cool! the world famous mr. doob has linked to my fire skull experiment in his latest post! :) i've been continuing to learn more about actionscript 3 and develop a small 3d engine. performance has continued to be a tricky thing. i'm so used to thinking at a lower level and in terms of the sorts of optimizations you'd do in c++ instead of as3. writing fast code in as3 is actually trickier in many ways than c++ because it often means you have to mangle your code and manually inline and unroll loops which most c++ compilers just do for you automatically.

anyways, here you can find my fire skull experiment. :) move the mouse around over him to have some fun. and thanks to kirill for the cool skull model which should get a jaw someday soon. ;)

thursday night was the ozzy osbourne and rob zombie concert at key arena which turned out to be awesome! i was hoping for a crazy over the top performance to kick off halloween and wasn't disappointed.

rob zombie's performance was my favorite. the stage was incredibly cool with three giant monster heads, huge pictures of wolfman and frankenstein, tons of skulls and projection screens playing things like classic horror and clips from house of a 1000 corpses and devil's rejects... so sweet! :) he played a ton of great songs and looked like he was really enjoying being back on stage.

before ozzy came on the projection screens played some bizarre videos of him spliced into tv shows doing silly things. this left little doubt that he's completely lost it at this point. :) his performance was quite fun as he played a lot of his classics like crazy train and iron man and it was comical watching him hop around on stage with his belly bouncing about. ;) on the stage above him he had the craziest iron cross with "ozzy" written on it which would burst into flames and jet fire out and down the sides. it was sweet! at one point like halfway through the set everyone went off stage except ozzy's guitarist who went into this crazy long solo that just went on and on and on and then finally morphed into the star spangled banner before ending. i found it terribly boring but the rest of the crowd seemed to enjoy it. the guitarist then collapsed on the next song but continued playing on the ground - it was nuts. towards the end ozzy was quite emotional and thanked the crowd several times saying things like "i love you all - god bless you" which i found quite funny coming from the "prince of darkness" with a burning cross behind him! :)

in the end it was a very entertaining halloween concert well worth the money. :)

as an excuse to try out the flash flex ui system i coded a small activator inhibitor texture generator. it uses cellular automata to simulate pigment cells switching between differentiated and undifferentiated states based on competing densities of the activator and inhibitor chemicals. you can play with it here and here are some sample tiling textures i made with it so far:

i made textures like this before with reaction diffusion algorithms but those were much slower. thanks to bugman's webpage i learned about this nice technique. thanks bugman!

as for the ui, i found flex extremely easy to use but i've only got it working within Flash CS3 so far. when i tried with FlashDevelop and the flex sdk my swf files just explode! i haven't bothered figuring out why yet because i still have like a week left on my CS3 trial. :)

action script is pretty sweet but i'm starting to find some things that can be improved. for example there really needs to be a way for users to save the contents of a sprite to disk without the as3 needing to send the data to a server first. also the perf can use some more love. i especially don't understand how any modern language can be missing native floating point vector and matrix types. the CPUs have had SIMD instruction sets for ages, come on language designers, wake up!!! ok one last thing... ActionScript/ECMAScript is supposed to be higher level - so much easier and faster to code with - than C. so why do i have do lots more typing? in C i type "int ball;" but in AS3 i type "var ball:int;" ick. and worse in C i type "float crunch () { ... }" but in as3 i type "function crunch ():Number { ... }". typing "function" every time i write a function... ahhh so lame! ;)

while exploring some random number sets i discovered a universe of spiders perpetually battling each other. their brutality is rather shocking and while i don't know how long they've been at it i do hope that someday they can resolve their differences peacefully. :) in the meantime you can watch their battle unfold live at the epic spider brawl.

hooray it's a weekend of early access to the Guild Wars expansion! but with 150 new skills will i ever be competitive in PvP again?? at least with over 4 million people with the game there's gotta be some i can still pummel... time for a lot of careful skill description reading and forum trolling. :)

oh and of course no release would be complete without a swift kick in the nuts from misbehaving graphics drivers. oh my poor nuts!! why god why??