Text Particles | Hacker News Reader

Text Particles

william.hoza.us

148 pointsDanielRibeiro21 comments

The repelling algorithm reminds me of one I accidentally came up with (this one uses a plant-like structure instead of particles though)

http://www.genesisbbs.com/appstem2.html

Cool! Reminds me of a Chrome Experiment that Ryan Alexander did: http://onecm.com/projects/canopy/

Note that you can add/edit text and you can link texts other than Chrome: http://william.hoza.us/text/?t=Hacker%20News

Is this a common demo effect? There's a very similar effect on http://generalrelativity.org/BitmapStuff.swf (it's been there since 2007).

The source code is really small and quite readable. From the source:

      var homeDX=this.homeX-this.x;
      var homeDY=this.homeY-this.y;
      var homeDistance=Math.sqrt(Math.pow(homeDX,2) + Math.pow(homeDY,2));
      var homeForce=homeDistance*0.01;
      var homeAngle=Math.atan2(homeDY,homeDX);

It seems it is just using gravitational like force, where a point is attracted to its original position. So I guess it is a more common effect for particles.

Springs?

Definitely a common effect. I remember seeing this kind of thing in the demoscene a lot of times. In fact I remember seeing a larger evolution of this recently.

What they did is used smooth particle hydrodynamics to simulate water, but then also use the text mesh as a local attractor. So the water would drip onto the invisible mesh, but then it would stick to the text just a bit more than normal allowing the words to form.

Link: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

In case it's of any help to the author, it basically doesn't run on FireFox 3.6.22 on Ubuntu 10.4. Completely unusable - pegs a core at 100%, takes minutes to do anything. A mouse click makes it change, but you can't "play" at all.

Which is a shame - it looks like it might be very impressive.

Canvas 2d is really slow on FF 3.6

It got a lot better from 4+. On the other hand it works great on Chrome. Opera is a bit slow as well, not as bad as FF 3.6 (using Ubuntu 10.4 as well).

Has there ever been a really good book on demoscene effects, old and new - and the maths behind them??

I miss that old classic stuff. Old animations with absurd graphics for the time. An S3M or MOD playing in the background. Really ground-breaking stuff. One of the classics:

Second Reality by FUTURE CREW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8

wow, 17 years old? i feel like an amateur. great job on those examples.

I spent more time staring at this and running my mouse round the screen than I care to admit. Very cool.

You can add ALT+XXX (ex. ALT+13) also, pretty cool. Although you must press 1. ALT+13 2. anything to make it show up

I expected an article on linguistics.

And your comment contributes to the conversation how?

It got me to go seek out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_particle

Why doesn't this work in IE 10 Platform Preview? I am just curious if it would run faster there.

So cool! But this makes my poor Macbook Air (2011) sound like it wants to die...

ADs :(

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