Flying Butterflies

Here is the latest version of the Butterfly project. There is no interactivity in this test, but you can see the butterflies, the “flaps” (which are the black circles) and the “overlaps” (the transparent blue circles). The display scales if you stretch the browser/player.

I have no idea how well the server will hold up over the next day, so if things aren’t working when you check this demo out, i’m sorry. This test will be for one day only (Monday), so if you are reading this after the 13th, you are out of luck.

I’m finding that the client is pretty slow - slower then i would have thought it should be. I’m pretty sure its because all the messages are delivered via JSON, and the cost of each call to the parse() method is expensive. I need to do some profiling to make sure, of course, but thats the most likely culprit. However, as Donald Knuth would say, “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, so i’m going to try to not get too hungup about the performance right now. It is still very early days, and there is lots to do before i need to worry about writing my own protocol!

Update I’m now running the client and server on seperate computers. This has pretty much cleared up most of the speed issues i was seeing before. Nice.

Update 2 I just thought i’d mention that this is post #1000! Unfortunatly, there are still lots of old archived posts that i haven’t added into the MT system, so really i must have reached 1000 a while ago. Regardless, that’s a lot of posts!