Archive for the ‘Canvastastic’ Category

Antisocial

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

This is it then… my big comeback to the Javascript demo scene after a two year absence, and also the moment when my demo coding muse returned from a long holiday, I guess. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Antisocial, a biting satire on social networking phenomena.

Visit the Antisocial microsite…

With my characteristic lack of organisation, I found myself with two weeks to go to the Sundown party, having promised a demo release, and with nothing specific in the pipeline. So, I decided to take a chance and run with an idea that had been sitting on top of my “demos to write when I have more free time than I do right now” pile for the best part of a year. I had it all planned out in my head, right down to the soundtrack: a mysterious track from an unlabelled CD I picked up at a ZX Spectrum Orchestra gig in 2005 (which turned out to be Round, from their Clive Live^3 EP). A quick bit of permission-getting later, and I was at the point of no return.

I knew it would be an ambitious job, and a bit of a leap artistically and technically from my usual stuff. I pencilled in a rough project plan in my diary. I drew up storyboards. I read up on the maths that was too nasty to contemplate on previous projects. And shockingly enough, I actually enjoyed all of the above.

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Canvastastic beta_1 released

Monday, September 11th, 2006

The loose ends are now tied up and Canvastastic is ready for a not-chronically-rushed release. It’s now placed under a proper licence (the LGPL) and, more importantly, it has actual API documentation!

Download: Canvastastic beta_1 (20K, .tar.gz)

If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be turning your nose up at having to download the thing just to see what the fuss is about, so I’m happy to oblige with some online demos…

  • Boxes (demonstrates lighting and camera movement)
  • Robot (demonstrates transforms and animation)
  • and finally, the library source itself, for those wanting a spot of light bedtime reading.

Canvastastic

Monday, September 4th, 2006

At this weekend’s BarCamp London, I announced a new Javascript library which takes the 3D engine from my Gallions Reach demo and promises to place it in the hands of industrious web developers, hackers and masher-uppers everywhere. The presentation seemed to go down well, so it’s only right that I should get this first release out, as promised. Strictly raw materials right now (and still no real documentation), so be prepared to fill in the gaps…

You shouldn’t have to wait too long for proper documentation, especially in view of the valiant effort Simon has already made. That Willison is a crafty one, as anyone who witnessed him pretending not to be a werewolf will testify. I borrowed his laptop for my talk, and within half an hour of getting it back he’d trawled through the code I’d left on it and more or less written up the complete API documentation – and promptly set about drawing diagrams to explain 3D coordinate transformations. Zero-day w4r3z, anyone?

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