Tag: Flash

Langton’s Ant with Heat Map

John Winkelman

Langton's Ant Heat Map

Click here to see it in action.

This is an update to the previous Langton’s Ant experiment. For this one I have added a heat map which shows the frequency with which the “ant” visits each cell in this grid. The more visits to a cell, the “hotter” the color. Click the application to toggle between the ant view and the heat map view.

I am really enjoying playing around with this thing. I have “hex” and “oct” variations (the above is a “quad”) waiting in the wings, and am exploring what it will take to make a 3d version, which hopefully I will have done this weekend.

Langton’s Ant, Reboot

John Winkelman

Langton's Ant

Click here to run the ants.

Another Cellular Automaton experiment. The rules for this one work as follows:
0. Place an ant on a grid.
1. check the color of the square the ant is on.
2a. If the square is red, turn it black and turn to the left.
2b. If the square is black, turn it red and turn to the right.
3. Move forward one square and repeat.

No interaction here; it will do the same thing every time you visit.

If you are patient, some interesting things begin to happen around iteration 10,000.

All Alike

John Winkelman

Procedurally generated maze in Actionscript 3

Click here to launch the maze explorer.

I have combined two of my experiments into something greater than the sum of the parts. Or at least, pretty close to equal to the sum of the parts. The height map explorer from a couple of weeks ago, combined with the maze from a few days ago. The combining took me all of ten minutes.

Now that I have got this far, I next need to start playing with collision detection so players can navigate the mazes, instead of flying over them.

A more technical description of this experiment can be found on my GameDev blog

aMazeIng!

John Winkelman

A generated maze. Click the image to play.

 

Sorry for the title; I couldn’t help myself.

I took the Java code from the Wikipedia article on Maze Generation Algorithms, converted it to Actionscript, and Voila! A randomly generated maze of practically infinite variations. For all intents and purposes it is just an image at the moment, but I will soon add wall detection and turn it into a game of some kind. Click anywhere on the maze to generate a new one.

The Gyruss Clone Revisited

John Winkelman

Click the image to see the experiment in action.

 

Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins. Click the movie if nothing happens at first.

My tile game experiments led me back to an old project where I was trying to recreate/reinvent the game Gyruss in Flash. I was playing around with the Perlin Noise generation functionality in Flash, and co-incidentally came across a polar distortion class at BIT-101. I took it, played with it a bit, and figured out how to go from Polar Distortion to Twirl, with the addition of one very short line of code. Voila! I had the thing you see above. The addition of a simple gradient provides the depth.