Games are an essentiel part of our society. Since ages we like to play and nothing has changed since the new-media-revolution arrived. Games became one of the most important parts of the media-industry.
One scheme in context of videogames is especially successful: the simulation of virtual worlds and their interactivity. The foundation of this success is a constant development of the technology behind the games. Parts of this technology are a visual, a sound and an interactive component. The evolution in terms of technology is heavily linked to hardware-development. The applications are simply following the hardware-enhancements.
In the past, nobody thought it would be possible to have volumetric clouds rendered in real-time, or that you can have an exorbitant count of polygons in one scene. There is a nice side-effect of this strong link between hardware- and application-enhancements. Gamers are able to enjoy innovations all the time.
In context of videogames, the main improvements that have been made where related to graphic and interactive components. When we talk about interactivity, we are talking about physical simulation and how we are able to achieve realistic behaviour in a virtual environment.

Just think about simple things like open a door or a ball that is falling down to the floor or even more complex things like steering a car in a realistic manner. Physic-simulation is a very important part for video-games.
The simulation of complex physical behaviour is usually only limited by the available hardware. A major target of this paper is to have a proof of concept for typical end-user hardware like a game-console.
Microsoft is offering the XNA framework for their game-console Xbox 360. So it is possible for every developer to have their applications run on the console.

The area of research i have chosen, is the realistic simulation and visualization of fluids in context of real-time environments. A fluid can be a gas or a liquid. Fluids are not very commonly used in nowadays computer-games, but there is a particular interest into this topic. Fluid-simulation cannot be replaced by a more simple approximation. The reason is the good quality of the results produced by a fluid-simulation. New hardware, especially massiv-parallel systems like the GPU, allows us to have realtime simulation implemented into interactive environments. This paper should give a comprehensive overview about fluid-simulation and visualization.

I first get in contact with Flash at the age of 16 (Flash 5) and i always tried to contribute and be a part of the community. My first community was the german FlashForum and i learned a lot from the heroes (Andrè Michelle, Ingo Ramin) at this time. As i get older and at the time i realized that i want to work as an Interactive Developer i decide to attend to a Multi-Media course at the university at my hometown (Salzburg, Austria). This was may the best decision of my life because it offers me a whole new world. It forces me to see Multi-Media from different points of view(Concept, Design, Programing, Media-Theory, etc.) and let me recognize that i have to be envolved in this discourse to getting better and that i need permanent exchange with other people.

But this is a bit of a problem for someone located in Austria because there are not a lof of chances to attend to events like Flash on the Beach , FITC, FlashCamp and all the other great events i always read about on Twitter and different blogs and for sure, there are not many Flashers in the neighborhood.

What i really like is when i follow the Flash heroes (just a few, because there are many , Grant Skinner, Lee Brimelow, Seb Lee-Delisle, Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, Mike Chambers, Keith Peters) on Twitter and to recognize how they communicate with each other. They are funny, they are telling jokes, launching competitions like #tweetcode or The 25-Line ActionScript Contest and they are all addicted to their work (imho). Most of them are speakers at the big conferences and there are a lot of projects they are sharing with the community. This allows us to get familiar with cutting-edge technology and to learn.

But what i miss a bit is the communication between youngsters like i am. What i would enjoy is to hear and talk with a lot more geeks at the age from 16 – 25 or to have more projects started by them. I only know 2 guys at my age that are as much involved into the community as the respected netheads.

So, my idea is now to stop this situation. I want to invite everyone who is interested in RIA’s, Web, Flash Platform, Programing, Design, User Experience, etc. and/or wants to help the youngsters to get out of the dark to start a new chapter. I want to collaborate and participate and i think there are many people out there with a similar wish.

If there is anyone interested, just drop me a line with your Twitter/Blog/Skype/Project/Whatever contact details and i will add it to the list below.

I want to start the list now with myself, to give you a template. I am looking forward to hear/read from you. Btw. i am looking forward to attend FotB in Brighton later this year, if anyone near Salzburg is thinking about going there, let me know. Btw. i would also enjoy to see some contact details from the “netheads”.

Update
You may follow this discussion on twitter http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23flashy, insert #flashy to get your tweet listed.

