[squeak-dev] Re: Would anyone care for some noise?

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Thu Feb 14 18:24:58 UTC 2013


Inline and abridged.

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:16 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>wrote:

>
>
> Are you aware of noise's Smalltalk connection?
> http://www.noisemachine.com/talk1/4.html
>

So I am aware of Alan's connection to the film, and I am aware that noise
was invented for it, but I am not aware of how Smalltalk fits in.

> I found myself wanting to understand Perlin noise, so I hunted around
> looking at various implementations (didn't find one in Smalltalk, if there
> is one, I'd love to know)
>
>
> Pretty certainly I did one back in the days of my Masters thesis ... 15
> years ago. Ugh. Don't have the code handy, sorry.
>

Oh drat.

> The bad news is, I still don't understand Perlin noise! :0
>
>
> Really?! Ken's presentation above is pretty clear, IMHO ...
>

Sometimes I'm just dense. Squeak is really shining here though, because I
can just hook things up to sliders and play around until I get a feel for
it. I'm also playing with my words a bit: I don't understand in any
concrete way why noise approximates natural phenomena. AFAICT no one does.
It kind of reminds me of that Fermat conjecture, "here's this thing we
don't understand and couldn't prove for a really long time that always
worked no matter how many times we tried to break it." I think it's the
mysterious part of noise that drew me to it.

> Anyhow I'm not sure whether or not it's something that other people would
> want. Could be very niche graphics-nerdery, but who knows, the Croquet
> crowd might find ways to have fun with it at least. If I hear from people
> who'd like to play with it, I can clean up the code, add an example, and
> put it up under the MIT license somewhere convenient. Why not, right?
>
>
> Let me know if you'd like to make some noise!
>
>
> Seems certainly useful to me. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't an
> implementation in Croquet or Qwaq already.
>

I definitely don't want to do the "yet another implementation of X" thing.
It's pure Smalltalk code, no OpenGL stuff, which has ups and downs, but is
at least different from what David Faught mentioned. Once I'm confident
that I've got the bugs out, I might actually rewrite it in slang and make a
VM primitive.


> - Bert -
>

-- 
Casey Ransberger
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