It’s been silent here. Next to tripping to Tokyo to speak at Adobe MAX in Januari and doing some small jobs, I’m doing a very, very cool Flash 10 Project utilizing the upcoming Papervision for Flash 10. For some optimization parts I’ve been looking into using Alchemy as an easy way to write optimized bytecode. As opposed to what some people took from my previous post on Alchemy, I don’t hate Alchemy. My point there was that if Alchemy can perform that well, so should ActionScript be able to, with the standard compiler.

Now, that being said, all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. With no time to spare during the morning, daytime and evening, I took the laptop with me to bed last night, and decided to do something I didn’t do before, port something with Adobe Alchemy. I decided upon a long time thing on my wish list; SID Playback in Flash. What is SID ? Well, SID stands for Sound Interface Device, referring to the MOS6581 and it’s a programmable audiochip as used in the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I grew up with the Commodore 64, and the audio it produces is still something I hold dearly. You are quite likely to have heard a SID chip before, if you listen to the radio, as it is quite a possible you’ve heard one of these baby’s scream. Good recent examples are :

Bastian – You’ve got my love. (the beat in this song comes from Jeroen Tel’s Rubicon).

Nelly Furtado – Do It (controversy all around, Timbaland blatantly stole Glenn Rune Gallefoss’s version of Acid Jazzed Evening).

De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig – Hollereer (Produced by Bastian, C64 lover himself).

My interest was more playing back the old C64 tunes from games and demos. Keep in mind, an average SID file is about 2kilobyte to 10kilobyte; a perfect Small Web Format for all your music during preloading needs . Now, this is something I have been working on before in Flash 9, using the FC64 project, the amazing Flash C64 emulation effort by Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall. Last year, I even made a start with porting FC64 to Flash 10, but that needed to be dropped in favor of actual client work. SID Playback is something different from playing back .mod .xm or .mid files, as the SID chip doesn’t do much on it’s own. Essentially, a .SID file is an executable meant to be ran on the 6510, the Commodore 64′s CPU. So to playback the file, you not only need to emulate the SID chip, but also the 6510 and the needed registers / memory.

Software emulation of the SID chip has been around for a while, and all modern platforms have a way of playback SID files. Winamp plugins, command line utilities for conversion, it’s all there. As is there opensource code to do this. There’s libraries for most major languages. So, after a bit of research, I decided upon the Linux version of TinySid. This library is small enough and well optimized. It looked simple to port, so I went at it. All in all, 4 hours later, I had this baby up and running! (And an unhappy girlfriend who isn’t into the nerd thing, nor is she into listening to chiptunes whilst trying to sleep). Considering my very rusty C and a little hack around I had to do for the audio output, Alchemy shows off it’s feathers here. Many kudo’s to the Alchemy and Flash Player team for this effort. Just now I spent half an hour building a tiny interface using Keith Peter’s Minimal Components, and collected some songs; and here it is.

TinySidFlash (open link, requires Flash 10).

My favorites : Politik and Science (A C64 version of Coldplay’s the Scientist), Morphing and Turbo. Yes, I love Dane’s tunes!

There’s no code yet, as this is still very rough and unfinished work. I’m pretty sure that when I get time again, I’ll have a go at LibSidPlay instead, since the overall emulation in that library is a lot better.

Intro

As promised in my previous post, here’s a small opensource project from my side. It’s tiny, really, but I hadn’t seen an ActionScript implementation of any form of Image dithering before.

Dithering….what ?

Just a brief explanation what dithering in this context means. From wikipedia :

“Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise, used to randomize quantization error, thereby preventing large-scale patterns such as contouring that are more objectionable than uncorrelated noise.”

Words to take note of in that sentence are quantization, and “intentionally applied form of noise”. In our case quantization is the removal or swapping of colors. The form of noise applied differs over the several implementations and in so called “ordered dithering” it’s hardly noise, rather a carefully chosen threshold matrix.

Dithering, why ?

Dithering imagery has been around for some time. Put a close eye to any black and white printed newspaper’s pictures and you’ll see the effect.

It’s basically been around a lot longer then I have in my 28 years of life…that’s for sure. I first learned terms like “ordered dithering” and “Floyd-Steinberg Error Diffusion” in my young and early days on the Amiga hardware. See, in those days computer hardware wasn’t capable of displaying the huge arrays of colours like now-a-days. Since you then had few colours to spare (a typical amiga workbench ran at 16 to 128 colours or so), you needed to be creative to get yourself a nicely pimped desktop image, whilst still sparing colours for your icons.

