Last friday MIX Online and An Event Apart launched an unusual Javascript contest. 10K Apart pushes the developer to reduce their code so it fits in 10,000 bytes. This sounds like a nice challenge, but strangely they allow specific external libraries, which, in my opinion, over complicate things.

However, just to see what could be done, I quickly checked the amount of bytes that I would need to have a simple and easy to use 3d engine. That turned out to be about 1,000 bytes. Which left me with 9,000 bytes. Now, this may sound great, but it's kind of discouraging. Now I understand why the 64 kbytes coders always say that 64 kbytes are way harder to do than 4 kbytes – the number of possibilities is lower. Anyway, if I come up with a good idea I may try doing something with that for the contest.

Today I found out about JS1k. Which seemed to be Peter van der Zee's response to the former contest (no external libs, just 1,024 bytes of plain javascript) and it also had a few submissions.

Once I got the 3d engine working I got a bit code-addicted and ended up doing a plasma in 3D in 1,464 bytes, it was nice looking already, so it was a matter of reducing those extra 440 bytes. After learning some tricks and testing things here and there, it got reduced to 996 bytes. Here it's the result:



Looking forward to see what p01 has to "say" of all this... :)

EDIT: After reading Diego's post and finding interesting to see which tricks he used I thought I should also share the non-obfuscated code of my entry.

( function () {

	var res = 25, res3 = res * res * res,
	i = 0, x = 0, y = 0, z = 0, s, size, sizeHalf,
	vx, vy, vz, rsx, rcx, rsy, rcy, rsz, rcz,
	xy, xz, yx, yz, zx, zy,
	cx = 0, cy = 0, cz = 1, rx = 1, ry = 1, rz = 0,
	t, t1, t2, t3,
	sin = Math.sin, cos = Math.cos, pi = Math.PI * 3,
	mouseX = 0, mouseY = 0, color,
	doc = document, body = doc.body,
	canvas, context, mesh = [],
	width = innerWidth,
	height = innerHeight,
	widthHalf = width / 2,
	heightHalf = height / 2;

	body.style.margin = '0px';
	body.style.overflow = 'hidden';

	canvas = doc.body.children[0];
	canvas.width = width;
	canvas.height = height;

	context = canvas.getContext( '2d' );
	context.translate( widthHalf, heightHalf );

	doc.onmousemove = function ( event ) {

		mouseX = ( event.clientX - widthHalf ) / 1000;
		mouseY = ( event.clientY + heightHalf ) / 1000;

	};

	while ( i++ < res3 ) {

		mesh.push( x / res - 0.5 );
		mesh.push( y / res - 0.5 );
		mesh.push( z / res - 0.5 );

		z = i % res;
		y = !z ? ++y %res : y;
		x = !z && !y ? ++x : x;

	}

	setInterval( function () {

		context.clearRect( - widthHalf, - heightHalf, width, height );

		cx += ( mouseX - cx ) / 10;
		cz += ( mouseY - cz ) / 10;

		t = new Date().getTime();
		t1 = sin( t / 20000 ) * pi;
		t2 = sin( t / 10000 ) * pi;
		t3 = sin( t / 15000 ) * pi;

		rx = t / 10000;

		rsx = sin( rx ); rcx = cos( rx );
		rsy = sin( ry ); rcy = cos( ry );
		rsz = sin( rz ); rcz = cos( rz );

		i = 0;

		while ( ( i += 3 ) < res3 * 3 ) {

			x = mesh[ i ];
			y = mesh[ i + 1 ];
			z = mesh[ i + 2 ];
			s = sin( t1 + x * t1 ) + sin( t2 + y * t2 ) + sin( t3 + z * t3 );

			if ( s >= 0 ) {

				xy = rcx * y - rsx * z;
				xz = rsx * y + rcx * z;

				yz = rcy * xz - rsy * x;
				yx = rsy * xz + rcy * x;

				zx = rcz * yx - rsz * xy;
				zy = rsz * yx + rcz * xy;

				vx = zx - cx;
				vy = zy - cy;
				vz = yz + cz;

				if ( vz > 0 ) {

					color = ( 64 / vz ) >> 0;
					context.fillStyle = 'rgb('+ ( color - 16 ) + ','+ ( color * 2 - 128 ) + ','+ ( color + 64 ) + ')';

					size = s * 30 / vz;
					sizeHalf = size / 2;

					context.fillRect( ( vx / vz ) * widthHalf - sizeHalf, ( vy / vz ) * widthHalf - sizeHalf, size, size );

				}

			}
		}

	}, 16 );

} )();

