I’ve been having another play with Processing and a bit of simple maths. Ages ago I came across the works of John Whitney, and this rather hypnotic little Flash application. It always fascinated me how the dots went around their circlular paths and new patterns emerged, and I thought it’d be cool to make my own.

Circular Motion 1	Circular Motion 2	Hypotrochiod
Watch the slightly hypnotic patterns emerge from basic circular motion.	More hypnotic patterns and emergent behaviour from simple maths.	This one creates pretty gemoetric patterns called Hypotrochiods

Go on over to my Processing Applets page and have a look.

Twangy String - 1D rippling water

I use the Processing language to try out little coding ideas, or to have fun making something that looks pretty, or is amusing. After looking around my computers while tidying up I found several worthy of showing off, and have created a page on my main website to display these sketches.

Each sketch does one thing, and was either created by me to test out an idea, learn something new, or simply to have a bit of fun. After writing out structured database and Windows GUI code it’s nice to sit down with a few half thought out ideas and see what happens. The 1D rippling water was my attempt at copying the ‘water’ from Electroplankton, and the Circles sketch was inspired by Bloom on the iPhone.

I intend on updating the page as I create new sketches.

I’ve got the 30 day trial of BlitzMax on my Macbook. I’m quite bored of wasting time messing around when writing games. So bored that it puts me off beginning anything. I’ve got loads of ideas and I get stuck not knowing where to start, the effort of having to reinvent the wheel making sprite libraries is irritating.

I’ll give BlitzMax a go and see what that’s like. To keep up the motivation I feel like documenting the process on my main website.

I had a good bit of fun with Processing the other week, using the tilt sensor in my Macbook to control stuff on the screen.

Processing is really good, it’s more like hacking than any other form of programming that I’ve done. That’s “hacking” in the original sense, not the l33t hax0rz sense btw.

I took a piece of code that originally drew coloured lines across the screen, replaced the lines with circles, made the circles go upwards and ended up with something I call Exploding Dots.

My copy of Processing, Creative Coding and Computational Art has arrived. Now to begin the good old system of learning a programming language by typing out lots of examples and messing with them

The book contains information on how to write code using Processing, but I think I can safely ignore that part; well until I come across some weird part of Java anyway. I bought it for the ideas and sample code it provides. Being one of those people for whom maths is a confusing and difficult subject I like to see a direct cause and effect when learning new things.

I’ll upload my efforts to my projects area for people to look at and play with.