A better example of a dithering implementation for our industry is probably that checkbox when you want to save for web in Photoshop, using GIF. Or when you print something on a pure black and white printer.

Conclusion; dithering is normally used to create the illusion of tones on a device which is otherwise not capable of displaying it. So why port this to our ARGB/32Bit enabled Flash Player ? Part of the reason why I worked on this is because I just like the aesthetic of the effect. It just brings back wonderful memories of pimping my Amiga desktop.

Dithering in AS3

So, the algorithms for dithering are really quite simple. I was playing around with hydra Pixel Bender and had some ideas on converting some old algorithms to have them run in realtime. Then I thought I could make this run in realtime on Flash 9. So, first I did a version of the Algo in pure AS3. I played around with converting it to something fast enough to run at at least 20 frames per second on an average machine…and painfully failed. The remains are the AS3 version (hydra Pixel Bender version still in progress)….and I decided to clean that up a bit, and have it released as an OS project for anyone to use.

Currently it only contains so-called error-diffusion based ditherers. They make the most sense anyway, since the ordered ditherers really have nasty visual sideeffects, like Bayer’s crosshatches. Check the variants out in this little demo application using the class.

The Demo : try and use “No Dithering” first to see the effects of regular palette conversion.

The Source

Usage :

ImageDithering.dither(bitmapData, type, levels, grayscale);

Where :

BitmapData is the image to be manipulated.

Type is the form of dithering, currently supported :

1. ImageDitheringType.FLOYD_STEINBERG
2. ImageDitheringType.FALSE_FLOYD_STEINBERG
3. ImageDitheringType.STUCK
4. ImageDitheringType.NO_DITHER

Levels is the amount of colour levels to quantize to per channel.

Grayscale is a boolean indicating whether to convert the image to grayscale before the process is ran.

Right click and viewsource on the example to see how it’s implemented in Flex.

Quick update : Mario Klingemann, working on Aviary’s Peacock did a quick test with it. My effort had some use anyway!

He kicks off with this :
“Now a days people are creating hype about Apollo and Flex. When I had a look at what these two products are, I found that Apollo and Flex is just the replica of .NET Framework. They are talking so loud about Flash and Flex. Guys Flash is just an animation software which was made with the intention of being a preloader.”

Wow…so Flex is a replica of .NET ? Let me see…wasn’t it the Avalon team to hire well-known figures from the Flash industry to work on Sparkle ? That being established; I’m not going to tell you what was there first; mxml or xaml. Basically, I just don’t know. What I do know is that Flex 1 has been around a lot longer then the similar MS tech….

Furthermore Parvez states :
“It cannot take place of programming Language.”

….you obviously havn’t seen what AS3 (yes it’s a scripting language, I know) in the hands of a developer can do….

Next :
‘Apollo people are giving counts of Apollo runtime downloads. Dot NET Framework is downloaded four times more than their Apollo runtime.”

Considering Apollo is in developer ALPHA, that’s actually a compliment! .net has been around alot longer; but the 3 version to implement the WPF technology isn’t that well adopted at all yet.
Ow, and about that download : the installer for .net 3.0 is 2.8Mb, which will then continue to download another 30MB….compare that to Apollo’s current 6Mb footprint. On the bright side, .net’s footprint for Mac actually is 0Mb where Apollo is 8Mb. On the other hand; that 0Mb download comes from the fact that it’s not supported on Mac………

and continues into
“WPF technology and .NET Framework 3.0 brings in the years of experience of Microsoft in programming field. WPF is really a revolution. The combination of WPF/Expression Suite with the programming capabilities of Visual Studio makes it the best Programming Suite ever available.”

I’ll refrain on making any comments on the WPF technology. I haven’t spent enough time looking into WPF to tell you anything about the core technology, or how good it is, or it’s not.
But I will take you up on the “years of experience” :
I’ve always been a Windows user (after having to move away from the then dead AmigaOS). It’s good enough for me; I enjoyed the software, it enabled me to do my job, entertain myself, communicate, and get a fairly easy cleanly installed machine. XP is a stable and usable OS; all I need. Not complaining there. Recently I was lured by the Vista hype and gave it a try….that other product where MS so eagerly wishes to state is “built on top of years of experience”. I was just thinking : what did they actually do the last 5 years ? What really happened ? Couldn’t get halve of my hardware working, got several crashes on otherwise stable machine, and decided to go back to XP. I needed a killer machine to actually run it. Maybe my next-gen os will be X. Please do not use the “years of experience” as a proof of quality, it fails quite badly at this point in time; and as history has proven, years of experience doesn’t necessarily make you the best.

