Development | MadeByPi® Blog

Aug 2, 2010

Apparat – A custom Matryoshka

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Development, Technology

A few weeks ago Joa Ebert (@joa) released an update to the Apparat Reducer, adding the option of LZMA compression to further reduce your SWF file-sizes.

It works by squeezing your original SWF with LZMA compression, and injecting that data as a ByteArray into a wrapper SWF - hence the Matryoshka moniker.

The Matryoshka handles decompressing the data with an AS3 implementation of LZMA decompression, and then loads the resulting SWF bytes with a standard Loader object.

This all works beautifully, and you can get pretty decent reductions in file-size, especially on larger SWFs.

After testing it, I took a look at the Apparat sources - in particular the LZMA decoder and Matryoshka wrapper - and noticed that because of the use of the Vector type, the code was only compatible with Flash Player 10 or greater.

With the need to create Flash Player 9 compatible content still the part of many a working day, I felt it was worth trying to build a custom version of Apparat with Flash Player 9 compatible Matryoshka and LZMA decompression...

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Apr 30, 2010

Blend modes with Pixel Bender – an update…

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Cool stuff, Development, MadeByPi™ Labs

I posted this blend mode stuff a long time ago, but the interface was awful and it slipped most people by.

So, I've packaged all the code up into a handy SWC and made a better example application for you to play with.

Here's the test page, and here's the SWC. As well as clicking on the source images to load new ones, you can save your blended creations by clicking on the output window.

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Apr 23, 2010

Playing with Pixel Bender

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Development, MadeByPi™ Labs

Pixel Bender filter examples

I've been sitting on a small collection of Pixel Bender filters for Flash for a while now... way too long really. The filters were made a long time ago and since then I've been playing with and improving the user interface in (rare) spare moments.

The UI will be familiar to you if you've played with my JPEGlitch experiments, if not most things have tool-tips to guide you... and if you see an icon, generally speaking, clicking it will do something

At its core is a slightly modified version of the minimalcomps library from bit101, which has then been further extended to enable easy creation of parameter-based user interfaces (where a Parameter is an Observable object that has flexible value/range Mapping - inspired by the popforge library).

A handy new feature is parameter tweening - all the sliders can have animation turned on/off in their context menu (right-click). It's only a simple min-max tween that you can start and stop, but it's a quick way of seeing parameters in motion. Also, when not animating, double clicking on a slider will reset it to the default value.

I'll make the source (all the .as and .pbk) available soon. It needs a good tidy-up first, and a few comments probably wouldn't go amiss either. If there's sufficient interest I'll get around to putting it into a public source control of some sort (the Parameter/Snapshot UI framework would benefit most from this). Google code and github are the main contenders at the moment.

There are 4 effect and 6 colour-space filters available to fiddle with - there's a quick overview of the filters and UI below for those that need to know more. In the meantime, why not give them a go!

(249KB, no loader, Flash Player 10 required. For best performance, use the latest 10.1 release candidate)

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Apr 8, 2010

Design Outside the Box – presentation from DICE 2010

Posted by admin | Filed under Development, Technology

Watched this video the other day, some pretty interesting insight into and predictions for facebook and non-traditional games.

"Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular 'Facebook Games' era"

Watch it on G4

Mar 10, 2010

JPEGlitch test suite

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Cool stuff, Development, MadeByPi™ Labs

Well, it's been a while, but I finally got an improved test suite together for my JPEG glitching experiments.

The code available here includes the previously released JPEGlitch and JPEGlitch for HYPE, as well as the source for the 'decode glitching', where the JPEG bytes are mangled to add glitches before being loaded.

The interface allows you to control various glitch parameters and you can either process continuously or one step at a time. Each module has a pre-made set of parameters - choose 'example' in the snapshots drop-down of a module window to select them. You can also load /save JPEG images to your local file-system.

The UI might have some minor bugs, but it's usable. I've modified the lovely minimalcomps UI component set from bit-101, adding a custom framework for easy creation of parameter based interfaces. I also added bitmap icons to minimalcomps - compiling the 1000 famfamfam silk icons into a handy SWC - with all icons pre-compiled into buttons for importing into the project. Read more about creating the icon library, read the set-up guide, and get the code to do it separately, here.

This update is a step on the way to a larger suite of byte-glitching tools for images, audio, video, text, or any other file you might want to mess with... no eta. on that, but it's in the brain pipes.

Test suite

Source code

Feb 6, 2010

The iPad, HTML 5 and Flash

Posted by Paull | Filed under Design, Development

The recent release of the iPad and the decision by Apple not to include the flash plug-in on the device has triggered masses of debate in twitter, blogs and on a much smaller stage, the MadeByPi office. The debate has been about both the validity of Apple's decision and the wider subject future of flash itself as part of the web now that the HTML 5 specification is starting to cover areas where flash has been the default tool. (more...)