My name is Hannes Moser, Austria
Interests Flash Platform, Games, Screen Design, Communities, Programing & too much other things
I want to work on community projects, talk with people, attend all sort of events
Contact hannes [at] impossiblearts.com, @eliias, Skype: eliias

g=graphics;
mt=g.moveTo;
lt=g.lineTo;
ls=g.lineStyle;
m=Math;
r=m.random;
s=m.sin;
i=0;
o={};
function f(e){/*src*/}
addEventListener("enterFrame",f);

I am so addicted, i can’t stop…

My 140 chars of legend…. wait for it -dary.

#tweetcoding – “Pipes” http://twitter.com/eliias/statuses/1228303442

m=.05;if(!o.r)o.r={x:r()*m,y:r()*m,z:r()*m};w=20+s(i*o.r.y);l=2500/w;ls(1);g.drawCircle(200+s(++i*o.r.x)*l,200+s(i*o.r.y*2)*l,l/l*w);

Can’t stop #tweetcoding – “Shorty” http://twitter.com/eliias/statuses/1228042430

mt(200,200);g.lineStyle(1,0);lt(s(i+=0.1)*i/0.1,m.cos(i)*i/0.1);lt(s(i+5)*i/0.1,m.cos(i+5)*i/0.1);

#tweetcoding – “Crazy” http://twitter.com/eliias/status/1227884420

g.clear();g.beginFill(0);if(!o.s)o.s=[];o.s[o.i=i%440]={x:o.i%11*40,y:i++%440};while(t=o.s[o.i--])g.drawCircle(t.x,t.y,s(i/40+o.i)*30)

For me it was always clear, that the basic vector tools, some bitmap effects(live-effect) and the ability to handle the file-export easily are enough to setup a layout. At least the pixel-perfect positioning threw input fields of vector-forms is a main, maybe the biggest reason for me to use Fireworks.

I met some designers that prefer using Illustrator/Photoshop to get their results, but i always discovered that this combination has a major drawback, two different tools for one thing.

But in the last month i am getting very annoyed about Fireworks because of its bad font-rendering behavior. One major reason is the Anti-Aliasing of Fonts. The basic settings (Crisp, Strong, Smooth) are crap. Font-sizes up to 15px are looking like the same that my neighboures dog lost in front of my door this morning. Event for the basic fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma it is heavy to find a good anti-aliasing setting.

About font-sizes around 10px, 11px, 12px (this  is usually my choise for floating text or text that is not so important) the things get really worse.

Next big problem with Fireworks is rendering text. Even the Flash-Player has better capabilities of how to render text, especiall block-text (and for sure, Flash-Player has the better Anti-Aliasing).

In version 10 of a product that has its focus on prototyping web-applications i expect a bit more than block-left aligned, block-right aligned and an unusable block-centric. At least it should be possible to have a multi-line paragraph that is block-text and the lines do not have this crazy kerning.

Multi-column text would also be a nice feature. Maybe it is possible to get the new Flash-Player text-rendering with the new text-layout framework to work with Fireworks. Would be an advancement to the current status. But i would prefer to have the same text-anti-aliasing like Photoshop had it.

I also discovered a bug. First i thought is has nothing to do with Fireworks and it depends on the used font, but later i see that it also happens with system fonts.

The text should be in the blue area.

I am currently thinking about how to improve this without changing the tools. But i think its Adobe’s turn now.

h.

Btw. if you have similar problems or even better a solution for this, just drop me a few lines here.

The gameplay of Ace of Mace is based on physics and the challenge is to master the 5 levels.

Update

So BAMMM…. good news

“Adobe Site of the day” on 9th of January, 2009
“FWA – Site of the day” on 6th of February, 2009

It happened already two weeks ago, but there was no time to post about it. We were nominated and invited to the Europrix  09 award and won in the category for games. The game will be online soon(1st January 2009), you will find it here.

Some photos from the event could be found here.

And for sure i am the GEEK on the photo .

Thanks to the other project members

Bernhard Kerschbaumer (3D and effect artist)
Jürgen Brunner (sound design and level design)
Max Brandl (project management and screen sesign)

Ps.: Jürgen send me an URL to link your name.

Finally, the Alpha state is ready for public. I have tested some features of the system and most of them are quite impressing. But as a WordPress user i still miss some things. Most important for me is to be different with my blog from others, not only in entries also in design and appearance. There should be a possibility to access the data threw an API (webservice). I would definitly swap from WordPress to kontain if i get a chance to switch back any time and/or import data from each service to the other.

