Update: Now it appears that the censorship is strict on many levels. The complaint is widely shared by all the playstation community. Terms that may offend in religion or any internationally criticized topic are subjected to a high level of censorship. Is it partly because moderating an open community with Audio/Visual communication is harder? Or is it that Sony is targeting a more friendly audience with Home? It is note-able that the average user of a PS3 is from ages 15-25 and most people at that age start understanding the quirks of being in a social service. Given that, it does not justify the censorship of country names and I stand my ground about the complaint.

It is after a long time that I am going to post about something aside from programming. Recently, I have been busy playing Playstation Home using my PS3. Don’t mind Sony, you trashed a perfectly great idea. People are enjoying it because it is a new experience for them. I believe not many people know about Second Life anyway. So, a job not done well.

What concerned me was how Home is reacting towards international issues in its user policy. You can type “Pakistan” or “Afghanistan” in your chat area and your friends will tell you that all they see are asterisks. Wow!. Now why would Sony go that far? It may not be a big issue for people living in a country which is not censored but it is for me. A company such as Sony should be neutral in its application to its consumers. It is not doing any good to the people who are using the crappy service but shows how racist a common service can be.

Take this as a complaint from a loyal Sony consumer.

M.H.A.Q.S.

Update:  I found a memory leak in the AS3Steer branch and uploaded a quick fix. The branch also contains an example now.  If anyone wants to have a visual look into it, please check out the google repository. This will also show how differently Opensteer handles Flocking compared to other flocking algorithms.

I had to no idea what to name this post . Yes, I’ve been away again. My job has really taken me away from my personal interests. Nevertheless, there are people on the web that motivate me to get back into my work and update it. I have so much to write and I don’t know what to write first about…

Well to start off, I missed to write about some wonderful news on the web and that was the release of Processing getting out to BETA. I believe, I always loved processing even before Flash or Action script came into my consideration. If you do not know what processing is, I recommend you read Daniel Shiffman’s newly published book about Processing. It is worth the time and your hard earned money (highly recommended).

Further up, I have had many of my personal projects begging to be shared and uploaded. I am highly endowed to the people on the internet helping the community with their precious time. Thank you everyone…

I have uploaded a working copy of PaperSteer to the Google Repository. The core of library has been checked a million times by me, so it shoudl work without any issues. I have branched PaperSteer:

AS3Steer
This version is no nonsense heart of the OpenSteer library. This version is purely actionscript. It is optimized and not a direct port of its ancestor. I have removed the annotation, the plugins, and drawing classes as well as many amounts of non understandable code, just so that anyone who picks up OpenSteer for Actionscript can work with it. People have been asking me for an example of how to use the library with ActionScript. Well, I did not think it was that difficult, but here it is anyway.

PaperSteer
Now this version is a direct port of its ancestor. I am kind of happy that I managed to port the (not so much easy to understand) opensteer library in its originality. Here are the updates in big points:

- Flash Player 10 support.
- There are heavy optimizations there that WILL speed it up. These optimizations include:

Type casting
Function reductions
Typed Arrays and what not…

- Plugins are there now for anyone’s reference and YES they are working
- The drawing routine has been re written entirely, but is buggy and I am working on it. You’ll immediately notice it.
I call this revision a BETA. If you have not gone through the papersteer repository yet, I recommend you may give it a try.

So, that’s about it for PaperSteer. I have some more goodies to share .

I have had an enormous response for my R4 – Music Visualizer. People have been searching and asking for its sources. I remember, I promised to share the sources once I was finished with it. But frankly I left it midway as I had other things to do. Even then, below is the current shape of how it looks like. And here are the sources . Go make crazy stuff.

I made a 3D version of the Boids algorithm for Papervision3D as well. This is only to help people who may want to program this behavior in PV3D. You can replace those cones with actual Bird DAE’s and it’ll be more than you expect it to be. The sources here.

Next up are my naughty friends from nowhere. I just love them. You will too. Sources here…

Am I forgetting something? Oh yeah, I have a download section now. People keep asking me where they can download certain stuff or libs that were posted earlier on the blog. For a hint, I have fixed:

Vector3D class
Why use it when Adobe has a Vector3D class built into Flash 10? Well, go see for yourself. I have spent too much a time to make this the ultimate Vector3D class there can be .

The Colors Class
I missed the XNA and AS2 Colors class so much that I created this nifty class to help out in my color cycles. It has many colors to choose from and it helps you convert between RGB, Vector and Hex values.

There are other utility classes in the Tabinda.net utils package. Pretty useful stuff if you ask me. Go check all of it out. Whew! I think that’d to for today. But wait, there is one more question I get a lot and that is about my portfolio and it’s inspiration. To summarize it in a single sentence,

“Yes, I created this portfolio out of emotion. I was a fan of Stefan Sagmeister and his design. The idea remains intact that it was to Touch Someone’s heart with design.”

Over and out…
M.H.A.Q.S.

Hi guys,

I’ve been lazy but eventually I managed to upload a new build of PaperSteer to the repository. This revision is a major overhaul of what I did with the port. It is in fact written from scratch. I wanted this port to be oriented towards its C++ parent i.e. the original release from Craig Reynolds and that is the reason why, I was not at all satisfied with my original release.

CHANGES:

- I have now uploaded the documentation, plugins and the new build with lots and LOTS of improvements.
- Bug fixes, stupid errors that I was overlooking.
- AS3 optimizations.
- OOP implementations and strict rules on compilation and AS3 compliance.

However, this build still does not contain the Demo which I initially promised for this build, but bear with me because I am actually working on it. Once that is done, I will be giving Papersteer a turn that the actual Opensteer lacks and that is, dynamic creation and loading of plugins.

Yes, I know that is something very big to tout about but since I love working on personal projects, I will definitely finish this sooner or later. For now, the build is up and I must say again that it is rather a preview for people to look at my work and it is broken. Porting a huge library such as Opensteer can be a severe pain, if it requires changes to the design and core implementations of the classes.

Go check it out already.

Apart from that, I recently tried to keep my artistic side alive by recreating an old scene from one of my favorite games of all time…Metal Slug. A destroyed submerged tank in the deep blue see…I hope you like it.

Regards,
MHAQS