Attractors rebuild
In the beginning of this year I had some free time and thought I’d spend it on P55 (which had been a while).
Update: this post is obsolete, there is now a rerebuild.
Because I’ve been doing as3 since late 2006 I’m now all used to it’s way of oo programming. The only way to do that in P55 (using packages and all that) is by doing Java and using the P55 core library.
I’m still fascinated by strange attractors and since my old P55 attractor viewer was made in P55 alpha, and there are all these useful libraries for the latest P55, I decide to rebuild it.
So I fired up Eclipse and after I while had a really cool new version in which you can create and save attractor data to cookies, render and save images directly. And the standalone version even renders out complete movies (thanks to this cool lib).
All was going well until I started testing online. Somewhere in my code was a memory leak. I’m not that experienced with Java and/or Eclipse (yeah I do my as3 in some simple text editor because I can’t get used to Eclipses lack of features like vertical selection or keystroke recording). So I spend ages trying to find that leak, read a lot on garbage collection, changed a lot of code, but it still leaks after a while. In the end I just gave up on it, which is a pity because I had all these other cool ideas to implement.
But yesterday I thought: what the hell, I’ll post this anyway, leak or no leak. It’s no use hiding in my test folder. You can still use it to render very cool images. Just remember: when the framerate slows down, save your attractor, close the page, reload it, and load your attractor again.
I’m gonna quit ranting, here it is: Attractors rebuild.