Everything about Flash

I did a lot of tinkering with ActionScript Workers towards the end of last year. However, because I'd swapped out the PPAPI Flash Player in Google Chrome, I was oblivious to the fact that Workers weren't supported under PPAPI. Since I spend my working days bemoaning browser fragmentation with HTML and JavaScript and more than half my blog visitors use Chrome, I was pretty peeved.

I've done a little more tweaking with last week's experiment running concurrent fluid dynamics and rigid body physics with ActionScript Workers. I've used a technique based on the threshold() method in BitmapData class to simulate metaballs - these are managed by Box2D and act as sources to my fluid dynamics ActionScript Worker.

My tinkering with ActionScript workers continues with the implementation of a simple particle system with mutual gravitational attraction. Mutual gravitation is computationally expensive because, in a naïve implementation like mine, every particle needs to reference every other in each simulation step. There are techniques such as neighbour searching to optimise this, but I'm idea rich and time poor, so I haven't implemented any proper optimisations.

I've played with reaction-diffusion simulations in the past, but with all the recent fun and games I've been having with ActionScript Workers, I thought it would be nice to revisit them. While pottering around the internet, I came across a nice Java implementation of the Gray Scott model at toxiclibs.

Here's another quick and dirty experiment with ActionScript Workers: I've taken two fairly meaty tasks: computational fluid dynamics and rigid body physics and created separate ActionScript Workers for each.

In my last post looking at particle systems using ActionScript Workers, I mentioned the lack of any neighbour searching algorithm. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at that code and implement a spatial subdivision optimisation.

I've had a few enquiries after the source code for my Node Editor Tone Generator from last year. The code was (and still is) a little ropey - some of it dates back over two years - however after a recent request, I agreed to send it out.

I am super happy to announce that we just posted today Flash Player 11.4/AIR 3.4 beta builds, and you guys need to check what we have for you!