Actionscript3, Flash, Java, C#, C++, Algorithms & Imageprocessing
I just put up a site with all the AudioTool recordings that I think are quite interesting. It is way easier to share them like that instead of posting about every single track.
I will also put some more sets and other tracks there if I find the time. The site will update randomly.
Here are the slides from my Flash On The Beach 2008 session “AudioTool’s Private Parts”. 2mb without a prelaoder. You will need Flash Player 10 to pass through to version detection or you can save the SWF directly to disk and watch it with Flash Player 9.
I wrote a while ago about our tween engine at Hobnox but I did not post any performance demos.
Here are the results for 1000 DisplayObjects with manipulation on their scaleX, scaleY, alpha, x, y and rotation properties. It is also very important that you take a look at the memory behaviour. A click starts the tweening.
As you can see it makes a lot of sense to stay type-safe and to manage the memory you are using on your own.
I will talk about those concepts in my next session AudioTool’s Private Parts in Brighton and Boston. Since optimization on a code level is trivial the main performance boost is achieved by re-thinking algorithms, structures and concepts. I guess one of the most interesting topics will be the optimization of our cable solver which was running O(n^2) (really!), then O(n(n+1)/2) and could be minimized to a rare O(n(n-4)/2) worst-case.
Last friday was an awesome day. It was my birthday, Microsoft released Photosynth which is a product I have been watching since two years and we won the FlashForward Award in the category Sound with our Audiotool.
The Audiotool development became a very interesting topic. We implemented so many things to keep stuff optimized not only on the code layer but also on the algorithm layer. I am really looking forward to talk about some techniques in my session “Audiotool’s Private Parts” at Flash on the beach and Flash on tap.
Besides implementing OggVorbis I was working on an effect for a while. It is called the Rasselbock and will probably not make it into the next launch but since I love the device so much I have some top-secret recordings of what that little guy can do.
It is basically an IDM/glitch-type effect unit with a lot of cool features. It supports sequenced effects like gate, stutter, etc. and keeps them synchronized to the beat. A killer feature is that it includes also a sequenced mixing unit. This sounds maybe a little bit bizzare but once you can play with it you will probably love it.
All of these songs were made in about 5 minutes and are very cheap. Anyways it is a lot of fun to take any sort of instrument (like a metronome) and route it through the Rasselbock.
As André already mentioned we have finally got an Ogg Vorbis Encoder in ActionScript 3. André wrote a lot about the benefits already.
Now what I really like about the encoder is the way we could minimize the encoding time by ~50%! I know two implementations of Ogg Vorbnis. One is written in C and another one in Java. What we did first was just getting it to work and it looked pretty much like the C/Java version. Then we started optimizing the code by comparing the encoding results always to reference files. I am quiet happy because on my machine we reduced the encoding time from 32sec to 16.5sec with simple optimizations and tricks.
Where to go from here? Of course we think the best we can do is to open-source the encoder. But there are a couple of other things in my mind. I started modifing Tamarin and added two functions to the Math class. Those convert a Number to its binary IEEE32 single-precision representation and vice versa. With those two functions we could get huge speed improvements for performance hungry tasks like this one. I hope Adobe will not forget about this as well — there seems to be general problem currently trying to support the simple Flash user on the one hand and the “Flash explorer” on the other hand.
I know you may ask what this feature could be good for, but doing floating point math using bitwise operations is a killer when it comes to performance. We are currently not allowed to do this and there is no reason for that.
Hooray! We are a finalist at the Flashforward Festival in the category “Sound”. Please vote for the AudioTool in the People’s Choice section as well.
I am more than proud to announce that we won the Grimme Online Award in the category “Special”. It is the most prestigious award in Germany releated to new media. Hobnox has been picked out of 1900 nominees and we made it.
The category “Special” has been introduced to cover high quality and highly innovative projects which do not fit into any other category like “Information”, “Education” or “Entertainment”. Regarding to the press statement Hobnox has been picked not only because of its high quality content and design but also because of the Noxtools — and this makes me especially happy.
Hobnox is finally out of beta and open for everyone. You are now able to register an account even without an invite. We are still developing our next big update regarding the AudioTool. I hope to see more of those videos in the meantime!
Some days ago I was writing a tween engine for our library here at Hobnox and when I was comparing it with the other ones out there which are quiet popular (Tweener, TweenLite) I was pretty surprised that my engine was performing about 10fps faster than TweenLite when tweening 1000 objects. It was 40fps for me, 28fps for TweenLite and 14fps for Tweener. It is not only faster but the memory usage is constant and small — on a Mac it was constant 11mb for my engine versus up to 22mb for TweenLite for instance.
Since I am currently not allowed to post the source-codes I want to talk a little bit about the ideas behind the engine.
