Do it.

Yeah, I'm a philosopher. Not much point in trying to maintain the anonymity given that my website has both things on it now. Hello, internet stalkers from my old high school! Hope your lives turned out to be happy and fulfilling!

The reason this experiment is interesting is that we should all start being nicer to one another, according to John Gabriel's Greater Theorem.

Don't you change your avatars as well, or we'll have no clue who you are!

/edit I'm halfway in on this. I need my work stuff to be #1 on Google, and I know if I use my full name my TIGs profile will be the #1 hit in about 3 seconds.

/edit 2, in case that sounded incredibly egotistical, I should say that I'm the only person in the world with my name, so having the #1 hit is not much of an achievement.

No, I realise that. What I'm saying is that Flash seems to employ the vector renderer whenever a displayobject is scaled. This seems to hurt the performance of the shaders quite a lot (but not by all that much, if it worked ok in Closure).

Ah, I knew it was in there somewhere, thanks Iamthejuggler. I'm not going crazy after all.

If using ScaleX or ScaleY on a bitmap forces it to use the vector drawing routines, you may as well attach the bitmap to a movieclip and scale that. When I tried that, I found that the effects were too slow on my laptop (which is admittedly an ultraportable mac running flash, kind of a worst-case scenario for performance). When it's kept to pure copypixels, you can run a pixel bender filter on the whole bitmap with no problems.

Just ignore me.

Grr. The documentation ALSO tells you you can't scale a bitmap. 

I give up on the documentation! It's trial-and-error from here on out...

Huh, I guess the official documentation is wrong. It explicitly tells you you can't do that in flash. Thanks for that tip!

/edit Ah, I see. You have to have the Flex SDK installed on your system.

Can't you do the scaling in the shader too?

Probably, although I'd have to make the bitmap twice as big so there was room. I don't think it would perform well enough, though.

I have a nice animated Apple IIe shader in there now.. I'd post a picture, but it doesn't look like much in a still.

You need to at least have a PC that can boot OSX. Get the free SDK, and if you're serious about it, get the paid iphone developer subscription. Then start by trying to get some example code compiled and running on a real phone.

I've been experimenting with the new Shader and ShaderFilter API, which opens some interesting creative possibilities. The following shader runs at quite an acceptable pace on a 600x360 bitmap, but not on a 600x360 displayobject. Unfortunately you can't do scaling on a bitmap, so I'm going to have to ditch this particular effect because I want my pixels to be scaled 2x.

It's doing a horizonal blur, scanlines, and rudimentary brightness/contrast.



This is actually an area where flex is superior, since you can compile your shaders into the .swf, whereas with flash you have to load it as an external file at runtime.

You can download the shader builder (Pixel Bender) at Adobe's site for free.

I thought about it a bit. I think the old orange blocks look a bit nicer with their handmade texture. However, it makes it easier to notice that all the blocks are weathered in the exact same way, which is jarring. The new purple blocks look better than the old gray ones, and the grass is much cooler now too.

I'm sad that the light is now a lot flatter because of the changes to the colours and shading. I hope you manage at least one tileset with a harsh sun.

The new backgrounds, I thoroughly approve of. Bring back gradient skies, everyone!

Hey fish, I don't know if you like getting suggestions or not, but I just had a brainwave...

You should have some mirrored blocks.

If I was playing Fez, and I could see the sky on one tile, I would assume that there was a tunnel through the level, and if I rotated the level, I'd be able to walk through to the other side. Then I would rotate the level, and it would turn out that there was a block there with a mirror on one side, and it would blow my mind.

I can image a larger area which looks like it's full of open sky, but when you rotate the level suddenly there are platforms to stand on, because the 'open sky' was full of mirrored blocks.

I'm glad to see that Poop Chute is still in development for the iPhone! 

I love it, Chrissketch!

I really should just bite the bullet and get a digital SLR.

..or at least find a decent mail-in developer that can deal with 35mm film.

This is gorgeous. It looks totally unreal.

Thanks! It was the last sunny day in Autumn in Piemonte, which gets very hazy and foggy at that time of year. The view is from a bed and breakfast which is also a winery (everybody's yard there is a winery, though) and I'm standing on a hill amongst the red and yellow grape leaves, looking at a nearby villa in the late afternoon. As for the rolling hills and neat crops, it looks like that all through the region. Totally recommended for a driving holiday - only in Autumn, when the white truffles are in season and relatively cheap.

Moogled: love that Jersey coast pic. I have only been down there once, and it was Atlantic city so it didn't look much like that!

I really never felt like I was hemmed into a linear path. I mean, I knew I was on a linear path, but it always felt like I was going where I wanted to go (i.e. away from the bad guys). I guess they were herding me towards the correct path but I felt like I was running freely away from them.

This is the real benefit to playing the game while avoiding combat completely. If they made a bad design mistake, it was in letting you fight at all...

Took this on holiday in Italy.

I've been playing it too, and I think it was underrated by reviewers. It is frustrating at times, and you do have to learn by trial and error, but I liked Megaman 9, so. The game is well worth it for the art direction and the unique adrenaline rush. The music is really well matched to the action, too. The combat system might be bad, but I wouldn't know because I never engage in combat.

I'm playing on a PC though, I think it would be worse with a gamepad. (Conversely, Assassin's Creed was a waste of time with keyboard and mouse)

My main function is to bankroll my real-estate agent's Rolls Royce and provide a warm place for my cat to sit.