This year I had the honor to be part of the opener show for Adobe MAX 2010. I really appreciate that the people at Adobe working on the keynote took the risk to try this out.
Mike Chambers asked me already in April this year if I would like to do it. He had the idea of Erik Natzke generating art, me doing live coding and a DJ playing music. Eric Clark has been a fantastic supporter of Audiotool so I thought it would be really nice to have him do it. Luckily he agreed.
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I wanted to make a simple bug fix release for Apparat since I solved some bugs and issues. However there are two additional features that are worth mentioning. First of all Apparat comes now with an ASMifier tool. This allows you to let Apparat generate code from an existing SWF. It will create a file that contains a basic class structure with statements that you can directly use for __asm optimizations. You can also suppress all log output and turn Apparat into quiet mode by specifying -Dapparat.quiet=true.
Also worth mentioning: JITB ships now by default with Apparat. What does it mean? Quadruple-rainbow in your face. You can now run your SWF files with JITB if you follow the five golden steps to pure happiness:
scala in a terminal, then type println(System getProperty "java.library.path" split java.io.File.pathSeparatorChar mkString "\n") and remember one of the folderslwjgl-2.5/native/YOUR OS/ into one of the folders that the Scala command showed you./jitb some.swf to launch JITB
Now here is the problem. JITB is not complete and so it will probably fail with your SWF — In fact I can nearly gaurantee you that it will not launch your SWF. I included JITB basically because it already allows you to use GLSL shaders very easy and I know a lot of people would like to play around with that.
However I have created an archive of all files I showed at FOTB besides the files that came from David’s laptop since I do not have them on my machine. You might be interested in checking out Example12.as which is the one that uses GLSL shaders. If you want to compile your own version you will need to link apparat-ersatz.swc as an external library since it contains the ContinuousFileLoader and GLSLShader class. Happy hacking!
Update: Also read Ray tracing with Pixel Bender using JITB by David Laenarts for details on the FOTB demos.
The Flash Player is to many of us developers a blackbox. We use it every day in our job but do not really know much about it. Of course we do not have to understand its inner workings but it is sometimes very interesting to know more a little bit about specific implementation details.
One of the biggest challenges when writing a program like JITB is to convert ActionScript to Java. There are major differences between ActionScript 3.0 and Java 1.6 which JITB currently targets.
ActionScript 3.0 is a dynamically typed language with function closures. Furthermore it has native XML support, scope-changes, implicit getters and setters etc. The main issue however is to convert the set of bytecodes ahead of time to statically typed Java code. JITB does not know anything about what is going on since it compiles all the code ahead of time.
I have demoed support for PixelBender shaders in JITB at the FOTB 2010 conference. It turned out that JITB can run PixelBender code really fast and well. I have demoed a Julia and Terrain raytracer which were both kindly contributed by David Lenaerts. I only showed the demos since I would have been running out of time. I still owe you an explanation of how it all works.
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