Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Particle Sessions : Part One, Is this it ?

The Particle Sessions : Part One, Is this it ?:

Particles

Part One of the Particle Session kicks off with looking at a system similar, but simpler then this Bloom particle experiment (music made for it by the fantastic artist Rich Bologna, thank you again for it, Rich!). We’ll be taking slow steps of optimizations and at the end have a get prepared for the next level. To be able to get up to speed with the working of the video particles, we’ll start from the beginning and work our way up. For that reason, we’ll start very simple and look at a basic unoptimized particle system with next to zero functionality, and modify the code for performance.

Basis : The Particle

The opening picture of this post is the album cover of The Strokes – Is This It. It being one of my favorite albums, I have listened to it many times, but never noticed what the cover really was. It’s amazing & inspiring what imagery one can get from science. Now put on your headphones and listen to that album while reading this post.

Over the last years I’ve more and more started enjoying introductory books about theoretical physics. In complete honesty, it wasn’t even that long ago that I didn’t know that the Boson in the Higgs Boson wasn’t the other guy discovering it, next to Mr.Higgs. You know, like the Hale-Bopp comet was discovered by Hale & Bopp.

Luckily for us and this post, we don’t need to deal with wave particle duality and quantum entanglement, but we can achieve seeming complexity by using simplicity.

Getting started : Simplicity & Complexity

The simple core particle we will be using in this session get its complexity from its display of large numbers of them, not from per instance properties. To illustrate that, let’s start off with a simple particle object in AS3 [...]

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