Everything about Flash

I've played with the Gray Scott Model a lot over the last year, but I've never been bold enough to actually tinker with the equations themselves. 

Here's an extension to my recent implementation of Hiroki Sayama's Swarm Chemistry: I've plugged in a fluid dynamics solver (a worker used in my Reaction Diffusion Advection experiment) so that particles (swarm members) radiate heat and add to the CFD density field which then feeds back velocities to the swarm chemistry model.

The lack of saving and loading of scenes in ReDiLab, my Stage3D / AGAL based reaction diffusion laboratory was slowly driving my crazy. My screen was littered with countless screen grabs and my desk with scraps of paper covered with scribbled numbers.

My recent myriad of experiments with reaction diffusion models has coalesced into a single Stage3D based Flex application, ReDiLab (for Reaction Diffusion Laboratory). 

I've tweaked last week's trigonometric reaction diffusion model to get some interesting results.

I've used ActionScript Workers a lot over the last year for funky stuff like sound synthesis, reaction diffusion and swarm chemistry simulations. Workers are virtual instances of the Flash runtime that allow code to run in the background while keeping the user interface responsive. They've allowed me to run crazily long loops calculating, for example, hundreds of thousands of particle interactions per frame, while the user can happily interact with the interface.

This week sees a few new updates to ReDiLab - my Stage3D / AGAL based reaction diffusion laboratory.

First off, my lovely friends at Finkk designed the funky logo above which lives in the 'about' dialog. 

There are two changes to the application itself:

The other day, MathsWorld tweeted a link to this video showing pendulum waves. These are waves that emerge from viewing a number of uncoupled pendulums of increasing length. If the length of the pendulums are just right, they exhibit travelling waves, standing waves and chaotic motion.

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.