ricardocabellov5.5

On Thursday, 28 August 2008, BT accidentally cancelled our broadband connection, leaving us without an internet connection for a full week while we were being "re-provisioned". In order to make being cut-off from the virtual world more bearable, we created our own local internet, out of files that were on our harddrives, and some argue it was actually better than the real thing. Make up your own mind, because as a tribute to the week we had, hi-res.net is being replaced with

The Internet (2008)

Mixed and Matched Media

Normal service will resume shortly, while we are re-provisioning this site.

Give it a go, I'm sure you will like it. If the page is not too surreal, and it feels really geeky, I was probably behind it ;D.

Another thing I can get rid from my to-do list. My introduction to the Pixel Bender/Flash10 Shaders world. Yesterday afternoon I decided to give it a try and see how all this worked

First thing was setting up FDT to compile Flash10 movies, something that ended up being quite easy thanks to this post. By the way, in case you're wondering... FDT on Ubuntu seems to be doing very well, no problems so far. Unfortunately I had to go to Windows in order to do the Pixel Bender part.

Dealing with Pixel Bender was kind of fun, although I was missing a timer (incremental) value, something to easily test my filter moving. Maybe there is something for it already but I just didn't find it on the few hours I played with it.

Once the filters were done I tried them with Flash10, and then that Tinic post popped into my mind and realised how slow it was (compared to the Pixel Bender). I'm sure the filters can be optimised but I just left them easier to understand so whoever feels like can start playing with the values. However, they are fast enough for 512x512 action or for fullscreen single frame distortion.

Ok, show time...


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)

If you're wondering how I managed to do that many effects in just a couple of hours, here it's a hint... iq.

All the .as, textures and compiled shaders are here.

What to do now? Well, I would suggest you to download Pixel Bender load any of those .pbk files, find the line where it says // This is where the magic happens and play with the formulas there and make your own ones.

Have fun! :)

There is not enough disk space on C:\WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$ to install Service Pack 3. Setup requires a minimum of 4 additional megabytes of free space or if you also want to archive the files for uninstallation, Setup requires 4 additional megabytes of free space. Free additional space on your hard disk and then try again.

That's funny, because I have 72 GB of free space. And lets forget the 30 times Windows Updater tried to install SP3 but magically stopped and disappeared.

It really makes me laugh, is like the first OS that is a comedian, I can wait to read the next joke :D

Seeing that FlexBuilder Alpha 4 still didn't have refactoring I had to search once again for a solution with FDT on Linux. And well, seems that a solution for my problem has been out there for months!

I managed to register it without problems, but when I was creating a class I had this:

package com {nullimport flash.display.Sprite;/**null * @author Mr.doob */nullpublic class Main extends Sprite {nullpublic function Main(){null}}null}null

Maxim Zaks posted the solution here.

you can check this by going to Menu: "Window/Preferences/General/Workspace" and than in the "New text file line delimiter" Panel change from "Default" to "Other: Unix"

Big Pheeew!!!! Having to swap between FDT and FlexBuilder in some projects were driving me nuts... this really looks like the final "Bye bye Windows!".

Well, that was the first line in some emails I decided to answer today. There used to be a time I answered everything and helped everyone that asked for help, but seems like these days are over.

Well, not really, I still reply, only 6 months later ;) But... if I don't reply, please accept my apologies, blame to however invented time! :)

I've recently seen the class being used in the wild so I guess it was time to properly publish it.

Since the beginnings I've always had a FPS meter class, really basic, but had to be there. Then Carlos came along with one with a nice visualizer of the performance and then I saw Alternativa's one and I though that was the best approach. However, it had some issues, the speed of the graph seemed a bit pointless as the history was of 1 second or so.



So I improved my own one on the direction of the latest, but having a graph history of about 10/15 seconds, having a clearer picture of how your app/site is performing. Theo came along and helped with the graph visualisation too and then it went public.

