Monthly Archive for January, 2008

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Pulse Particle Update + New Example

Published on January 15, 2008 in Uncategorized. Closed

There’s an update to the Pulse Particle system available on the dow nload page.

And here’s an example that shows off some of the capabilities. My examples tend to suck since I’m not a good designer/artist. If you play around with Pulse Particles and create anything interesting please send it over and I’m happy to host or link to it. The example shows off 4 simple effects, my favorite of them is the green bubbles.

This update brings three things.

Most of the jitter in the particles is gone.
If you place a particle emitter within a MovieClip, then the particles will be made on that clip. That means you can use a mask to determine where those particles will appear. You could also animate or add filters to that clip. This really opens up a lot of the power of Flash for controlling how the particles are displayed.
Acceleration / Deceleration is now implemented (and it’s in the explorer as well)

The download src file now has the .fla files I used to make the .mxp package.

And ASDocs are now posted automatically whenever I make a new build, go to the project page to find them.

Pulse Particle Explorer introduction

Published on January 11, 2008 in Flash, particles and pulse. Closed

The other day I posted a video showing how to use the Pulse Particle system in Flash. Now, here’s an introduction on how to use some of the particle explorer functions to define particle behavior.

Explorer introduction – Part 1
Explorer introduction – Part 2

You can find the Pulse Particle project page here:
http://rogue-development.com/pulseParticles.html

There were several requests in my last blog post on how people could help out. Check out the new contribute page on my site. There things for all levels of technical knowhow there.

Pulse Particle System + Flash IDE

Published on January 10, 2008 in Flash and particles. 10 Comments

I did a bit of work to see what I could do to get a workflow with the Flash authoring environment and the Pulse particle system working. I got it to a point where I can download, install, and show a quick example of how to use it in a 4 minute video. Not too bad.

The Video (Adobe Share Download)

The video (Alternate Download)

Some more links:

The project page

The download page

The Particle Explorer

The particle system itself is still a bit rough, there’s a bit of choppiness here and there that I need to work out, and there’s a bunch more options (like acceleration) I’d like to tackle. That, and a bit more on the documentation side would be nice.

Update, Here’s a nice demo from the comments below. It has an animated movieclip as a particle and looks pretty cool.

AgileAgenda – New Version

Published on January 7, 2008 in AIR, AgileAgenda, Schedule and flex. Closed

Posted a new version of AgileAgenda over the weekend. Fixed a few minor bugs, redesigned the opening screens, and put in our new logo. The entire initial user experience should be better now. Here’s a quick glimpse of what it looks like now:

Synergy2 – Multiple computers, one set of input devices

Published on January 4, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I’ve run across far too many people who have two sets of keyboard/mice that they use on a regular bases. There is a solution to this, and it’s called Synergy.

Just download it, install it on a couple computers, and you can share a single keyboard/mouse across them. They don’t even have to be the same platform, I’m right now typing on my OSX laptop through a keyboard plugged into my desktop PC. It works over any IP network. If you have the monitors next to each other you can even mouse between them just like a dual headed display. If you have to switch monitors to view different computers, you can set up a hotkey to do switch your input target.

(This is not a monitor sharing / KVM solution)

Only problem is it ain’t encrypted, so be careful if your on a public network. There’s ways to pipe it through an SSH tunnel if that’s an issue for you.

Pulse Particle system interactive explorer

Published on January 4, 2008 in Flash, particles and pulse. Closed

I just whipped up a quick flex app to explore some of the features of the Pulse Particle system I’ve been working on lately.

1) Various configuration options for the particles
2) The resulting config-object that those options make, you can pass that to SimpleParticles to create the effect in your application.
3) A live preview of the particle effect

The demo only has a handful of rules in it, but they show off a good chunk of the possible functionality you can get from the SimpleParticles interface. One of the biggest limitations of the explorer is there’s only a few images embedded for you to make particles out of.

To use one of these particles in your app, do something like this:

import com.roguedevelopment.pulse.simple.SimpleParticles;import com.roguedevelopment.pulse.PulseEngine;

...

PulseEngine.instance.root = this;SimpleParticles.createEmitter( {pps:10,x:153, y:286,image:spark,     movement:true, minSpeed:199,     maxSpeed:216, minAngle:211,     maxAngle:219, minScale:0.8,     maxScale:1, pointSwarm:[100,100], lifespan:5000} );

where the argument to createEmitter comes from #2 above.

You can play with it yourself at:
http://rogue-development.com/pulse/explorer/#

If you make any cool looking effects, copy & paste the config object to a comment to share with everyone.