Mr. Ansari concludes :
“Let this year of 2007 come to an end then we will see where this Apollo and Flex stand ”

Well if all MS Certified professionals have this kind of attitude towards competitive products, I’m willing to take you up on that one ! You’ll never noticed what just hit you, if you don’t know it’s coming.

I’ll leave my personal views on WPF technology and such out of this, but with such an invitation to correct ignorance, I couldn’t resist myself. I would never underestimate another technology, without having a proper look at it.

Found this via Actionscript Hero. who elegantly choose to just link, and not reply to anything….that’s what I should’ve done here

Just remember the blogs slogan : “Parvez Ansari Told You….”

There’s a couple of errors and small bugs in Flex which reveal things about the Adobe dev environment, like the path from the building machine (something like c:\dev\…\…\, can’t reproduce right now).

This hint of a class which could us info about the Traits got me particularly excited though; I thought it was a reference to the AS3 Object Model. So if we would have more info on what actually happens with our classes in terms of what the Traits look like, this would give some good insights at runtime…seemed interesting to explore to me. But the package where this is in suggests it hasn’t got anything to do with AS3, but it refers to data services. Still these things get me very curious. If anyone of Adobe reads this (I hope the title advertisement worked), and wants to and can share, please do.

For people interested in the Traits; this is probably the best document on it.

KPN Shood

PaperFlickr/

The bugs & to be done things in random order :
1. You have to wait until all images are loaded before you can freely click around the datagrid.
2. The 3d panes are not clickables, that’s why that datagrid is there.
3. You can’t clear the result set yet.
4. Clipping of on screen faces occure (this is actually related to pv3d clipping).
5. It’s kind of slow…the loading of flickr images is being cached on my server.
6. It slows down. Rendering modes on the panes are not reset, the more you show, the heavier it gets.

Next to that, it’s cool to see what pv3d will be able to bring very soon…the amount of work this has taken me is minimal. Really minimal. No sources here yet.

For all the DFUG people out there @ breeze and the Aarhus meeting tonight : thanks! I had a great evening, great meeting you people, and thanks for listening!

At least this is very promising, and shows what developers would be able to do with Papervision3D by extending it…

Here’s my first try. (requires flash 9 player and might take some time to load)

Today, Antonis sent an e-mail to the OSFlash / Papervision e-mail list, in which he asked if there were any examples of Flex 2 using Papervision; this triggered me to do a little bit of work of creating 2 examples of the current alpha as3 code to be used in Flex 2. Both examples are ports of the current AS2 examples Papervision is not only lightweight, it is also easy to implement.

So here you go :

Papervision3d / Flex 2 : HelloPlane Example.
Papervision3d / Flex 2 : HelloASE Example.

These examples are ugly, and don’t use all the capabilities of the engine, but as a proof of concept they show alot of potential in terms of speed and ease of implementation.
Although Papervision3d / AS2 seems to be shaping up quite well, Papervision3d / AS3 has some catching up to do, it is still alpha, let alone implementations in Flex 2. Still, these examples where fairly easy to create. Thanks to Carlos Ulloa and John Grden for the awesome work they have put in this engine.
Make sure you check papervision’s osflash page to see when it’s going in beta.

I hope to get some time somewhere in the beginning months of the next year and put some work in the OSFlash projects, most notably the FC64 SID project, and Papervision.

We finally managed to trace the source of the memory problem back to our logger view, in which I had implemented Adobe’s autcomplete component. The autocomplete component itself is great; thanks for that guys!

Strange thing was that except for our FDS & Cairngorm logging we didn’t have a whole lot of logging going on. Now we started to debug log some view things, and the amount of memory usage kept on rising.

After searching for several hours (and fixing multiple things) the Autocomplete component turned out to be the culprit.
I think it has something to do with the way it builds up the dictonary / bsp tree I assume it uses.

So; if any macrodobian is reading this : here’s an example of that leak (read explanation in left pane); and here’s the source to the example.