Which, after compression ends up like this:

var O=24,d=O*O*O,X=0,U=0,T=0,S=0,W,j,L,o,m,k,b,q,ac,n,ab,l,K,I,r,p,Z,Y,C=0,A=0,w=1,G=1,F=1,E=0,V,P,N,M,u=Math.sin,f=Math.cos,v=Math.PI*3,R=0,Q=0,H,g=document,D=g.body,h,aa,B=[],a=innerWidth,e=innerHeight,J=a/2,c=e/2;D.style.margin="0px";D.style.overflow="hidden";h=g.body.children[0];h.width=a;h.height=e;aa=h.getContext("2d");aa.translate(J,c);g.onmousemove=function(i){R=(i.clientX-J)/1e3;Q=(i.clientY+c)/1e3};while(X++=0){K=q*T-b*S;I=b*T+q*S;p=n*I-ac*U;r=ac*I+n*U;Z=l*r-ab*K;Y=ab*r+l*K;o=Z-C;m=Y-A;k=p+w;if(k>0){H=(64/k)>>0;aa.fillStyle="rgb("+(H-16)+","+(H*2-128)+","+(H+64)+")";j=W*30/k;L=j/2;aa.fillRect((o/k)*J-L,(m/k)*J-L,j,j)}}}},16);

20 comments

This weekend Euskal took place and for quite a while I was considering doing a demo for it, but it wasn't until Friday night that I finally got free time for doing it (and the deadline was Saturday evening...).

Now that three.js was starting to get stable and also thanks to some sequencing code I had done some months ago I had no excuses to get working on it. So, from Friday midnight until Saturday afternoon, I managed to get this:



That's just a video of the demo, watch the actual demo.

Quite amazing how quickly you can get stuff done with javascript once you have the basic libs ready ;)

I need to check what's wrong with Opera, for some reason is not cleaning the screen. Apart from that it should work in all browsers (albeit quite slow in some, specially MacOS ones). Oh, I think it wouldn't work on Safari either, as it seems to be the only modern browser that doesn't support .ogg files.

In case anyone is interested, I've also shared the source code.

EDIT: Found the problem with Opera. Turns out context.clearRect() doesn't work if the context has been transformed with negative values. I'll let them fix their bug ;)

60 comments

Here it's a project I made over the past weekend. I warn you, it's kinda weird. (Chrome 4+, Safari 5+, Firefox 4+ only)



You'll find some more iterations on my twitpic.

Now, lets give some context...

Nerd talk

Over the past few weeks I've seen people over twitter talking about this node.js thing. Because I've been quite into Javascript this year last week Jaakko was asking if I had played with node.js yet. I still didn't know what it was but he was kind enough to explain.

So node.js is like Apache but super optimised and lightweight, the coolest part is that you code your server in Javascript. Besides a small problem I had to deal with it was really easy to compile and install on my Ubuntu system.

Then there was this other hype thing, and that's websockets which basically is an open connection between the client and the server. You can send data to the server via websocket without having to send additional headers for each request.

So Jaakko persuaded me to try doing a node.js + websockets + harmony experiment. I was going to spend the weekend doing the WebGL renderer for three.js (which I did yesterday), and my mind was in another place, but somehow he convinced me ("fucking do it now" may have been the key ;D).

Ok, there are a bunch of node.js libraries to handle websockets. At first I was using socket.io but it seemed to use a lot of cpu. After a looking at the code a bit we find out that they JSON all the data that gets sent all the time. That can be useful but in this case it was quite a bit of overhead (and I think they're working to fix that). So I ended up using miksago's node-websocket-server which broadcasts the data to all the connected users as it got sent.

At this point is when you just need to sit down and get the thing working. Once it was working locally I got a slice in slicehost and in a matter of minutes the experiment was live. Considering that it costs $20 for 150gb of BW and that I received €60 from flattr last month I though it was worth spending that money on this project. (EDIT: At this rate I suspect I'll end up spending the full €60 on this...)

The first version of the code was pretty much brute force, every user was sending their X,Y position every time they moved their mouse. Yes, that's *a lot* of data per second. There has been 50gb of data transfered in just 4 days :P However, yesterday night I finally got a bit of time and improved a bit the data that gets transferred, and not only it consumes less bandwidth, the server's CPU is much happier (btw, thanks sole for the top tip :D).

Monitoring interactions

Leaving the technicalities aside, this experiment is very different from everything I've done until now. I've never seen how the people interact with my experiments. The feedback I get from them are emails, comments on the blog or tweets. Which basically reduces to a couple of sentences defining how the experience was. Which is good, but it's impossible to get a clear impression of the experience of the user.

With this one, I can see the people interacting. I can see people experimenting and writing scripts and doing unexpected things with the system (which were fun, but please, don't). I was even able to see people trying XSS exploits in realtime.