I like the way f-i is building user-interfaces and the media-experience is great. So this is still an Alpha, but i am looking forward to the features coming.

With PixelBender toolkit it is possible to build shaders very fast and easily. It took me less then 10min till i compiled my first shader. One reason is, that in my opinion the code is very intuitional to write and even greater, the code is very compact, f.e. vector and scalar types are doing basic math operations together without a special cast or convertion.

This is great and gives you the motivation for doing more (like i do now). But after playing arount i am going to miss more and more features.

First, the UI is easy to use, but i want to split coding/preview window or at least rearrange it, it’s annoying, even on my 24 inch display, if you are using a test-image greater than 400px in height (windows are tiled horizontal).

Next thing, the FlashPlayer implementation of the filter-runtime is not able to interpret any flow-controls. The only one allowed is a simple if (condition) else condition. So that means, no loops (neither while nor for). I have seen a zoom-blur implementation written with a code redundancy count of 15!!! This definitly sucks.

There are a few more limitations but they will not care you as much as the one i mentioned above.

Biggest wish of mine is, i have read somewhere that this is on the roadmap already(i hope that’s true), to have a low-level tool for compiling PixelBender sources. I am looking forward to build a Eclipse-plugin for writing PB-code and have some elementary “curves” you can drag and drop into it. A standalone-viewer would also be great.

Some words about PixelBender-runtime performance. I have not done soooo much tests with FlashPlayer by now, but my first tests giving me very bad results on images that are a bit greater than your thumb (Ok, i have tried a bigger one with success, but f.e. 800x800px with a simple sin-wave is going mad). On my 2 workstations (very similiar hardware setup) i get strange differences on framerate count. Both are running in GPU mode, but on the first one i am getting a constant framerate of about 60fps, the other PC shows different framerates in a high frequency starting from 150 up to 1500. All this numbers i got with the preview-mode in PixelBender toolkit. If you are going to use a PB-shader with Flash, things get even worse. I got a dramatic drawdawn with my framerates and a high CPU-load one one of my machines.

I think that behaviour means, FlashPlayer is using CPU to calculate the shader instead of GPU? I don’t know by now, so it is very speculative to say something concrete. I hope that it will be possible to recognize a CPU fallback at runtime, so you have at least the chance to turn off your “stunning” effects. I am looking forward to publish more info on this issue soon.

So, enough said about the drawbacks, go on with the interesting part.

For those, which did not read my previous post, i am going to proof if it is possible to have some post-processing in realtime for games with PixelBender. I want to create something like a shockwave with a simple distortion of the image.

PixelBender sources (formula is not optimized)

<languageVersion : 1.0;>
kernel HorizontalAverage
<
namespace:          "com.impossiblearts";
vendor:             "Hannes Moser";
version:            1;
description:        "damped sin-wave depending on time";
>
{
input image4 source;
output pixel4 result;

const float PI = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288;

parameter float2 pos
<
minValue:float2(0.0, 0.0);
maxValue:float2(2880.0, 2880.0);
defaultValue:float2(400.0, 400.0);
>;

parameter float amount
<
minValue:0.0;
maxValue:10000.0;
defaultValue:5000.0;
>;
parameter float wavelength
<
minValue:1.0;
maxValue:2500.0;
defaultValue:150.0;
>;

parameter float t
<
minValue:0.0;
maxValue:1000.0;
defaultValue:0.0;
>;

parameter float overlay
<
minValue:0.0;
maxValue:100.0;
defaultValue:10.0;
>;

void evaluatePixel()
{
float2 coord = outCoord();

float dist = distance(pos, coord);
float curve = (1.0 / sqrt(1000.0 * PI)) * exp((-1.0/wavelength) * pow(-t + dist, 2.0)) * sin(dist / overlay) * amount;
float2 cw;
cw = coord + curve;
result = sample(source, cw);
}
}

You have to start with the parameter t(time), you will see a ring-like distortion. This is a Gauss-curve. There is already a sin-wave overlay, but you will only see it if you tweak some of the parameters.

This is a setup that works for me.
amount: 2000
overlay: 8
pos: your image-width and image-height divided by 2
t: 250
wavelength: 2500

Now try to slide the control for “t”.

Not so bad for a 3 loc shader i think. The image below shows you how the curves are combined.