Anyway... if you need a tiny and easy FPS/MS/MEM control panel, feel free to use it :)

http://github.com/mrdoob/Hi-ReS-Stats

Just listened on a mix. And I'm not finding it anywhere, tried on soulseek, emule and torrent sites. Also tried on google because seems like it was a mp3 released on the web for free.

If anyone has it, please, send it to me :)

So, so, so funny. It's missing the speech bubbles in the embedded video tho, watch the real thing.

Status:
-89 days left until Inspire08
Back to production

While people that haven't released anything in years were trying to find the meaning of life and also were creating a rather depressing image for the newcomers to the site partly ruining our promotion job two weeks ago at Euskal, I was fighting once again with Java... er... and having a misery time playing at Mario Kart too (just for 1 hour tho).

I keep having problems with the audio player :(... glitching just at the beginning of the music and creating random delays. It doesn't happen all the time tho. I'll leave the glitch there for now, and concentrate on adding synchronize more stuff here and there (production). Which is what I'm doing, just after cleaning all the code. There were still some Timer.getTime() around...

Things are looking good, I just need to find a effect for the texts. But seems like finally I'm starting to get used to Java and I'm starting to optimise things. People may say that Java sucks and all that, well, based on my experience so far, it's great, it just needs more people working with it and sharing sources.

Status:
-88 days left until Inspire08
Released but unfinished

You may already know that the demo was released already two weeks ago at Euskal. Yes, this is how usually goes, you work for a demo for X party, you don't finish it in time and release it on Y party.

In the end it was actually a invitation for D///FEST 2008 as originally intended. Since the last post I didn't do much work on it to be honest, I did most of the part on the hotel while at Bilbao. I still wasn't able to forward/backward the tune so I still had the same problem of having to sync the something in the end of the demo and had to watch the whole demo. Some day... some day... But, tired of having to get the sync times by hand I added a Timer.getBeat() method. On init I sent the length of the beat (which is my tune is about 856ms) and then Timer.getBeat() will just give me back System.currentTimeMilliS() / beat_length. Once I found out the exact length of the beat the rest of the synchronization was much faster to produce. Instead of if (Timer.getTime() > 109568), now I had if (Timer.getBeat() > 128). Much easier to read for sure.

Then added the texts on top of everything, because, after all I had to talk about the event. Unfortunately I had to make the texts by myself too and that took some brain time. Which is something you don't have few hours before the deadline.

Last but not least, managed to do the greetings part/code in about 30min. All thanks to the Timer.getBeat() idea o/.

But this is not the end of the story. After releasing it some people were having problems playing it. I was finishing the demo at the party with WindowsXP at the party because Ubuntu doesn't work well in the macbook pro yet, and I added the fullscreen code in the very last minute, and seemed like on Ubuntu that wasn't working very well. So, some days after the release I updated the .zip which a new version that has a nice Resolution selector window before the demo, powered by java.awt.

No, there is still more. There were other people complaining about audio playback issues on Athlon64. Now, I don't know if this is related to the OGG player I was using or Java itself? Anyway I've switched to a MP3 player because it seems to have more options, easier getPosition and easier to implement the seek feature (backward/forward). I don't know if this will fix the Athlon64 thing in the end tho.

Related to this, I've also implemented a nice beat visualizer which lets me easily control if the visuals are losing synchronization. After some hours on it, seems like the problem was that I was initializing everything way too fast. I was starting the tune even before the video mode had change, that made the music stop for a couple of milliseconds, and everything got unsynced from there. So, that should be fixed now, everything seems to be working fine now, I should synchronize some more things on the visuals and I should be able to call it final version :D

Which is funny, I think I've never done a final version before, usually you don't want to do it after the party, but somehow, in this case I'm really enjoying it :? Anyway, that's all for now. Final version in a few days, and that will be the end of these series, oh, and yeah, I'll release all the sources so anyone can laugh, learn or fix the mess.

Oh yes, you have the current version (v1.1) here:
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51075