Considering how easy it was to put this together I won't be surprised if in a year or two, most of the websites use websockets to monitor how exactly their users navigate the site and improve the UX in realtime. And this is just an exmaple, imagine the possibilities!

Human behaviour

As expected, people like to draw male reproduction organs all over the place, and an annoying one was people scribbling on top of nice drawings. It was so annoying that I even had to tweak the brush algorithm to discourage such actions. The faster you move the cursor the less opacity the pencil has. Stupid solutions for stupid problems.

However, when humans want to collaborate the experiment becomes super fun. If you manage to get in a time that there isn't much people (rooms next?) and there is a collaborative person it can be great. For instance, the screenshot at the beginning of this post, I did some of the drawings on it in collaboration with a stranger, First I did a square with eyes and mouth, then he did another one on the site as if they were two squares that were about to collide and then he started doing the animal bits on the new one which I also followed by doing a joke to a classic internet image. It's also great when 4/5 users get organised and draw something together. 3-in-a-row games are also great :D

Last but not least, it's amazing to see, not only how one user interacts with the tool, but how they interact with the other people. That creates many games, they even create their own social rules for the place. And if that wasn't enough, I find it amazing to see how the cursors behave like "humans". If you put your cursor on top of another cursor, that other cursor is likely to get away. Like when someone you don't know get too close to you. The most interesting case was "Talentina", which I suspect is a little girl. She seemed happy and was drawing cute things like a giraffes and so on, but then someone will arrive and draw a penis on it. She would move the cursor away, like looking from the distance, and move away like in a slow/sad pace...

And lets not forget the fact that the history doesn't get saved, if you refresh you'll get a blank canvas. That's also a very strange behaviour to get used to, but people seem to be turning it into a feature :D

Unexpectedly fascinating.

EDIT: Running MacOS? Need a new screensaver? Cédric Raud has done something for you.

http://hxt.fr/vrac/Multiuser%20Sketchpad.screensaver.1.1.zip

Also... from "ops" in the comments, a recording of a session at 4000x :O



79 comments

Some of you may have realised already that I've been using a Javascript FPS counter on some of my experiments.

Originally it had exactly the same look as the Actionscript version but, as far as I know, you can't query the system to get the amount of memory the application is using from Javascript. So 2 of the 4 common values of the Actionscript version were empty. That made me reconsider the design and tried to improve it a bit. And after using it for quite a while I think it's ready.



As you can see it has two modes, FPS and MS. Just click on the widget to switch between them. I may change MS to use greens instead of cyan to match the Actionscript version a bit more. Thoughts?

Unfortunately this time the code is not as simple as the Actionscript version, but I think it's still simple enough.

var stats = new Stats();
parentElement.appendChild(stats.domElement);

setInterval(function () {

    stats.update();

}, 1000/60);

Find the source code, compressed file and more examples at the project page on github.

15 comments

It's not the first time I mess with plane deformations, I also did some Pixel Bender experiments with them some years ago.

The principle of this technique is to apply a formula to every pixel of the output bitmap. If you know about shaders of Pixel Bender you know how this works.

Depending of the formula you're going to deform a source texture creating different forms. Javascript seems to be quite fast doing Math computations, the bottleneck, as usual, is drawing the pixels to the bitmap. So I thought it was worth porting the code and the formulas in order to get a base for it and have yet another experiment to test the new browser versions with.



Once again, using shaders we'll be able to do this kind of effects with much better resolution and speeds as soon as WebGL gets enabled on browsers by default.

Until then, feel free to take a look at the code and mess with the formulas.

31 comments

Since I made three.js public I've been refactoring a bit some parts and experimenting a bit with potential performance improvement tricks. I won't go much into details, but maybe this snapshot will give you some idea of what I tried.



So that's nice and all that, but I was starting to get tired of flat colors so I decided it was time to try to implement textures and uv mapping. I took a look other engines to see how they were implementing these and the one that seemed the simplest and fastest was the one in pre3d which was done by Thatcher Ulrich. That also needed a bit of refactoring because I was storing the UV data on each triangle. Instead, it's better to store the UV on the geometry level so you can have different UV mappings (also called channels) for the same geometry.

Once I got that working it was time to do a bunch of demos and see how the browsers were able to handle it. Coincidently, Apple published their infamous HTML5 some days before.



From all the demos I got mostly interested on the VR one:



I know, I was also excited when I saw that message. Anyway, I managed to try the demos in Safari and this demo is pretty much a panorama. 6 planes textures and the camera inside. For that they used the CSS transforms which are only available in Safari at the moment. So I wondered if I could do that same effect using three.js and the new feature.

Turns out you don't need Safari to do a panorama. It's not as fast (not hardware accelerated), but hey, it works. I wasn't too happy about these textures and I looked for better ones for a proper demo. This is how it ended up:



That's better. Certainly slower as it's fullscreen but it has potential.

