World360: Unbugged and kicking!

A few days back, I posted the latest update on my World360 project (aka ‘stereographic projection‘… That’s what it is actually called). What this thing actually does is it turns a 360° panorama image into a stereographic projection. The idea is to render this real time (just for the fun of doing it) (I am thinking about doing more with this though…)

A few days back I ran into a (at that time) weird problem where transparency was rendered black after a few frames. I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and I just didn’t have a clue where to start looking. Google wasn’t really helping me out either. So I posted my problem on FlashFocus but nobody came up with the answer to my problem. Peter Elst asked Ralph Hauwert if he already had run into this problem. Mario Klingemann suggested that there might be a problem with the premultiplied alpha. At that time I didn’t know what premultiplied alpha was and seen as the problem resembled the example Mario gave, it seemed quite obvious he was right.

So I took peace with this, and decided to fall back to a non-transparent image format like JPEG. 2 days later Erwin Verdonk came up with the answer to the whole problem… I just had a hard time understanding it…

The root of the problem was me: I had totally forgotten that the draw() method of the BitmapData class didn’t clear the pixels before drawing… Yea, that’s emberassing, right?

But okay… That took care of some problems. I rewrote some of the code, and adjusted some settings.
The speed and the result are quite okay right now. However using 450MB and up of RAM usage might be a bit of a killer.
I’m wondering if I could take care of this using PNGencoder or perhaps JPGencoder.

But for now I’m happy… The final result (for now) can be seen here.

Thanks everybody for helping me out. You guys rock!

PS: The picture used in this experiment was taken by Thomas Heylen. Thanks Thomas!

Visualizr source

A few people asked me for the Visualizr source. I always said I’d post it on my blog ‘pretty soon’… Well… It’s not pretty soon, but at least I didn’t totally forget about it. Anyway here’s the Actionscript class I made in a Flex Actionscript project

I did some pretty naughty things in there, but it worked out the way I wanted it… So be nice :p
Make sure you have got the MP3 tracks in place You’ll need at least one. Make sure you change the tracknames too.

Playr 2.0 is here!

It almost took me an eternity, but at last it’s there: Playr 2.0 is ready.
Playr is a Flash Actionscript 3 class built to take the heavy lifting off your hands when building any kind of music player appliction in Flash, Flex or AIR. I put a lot of work and time in this project, and I think the result is amazing: Playr is hands down the easiest way to do so!

I’m very happy to finally release this. A lot of people helped me test it and gave me feedback.
That helped me a lot, and changed a lot of features. Special thanks to all of you!

I’ve put up a dedicated site for Playr where all of the information, code examples, downloads are gathered.
Head over there to read more about it!

More info:
Playr site: Click
Download Playr 2.0: Click
Playr 2.0 documentation: Click

Can I use Flash CS3 to open Flash CS4 files?

NO.

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Congrats Thomas and Boulevart

Man, I’ve been postponing writing a blogpost about Boulevart’s nomination for the Adobe MAX awards way too long (even though I promised I would post. Sorry guys). In fact I’ve been postponing this so long, that right now it’s too late.

However: Thomas Joos, his crew at Boulevart and Barefoot created a Flash Lite application that blew everybody away. Having said that: They won an Adobe Max award at Max Milan about 10 minutes ago. (That makes me the first one to report this, right? )

I think this is incredibly cool since Thomas just finished school a year ago. I think he’s done some amazing work in the 12 months that passed.
You deserve it, Thomas. Congratulations to you and Boulevart for achieving this!

More info about the app: Click

A little preview about the (Flash Lite, running on) iPhone application