Here’s me shepherding a couple of delightful young ladies into the booth. Then Me, Jamie and Jim signing off on the big screen. You can see there how it builds up a fullscreen wall of images and gracefully scales to take as many as we throw at it.

For Sony PS3, LOVE’s biggest digital achievement to date: The Game.

Look at the pretty games!

Check out the demo. But don’t just click on the swf when it comes up. A click saves an A2, 300dpi PNG. Just be warned that this could crash your browser, depending on memory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Got some nice new features into PrintCanvas. It’s all very well having a massive BitmapData for print, but it’d be nice to see what it’s doing on-screen without actually shoving the whole thing into the display list. Particularly when doing time-based generative stuff, I want to watch it happen!

I’ve built this into PrintCanvas using a matrix to pull out a scaled version for display. You can easily return this display Bitmap with

Stick that on your stage, then in a Timer, EnterFrame or whenever you need it, call

to refresh the BitmapData linked to the Bitmap. Simple.

Then I thought well, this is nice and quick, but really I want to see what’s going on at pixel level. So I built in a loupe that returns a 100% window on the big BitmapData. Just pass a width and a point on the display Bitmap – usually the local mouse position – into

to get another Bitmap back. Then refresh it as above by calling

In the demo above, I’ve stuck the loupe Bitmap to the mouse and masked it with a circle because it looks nice. So there. And the blue squares aren’t intended as anything pretty – they’re just there to show it updating and give you something to look at with the loupe. I’ll get something nice going soon, I promise.

I’m pretty impressed with the performance on this, even on my 4 year old MacBook Pro! If you consider in the demo it’s getting both sets of data from an unseen A2 canvas at 300dpi, every frame, that’s not bad. Seems a good deal faster still in the standalone FP10 player/IDE for some strange reason.

So here, have the code if you must.

One last ice photo from yesterday’s ice adventure. Again, retouching was great fun, so maybe I should get out and shoot more than once every six months.

Went for a drive over Snake Pass this afternoon. Came across the other side and a pond had overflowed and flooded the road, so ice had kept freezing on the bushes as cars kept splashing them. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Click through for the big pics on Flickr.

I can recommend extensive dodging and burning to make ice sparkle. It’s very therapeutic.

I’d been wanting to play with Mario’s “image foam” experiments since I saw him present them at FOTB a couple of years ago and finally got round to it yesterday. The Late, Great Sid James was just the first image to hand. Here’s a disturbing detail:

Turns out Mario never posted the source, or at least I can’t find it. So I had to work it out for myself, which I suppose is better really. At least now I more or less understand Bitmapdata.hitTest(), getBounds() (yeah, never really needed it before), finding transparent pixels, etc. It’s set to keep scaling up the Sids to fill transparent areas till the space is 95% full, which equated to 40199 swirling Sid heads. Try not to stare at the big one on Flickr for too long. You’ll go into a Carry On trance.

So next I need to get this onto my PrintCanvas and try using different images and rotations for grey levels – like you would with perlin noise – to make up a huge picture. Should be fun. Might use porn…

Oh and cheers, Jamie, for putting me straight on some of the more complex Bitmapdata stuff!

A £3.50 Ikea light, from above, pepped up on with Photogene on the phone. Love the way the 3GS handles white balance and focus.

In AIR 1.5 and Flash Player 10, the maximum size for a BitmapData object is 8,191 pixels in width or height, and the total number of pixels cannot exceed 16,777,215 pixels. (So, if a BitmapData object is 8,191 pixels wide, it can only be 2,048 pixels high.)

Keith Peters had the same problem, but there in the comments was a mention of this fantastic hack by Martin Rädlinger at formatlos. BitmapUnlimited does some clever hack thing to do with a GIF that somehow tricks the player to make bigger bitmaps. Works great too.

So in order to make print res bitmaps even easier, I’ve wrapped it in PrintCanvas, a simple little class of my own. Here’s how to use it:

So that creates an A2, 300dpi, yellow landscape canvas, adds it to the stage in a bitmap once it’s ready and saves it as a PNG. You can have a JPG too with quality setting, plus saveImage() returns its FileReference object in case you want to track progress etc. It can take a while.

Basically, you can have any size you want at any dpi. But beware memory issues! This eats it fast, so the A2 at 300dpi in this example could easily be a killer. That said, currently supported sizes from what I could find on Wikipedia are:

A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, Letter, Legal, Tabloid.

I couldn’t seem to find out much about standard American sizes beyond Letter and Legal (oddly, on the internet). Any help much appreciated.

Grab the zip here.

One big drawback of BitmapDataUnlimited is that it can’t handle filters beyond the usual BMD size. EDIT: See Martin’s comment below. That saves me some work! I’m only really bothered as the look of the screen res images I was playing with a long time back played heavily on the use of glows. Maybe now I can get on with making pretty things again, this time big enough to go on the wall.