Weblog: Pieter Vanderwerff Visualisations

Since I have been experimenting with the Flint particle system in Flash I decided to make a basic simulator using this action script library. The simulator did not need to be accurate it just needed to show the basic principles and relationships present.

Image of the TVR simulator | Flash file.

To create this project it was necessary to implement line zone collisions from the Lines and Collisions branch of the Flint SVN to allow the particles to bounce off bounding lines. This was very simple to implement, the first thing needed was to download and upgraded my Flint source code from the SVN, i then created a copy of the BoudingBox.as file in twoD\actions and called it BoundingShape.as. The file was then modified to reflect the new class name (BoundingShape) and changed to accept a LineZone instead of rectangular coordinates. The main update function was then changed to the following.

override public function update(emitter:Emitter,particle:Particle,time:Number ):void
{
    var p:Particle2D = Particle2D( particle );
    _zone.collideParticle(p, _bounce);
}

This code calls the collide particle function of the LineZone which check for a collision and if present it updates the particle to the new velocity and direction. The Bounding Shape action can then be implemented into your project with the following line of code.

emitter.addAction( new BoundingShape( new LineZone( point1, point2 ), 0.7 ) );

Click here to see the finished product of this project. Also if there is interest in seeing the source code for the TVR simulator or the bounding shape action leave a comment and I can upload the files.