Next thing to try was using <video> as a texture for a plane. Adding a fake reflection on the floor for extra niceness.



Although it may seem much more advanced it's not. We just need to draw the <video> element to the texture applied in every frame.

Last, but not least interesting, was a Terrain Generator demo. The code to generate the height map and texture is not too different from the code I wrote some years ago while trying to do a raycaster. Only this time I needed to generate the texture instead and let the engine do the rendering part. After a couple of iterations [1, 2], this is the result:



I know, is so slow it's pointless, but I'm having fun doing all this anyway. I hope browsers will keep improving their implementation of <canvas> and maybe all this will have some potential. However, I have to say that I think a lot of things can be done with this. People have done amazing things with even more limitations.



Ah... so tempting... :P Anyway, I better start implementing a WebGL renderer to the engine.



13 comments

As you may have seen, I've recently added a few Flattr buttons to some of my experiments.

Flattr? What? Here here:



I really hope it to succeed. It's like the old (and not so old) days, when the artists were funded by the people that enjoyed their work.

You may wonder, what was wrong with Paypal donations? Well... Paypal it's a bit like having to go to the bank every time you wanted to donate a coin.

Here it's my profile over there.

13 comments

Seems like Harmony has had a fairly amount of success since it was released. Nowadays, you just need to search on Facebook for fan pages created by others about any or your works to know if it was successful or not. In this case I found 2! :)

So I can't be happier about it. With the release I also decided to share the source code hoping that people would play with it, create more brushes and in the end improve the application.

Instead, people started porting (or encapsulating) the code on mobile platforms (iPhoneOS / Android) which I also found great. Here it's a list of all the ports I'm aware of:

Paid

AbtMagicSand Classic by Ultie, Inc. (iPhone OS)
ASKetch Pad by AKERN Software (iPhone OS)
Harmonious. by The Angry Robot Zombie Factory (iPhone OS)
LiveSketch by Yan Rabovik (iPhone OS)
LiveSketch HD by Yan Rabovik (iPhone OS)
OmniSketch by Richard Taylor (iPhone OS)
Touch Sketch by Luksor (iPhone OS)
Really Big Pictures HD by Zeno Machine (iPhone OS)
Qvik Sketch Pro by Qvik (iPhone OS)

Free

Draw(er) by Dansl (Android)
MiniTones by Banana Coding (iPhone OS)
Qvik Sketch by Qvik (iPhone OS)
Sketcher by wargoth (Android)

If I have forgotten any app, feel free to share it on the comments.

EDIT: I've modified the post to focus on the part of listing all the adaptations and removed the part about people behaviour using the open source code. Joa made a very good point in the comments: "Why should an app not be open source if it is completely based on other open source ideas?". I'll take that in consideration from now on.

50 comments

This one is a really old effect that I always wanted to do. It has two part, first the 2d water effect, and then the parallax effect.

Water Effect

It all starts (once again) from this page. On there you'll see a "magic" trick to simulate 2d water. I've implemented that code in Actionscript and even as a Pixel Bender Shader but unfortunately never got something interesting out of it. Some months ago I revisited it again and made a Javascript version which has been on my site for a while.



At first it was a bit boring in black and white, but with a bit of experimenting I found out this color offset that made it look more interesting.

Parallax Effect

While working on the water effect I somehow remembered HeartQuake by Iguana. A MSDOS demo from 1994. One of the effects in that demo consisted in a 2'5D liquid surface.



(You can see the effect on the 5:32 mark)

I've seen that demo many times, but only this time I had enough knowledge to start guessing how each effect was made. The effect looked like the water effect but used as elevation map, maybe using voxels for creating the 2,5D illusion. I tried the voxels path but it was too slow for Javascript, so I forgot about it and left it there.

This week, for some reason, I ended up at Petri Leskinen's blog once again. On this visit I realised he shared a very interesting snippet. It seemed like a very fast technique to simulate 2'5D terrains. I quickly tried it out to see how fast it performed in Javascript and the results seemed pretty good (18ms for creating the perlin texture, 17ms for the elevated one).

So from there it was a matter a putting everything together and playing a bit with the code until I found an interesting level of interaction. The text idea seemed to work quite well, it had very mermerising motions so I went forward with it also as a bit of homage to Iguana's demo.

There are still a bunch of oldschool effects I want to try using <canvas> before I jump to WebGL shaders. As always, feel free to abuse of the beauty of Javascript: Right click > View Source :)

12 comments

Today neave was sharing this interesting talk over twitter. I wish I would have seen it before... now I'll need to go back and fix most of the JavaScript I've written :S



20 comments