Recently I did some work on the a project that required me to use some Displacement Maps. I have never used them before, but after playing with them for a bit I soon realised something… they are very awesome.
They do take a little bit of getting used to, so to help with the experimentation I created this little app that makes it easy to test out different image and maps combinations.
Working at Visual Jazz I tend to get to involved with some pretty cool Holden projects – a lot of which are flash based microsites.
One of those sites was for the Holden Epica.
Built entirely in flash, I was responsible for coding most of this site. In comparison to some of the other websites I’ve worked on it wasn’t very big, but it did come up looking pretty cool with a very cool / clean look that I really liked.
Read on to get a bit of a spiel and then check it out at here.
I’m by no means an expert on Regular Expressions. I mean, I get what they do, and can see their awesomeness, but damn they do my head in sometimes.
To help myself out, I wrote a quick little Flex app that lets you test how a regular expression will work with a particular string. It lets you try out all the Flash Regular Expression methods and see each of the results.
To top it all off, I put together a quick overview of the different Flash Regular Expression methods that are available, as well as a short overview of the Regular Expression syntax.
You can check it all out right here…
A while back I was given my first flash project that required me to use Papervision 3D. If that wasn’t daunting enough, the design of the project required that there be a depth of field effect on the elements – something that papervision cannot do. (If i am wrong about that, please don’t tell me now…)
After learning the basics of papervision – which has plenty of tutorials on the interwebs – I started brainstorming an approach for faking depth of field. Here is what I came up with.
Build your own online jigsaw puzzle to play and share with friends. Simply upload a JPEG image that you wish to use, click a couple of buttons, and BAM! online jigsaw puzzle.
You’ll be sent an email with a custom URL that you and anyone else can use to play your online jigsaw.
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Marble Buster is an odd game. It is simple in its requirements but requires planning in order to achieve high scores.
You start off with a board full of randomly coloured marbles. When you click on a group of two or more matching colours, they disappear, and the grid collapses to fill the gaps. The bigger the group you match, the more points you earn.
It’s simple but pretty addictive.
This is basically a digital representation of a traditional jigsaw puzzle. Like all jigsaws the aim of the game is to re-assemble all of the puzzle pieces until you have the final image.
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Catching as many bugs as you can – that’s what Grabbit is all about.
You play as a frog, sitting on the side of the pond. As bugs fly over your head you use your tongue to catch as many as you can. To keep things interesting, there is a timer counting down the whole time. Every time you catch 10 bugs, you get a little bit more time.
The longer you last, the harder the bugs are to catch, and the more points you get.
See if you can get the highest score!
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Separating Axis Theorem (SAT) is a technique for calculating collisions between convex polygons.
I’m by no means an expert on it, but after the need arose for me to do some collision detection I did a pile of reading and finally got it working in ActionScript 3.
I thought I would share what I learned in the hope others wouldn’t suffer so much 
I was creating an online gallery for a project at work when came across the need for dynamically created reflections. We had an existing class that we usually used for reflections, but it was a bad port from AS2 to AS3 and I was never happy with it. It tended to be hard to work with and pretty inefficient.
In an attempt to make things better, and make my life easier in the process, I sat down and created my own Reflection class.
Here is what I came up with.