Everything about Flash

Stage3D is hugely powerful, but with that power comes a very new and very complicated requirement for many programmers: shaders. Shaders are tiny programs that run on the GPU and are hugely limited compared to fancy CPU-side languages like AS3. For many programmers new to shaders these things are truly mind-bending. They’re even split into two parts: vertex and fragment shaders. Today’s article focuses on the two kinds of inputs to vertex shaders and seeks to explain them and clear up some of the confusion.

This week sees a few new updates to ReDiLab - my Stage3D / AGAL based reaction diffusion laboratory.

First off, my lovely friends at Finkk designed the funky logo above which lives in the 'about' dialog. 

There are two changes to the application itself:

My recent myriad of experiments with reaction diffusion models has coalesced into a single Stage3D based Flex application, ReDiLab (for Reaction Diffusion Laboratory). 

This evening, I locked myself away with a glass of Rioja determined to fix my Stage3D rendering woes once and all.Last night's efforts were so close, but I couldn't help feeling they could be tweaked a little more. Having a fixed Stage3D viewport of 1024 x 1024 felt a little limiting.

HLAG is a high level shader language which compiles to AGAL instructions for use with Adobe Flash or AIR.

While I was on my way to learn how to make shadows (and it’s a big topic),
I met the rendering to texture method.
And as I was digging into this technic,
I decided to delay my journey in shadowland and to paste some time exploring
the rendered textures and texture projections because it’s the first step of
some great technics such as light mapping, dynamic displacement map, of course shadows , etc…

I'm excited to be able to post the first iteration of my Stage3D based Reaction Diffusion Explorer based on my AGAL Gray Scott shader.