiration for this thing came from other less known artist, Pierrick Calvez, specifically his DIAD project (10:10 am)