Metaballs, everyone’s favorite computer-generated globby blobs , have been around for a while. They’re the product of a rush of innovation in computer graphics during the 1980′s by the likes of Ken Perlin, Bui Tuong Phong, and Jim Blinn, when computer graphics began recognizing the need for organic shapes and shaders. The algorithm has been implemented countless times and can be astoundingly efficient and simple; the hardest part is finding something useful for them. Here is our take on it.

A cover flow is a great way to display and browse through discrete content. It feels like flipping through a magazine: easy and fast, but informative. Its a natural addition to many user interfaces, but many existing implementations are like black boxes with strict display rules. You add in your elements, and you end up with iTunes 7. We needed something more generic and reusable; those were the priorities. We take a look at the built in transform property of a DisplayObject, and how that can be used to build an flexible flow

We have finally managed to get everything together so that we can release the Alchemy Source Code to our Ogg Vorbis Encoder/Decoder library for Flash! Hit link from the post and start getting your hands dirty with the source!

This episode is a bit of a catch all for some other random things that we wanted to cover in this series, like multiple file libraries, async functions, and Flash access from C. The hope is, by the time you are done reading this post (along with the last 4) you will be able to start build swcs of other libraries, or even creating your own directly in C. If this ends up being the case, please let us know, we would love to see what you guys make! Anywho, on with the show…

Real-time graphics have been an obsession of mine since the day my father came home with an Atari 800xl. I spent hours copying lines of BASIC code out of magazines to play games like “Space Junk” only for my mother to come in and turn the Atari off while I was at school and flushing my hard work.

This week, in Part 4 of our Alchemy Series we are exploring Data Management and Manipulation from Flash to C and back. We cover keeping state inside of Alchemy code, as well as dealing with ByteArrays as File Streams and other basic data handling.

In part 3 of our Adobe Alchemy series we finally dive into some C code, and get an example up and running from scratch. You will be exposed to words like “thunk” and “bash” and not be referring to a bad cave man joke. Oh, and you will also make calls to C functions from Flash