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Starfish (Read 2397 times)

rgovostes

Starfish
Jul 6^th, 2005, 4:12am

http://rgov.org/wp/?page_id=8
Click to draw a "starfish". Be patient, they take a little while to do.

The images it shows while loading are of real starfish. The applet doesn't generate them, sorry

It is a port of Mars Saxman's amazing Starfish algorithm.

The sketch starts with only 3 simple types of linear waves, then progressively combines and changes them until a colorful 2D image is created. It's a bit slow, but the images it produces are often pretty spectacular.

Note that the entire thing is random - you can get a solid color, or something very boring. My sketch seems to like lots of black, which I tried to reduce by starting over if the first row is entirely color(0). I'll have to see why it does that, though...

(I've no idea what category this would go under - what happened to "Beyond Categories" This has very little connection to artificial life other than its name)

« Last Edit: Jul 12^th, 2005, 4:41am by rgovostes »

rgovostes

Re: Starfish
Reply #1 - Jul 6^th, 2005, 8:24pm

Oops. I had two very small bugs which together contributed to over 3.5 million overflows (results out of the range -1.0...1.0). In one case, I forgot to subtract 1, and in another I had used less than instead of greater than.

The results are pretty staggering. The pictures are much more fluid in this version, with less tendency to have jagged edges, large black areas, and static.

http://rgov.org/misc/applets/starfish/

Arkitus YaBB Newbies Offline Posts: 32	Re: Starfish Reply #2 - Jul 7^th, 2005, 10:42am Nice! The new version is much better than the old one. I still don't know what it has to do with starfish though?
	Personal Website: http://www.arkitus.com

rgovostes Junior Member Offline Posts: 76	Re: Starfish Reply #3 - Jul 7^th, 2005, 9:17pm I dunno, Mars Saxman named it Thanks for your kind words.

Markavian Full Member Offline Posts: 174	Re: Starfish Reply #4 - Jul 8^th, 2005, 3:05am I like it, its a shame its only in black and white, and you can't see it being drawn. It'd be interseting if you spaced out the sampling so you could watch an image being formed - and at a large size?

myT

Re: Starfish
Reply #5 - Jul 8^th, 2005, 11:39am

Hehe... I think it is very colorful.
At first I also thought that the starfish images were meant to be the result of this applet. But nooo... it's the colored images that only appear for patient users.

Could you probably change the mouse input in the way, that you can not start the next drawing, while a drawing is actually in process. As it is now, you just click very often on the starfish because nothing happens and you will only see the real result image for about 1 frame.

Markavian Full Member Offline Posts: 174	Re: Starfish Reply #6 - Jul 8^th, 2005, 2:14pm Ohhh, I see now.

rgovostes

Re: Starfish
Reply #7 - Jul 8^th, 2005, 5:06pm

The starfish images are deceiving, sorry

That would be a cool algorithm, though, heh. It takes anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to draw an image on a moderately fast computer. The production of the image internally - that is, the massively long function that it uses to get each pixel - takes only a second to create, it's the evaluation that takes so long. I'm looking into sine et al tables to help this.

I tried disabling clicks while it's drawing, but the mouseReleased() event fires after it finishes, even if you click during the drawing stage. I think a separate thread would fix this issue.

rgovostes

Re: Starfish
Reply #8 - Jul 12^th, 2005, 4:47am

Alright, I've a new version up at http://rgov.org/wp/?page_id=8

It looks the same, but I've done some internal changes.
- dumped the hyp() function which was the same as Processing's mag().
- confusing starfish images were given the boot. now a tiny little circle appears to show that it's busy.
- the rendering code is now in its own thread. this makes it nicer when you click to draw a new one
- moved it to a page on WordPress, which lets me accept comments there. this is kind of strange, as now I have a forum post, a blog post, and a wordpress page

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