omino pixel blog

Updated
The first link of the downloads page has been working for our tireless testers on Mac and Win8, AECC.

Thanks everyone who gave great data!

There’s been recurring requests for the After Effects plug-in omino snake to be available on Windows.

              MAC      WIN7   WIN8
AECS5 10.x    tested   ?      ?
AECS6 11.x    tested  tested  ?
AECC  12.x    tested  tested  tested
(future)      tested  tested  ?

Table above is for my local testing. HOWever, we’ve received user reports of omino snake failing to load on AECC (12.x) and AECS6 (11.x).
Any further notes from the field are eagerly solicited! Many thanks in advance for your help.

I finished this almost two weeks ago, fifth day of coding. Was so satisified, forgot to post!

For your amusement. Generates a “maze” with no dead ends, and lets the cubies loose on it, with collision avoidance. Implements a very, very simple parallel ray shadow map, too. The shadow map is pretty glitchy, but still adds some character to the scene.

WebGL.

It appears that gl.drawArray() is expensive! Didn’t gather numbers, but could see that more than a few started racking up the CPU load. Adopted a “sprite” approach, that lets the same geometry values get reused, and a texture is submitted to the vertex shader to offset them. Handy!

A bit of the vertex shader goes like so.

    attribute float sprite; // each vertex is anchored to an offset, represented by a pixel in the Sprite Control texture
    uniform sampler2D sprites; // 
    ...
        vec4 spritePos = texture2D(sprites, vec2(sprite, 0.5)); // texture is 512 by 1
	pos4.xyz += spritePos.xyz;
        // (and use spritePos.w for a yaw rotation.)

Here we see 511 sprites, all rendered with a single gl.drawArray() call.

The motion comes by moving each sprite along a different 3d Lissajous path.

Only had a short interval today. Did a first implementation of camera management. Here, it cycles between a street view and an aerial view.