tyler

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this page is WIP!

Definately send me an email if you're interested in tyler.

Tyler is a little graphics experimentation tool written in java - it started as a browser applet, but eventually - because browser permissions became too limiting for its development - graduated to a java application.

Tyler is basically a little tool for playing with pixels and particles.

For the particles, (which are 2d only at the moment) they can be emitted, propagated through the frame (duplicated, rotated, scaled and so-on) using an L-String (much like an L-System), take (or modify) their colors from their position in the pixel buffer, and be drawn in various ways using the java AWT primitives.

For the pixels, images may be loaded (in a separate thread and faded to) and viewed through the buffer in a simple pixel-processing feedback engine, the main goal of which was to support pixel-automata and roughly antialiased feedback image warping in the same fast framework (which unfortunately is still not that fast in java).

The pixel processing engine in tyler is based on a class called 'topology', which handles the neighborhoods, and a class called 'rule', which handles several dimensional arrays of values (float, integer, and color) that are used in the processing of the topologies to control the feedback behaviour.

Topologies are generated by a generator class called 'topologyGenerator' which runs in a separate thread so that the main action can continue. 'Topologies' are like a simple stack of integer-addresses that point (one-dimensionally, like a memory pointer) to other pixels in the buffer. This means that there is no math to be done to retrieve a neighbor pixel, you simply jam the integer into an array lookup and you're there. This mechanism is able to support most common rectilinear automata neigborhoods, such as the Moore neighborhood and the Von Neumann neighborhood, as well as rasterisations of complicated vector fields

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