Finally, here is a Flash-Demo with the shader (click on image to load demo, click again to start effect).

Update

http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-pixel-bender-in-flash-player-10.html

So, no GPU ;-(

First result here. Click on image in the demo to start effect (FP 10 needed).

Update

PixelBender Kernel

<languageVersion : 1.0;>
kernel HorizontalAverage
<
namespace:          "com.impossiblearts";
vendor:             "Hannes Moser";
version:            1;
description:        "damped sin-wave depending on time";
>
{
input image4 source;
output pixel4 result;

const float pi = 3.14;

parameter float2 pos
<
minValue:float2(0.0, 0.0);
maxValue:float2(2880.0, 2880.0);
defaultValue:float2(225.0, 125.0);
>;

parameter float amount
<
minValue:0.001;
maxValue:0.1;
defaultValue:0.01;
>;

parameter float wavelength
<
minValue:0.0;
maxValue:1.0;
defaultValue:0.7;
>;

parameter float damping
<
minValue:0.0;
maxValue:1.0;
defaultValue:0.5;
>;

parameter float maxradius
<
minValue:0.1;
maxValue:2880.0;
defaultValue:200.0;
>;

parameter float t
<
minValue:0.0;
maxValue:10.0;
defaultValue:0.0;
>;

void evaluatePixel()
{
float2 coord = outCoord();

float wlength = 1.0 - wavelength;
float dist = distance(pos, coord);
float curve = sin(dist * wlength - t * pi) / (amount * dist * wlength);
float distDamping = max(dist / maxradius, 1.0);
float2 cw = coord + (curve * distDamping);

result = sampleNearest(source, cw);
}
}

AS (extended from lee brimelow’s gotoandlearn example)

package
{
import caurina.transitions.Equations;
import caurina.transitions.Tweener;

import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.display.Shader;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
import flash.filters.ShaderFilter;
import flash.net.URLLoader;
import flash.net.URLLoaderDataFormat;
import flash.net.URLRequest;

// swf metadata
[SWF(width="450", height="250", backgroundColor="#000000", framerate="60")]

public class NativePostProcessing extends Sprite
{
[Embed(source="starwars_tfu.jpg")]
private var image:Class;

private var loader:URLLoader;
private var shader:Shader;
private var filter:ShaderFilter;
private var im:Bitmap;

public function NativePostProcessing()
{
im = new image() as Bitmap;
addChild(im);
loader = new URLLoader();
loader.dataFormat = URLLoaderDataFormat.BINARY;
loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onFilterLoad);
loader.load(new URLRequest("filters/waves.pbj"));
}

private function onFilterLoad(ev:Event):void
{
shader = new Shader(loader.data);
shader.data.pos.value = [225, 85];
shader.data.amount.value = [0];
shader.data.wavelength.value = [0.2];
shader.data.damping.value = [0.5];

// start effect onclick
stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, this.startEffect);
}

private function startEffect(ev:MouseEvent):void
{
Tweener.addTween(this, { waveTime:6, time:1.5, transition:Equations.easeNone, onComplete:resetValues });

Tweener.addTween(this, { wavelength:0.9, time:1.3, transition:Equations.easeOutQuart });

Tweener.addTween(this, { amount:2, time:0.7, transition:Equations.easeNone });
Tweener.addTween(this, { amount:0, time:0.35, delay:0.9, transition:Equations.easeInOutQuint });

addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, this.update);
}

private function resetValues():void
{
waveTime = 0;
amount = 0.0;
wavelength = 0.2;
}

public var waveTime:Number = 0;
public var amount:Number = 0.0;
public var wavelength:Number = 0.2;

private function update(ev:Event):void
{
shader.data.t.value = [waveTime];
shader.data.amount.value = [amount];
shader.data.wavelength.value = [wavelength];

filter = new ShaderFilter(shader);
im.filters = [filter];
}
}
}

Flex – ActionScript project

Attention: You need Tweener to compile this files.

F-i has announced the upcoming release of kontain, formerly known as Propod. It seems that this application could may be a serious competitor for content management systems, designed for ease-of-use. The information provided on the product-website is not too much, but some screenshots are displaying media-features and there is a statement about a WYSWIG-editor.

I am planning a major retouch for this website and i am still collecting the requirements for the CMS behind it. I think i will give kontain at least a try (if F-i will release it early enough).