as3 plasma effect

Year: 2009
Tools: ActionScript 3.0

 

It all began with demos! When I saw my first Amiga-demo in 1988 I was immediately addiceted. By and by I formated most of my floppy disks, that were full of games, to have enough resources for my growing demo collection. I spend hours watching demos and swapping new stuff with others. I started creating Logos and Bitmap Fonts with Deluxe Paint and later explored musical possibilities with Soundtracker. From the demoscene I learned a lot about the creative use of computers. I thik, without the demos, I would not do the stuff I do today.

 

As a tribute to the good old days I wanted to convert some of the obligatory demo effects to flash. I thought about a fire-, tunnel- and plasma effect. And here is the first one: plasma!

The code is quite "brute force" with setPixel() on a BitmapData object. Expectedly, it's not very high-performance (change the size of the plasma area above and observe the franerate drop) but it has all features of the good old plasmas including color cycling. The only way to have the plasma cover a larger area is scaling the bitmap where the plasma gets drawn to (plasma scale slider). For a better performance without scaling have a look at the Pixel Bender version.

 

If you want to see the really COOL flash conversions of Amiga (and all other 16-bit systems) Intros and Cracktros drop over at www.flashtro.com. They are really doing an awsome job!