Future blog posts

I thought I should write about the goals and future directions on the blog. The main point for me is that regularly publishing updates will encourage me to do more, and better coding as I explore procedural graphics. I hope others can learn or enjoy them too.

The demos so far are in canvas, as I started learning Canvas recently. Thoughts on canvas:

-Very easy to share. Just load a page to view demo, and view source to read the code.
-Javascript the language is good and bad, but I miss having a good editor.
-Canvas is really slow.

2d vs 3d: After a certain level of scene complexity, I find it easier to do things in 3d rather than 2d, as you can just create the points and lots of things are taken care of for you. I don't think the web is a great platform for 3d graphics, and so I will be using Java applets and Open GL.

TODO:

canvas:
-Stochastic fractals (see Diffusion)
-A few more generated nature scenes etc like "Forest Night": beach, city scape, snowflakes
-A stripped down format for drawing shapes in canvas
-A polygon, shape etc editor for canvas
-I don't know the word for this subject, but visualisations of entity interactions - eg predator prey, termites, game of life, boids, daisy world, iterated prisoner's dilemma etc

Java applets:
-Procedural city generation (from my existing C++ code)
-Terrain generation (eg mountains)
-Texture generation (eg I have seen algorithms that move pixels randomly in 3d, take a 2d slice and the texture looks something like marble)
-Plant generation (including 3d L-System turtles)