Apparently while I’ve been busy working on my article about the chaos game, I’ve also gathered a somewhat large amount of links that I wanted to post in my blog. So without further delay, here they are:

The Amazing Chris Bliss is a video of a juggler who was on Montreal’s Just for Laughs. He only juggles three balls, but what’s amazing about this video is that his juggling is synchronized to the music. I actually know how to juggle and I can even do a few tricks, so I know what I’m talking about when I speak of juggling. Most of the tricks he does are not too hard (notice the word most), and I’m sure that with some practice I would be able to learn how to do them. However his timing is astonishing, it follows the music flawlessly and looks very cool.

Arwing in Zelda is a video of an Arwing from Starfox in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which to my surprise is actually real. Apparently using a GameShark, you can switch one of the kids in Kokiri forest for almost any character in the game, and one of this characters is an Arwing. The programmers even included some enemy AI for it to attack Link and a somewhat crappy explosion when it has been defeated.

The Matrix XP is a funny Matrix spoof which is very well done. It’s fun all along and the ending is particularly funny, although the title kinda spoils it.

Four Second Frenzy is a game which consists of 50 minigames that last 4 seconds each. All of the mini-games are controlled using only the arrow keys and the space bar. Most games don’t say much about what you need to do, so you need to quickly figure out the rules of the game. There’s even a “Final Boss”. I’ve always loved games where you need to figure out the instructions yourself, and I think this is a good example of that type of games.

My Animated World is a stop motion video full of gaming references. An incredible amount of effort must have gone into making this video, but the end result is great. Props to whoever made it.

Mathematical Pi is a music video of a song called “Mathematical Pi” which is based on the more famous song “American Pie”. It reminded me of Hard ‘n Phirm’s Pi song. If you have never heard it, you can listen to it in this YTMND.

Finally, Fuzetsu is one of Jos Hirth’s entries in the Java 4k competition. The objective was to create a game in Java which was under 4 kbs in size. I suggest reading how to play before trying it out, I didn’t and since the game contains no instructions I had a hard time figuring out how the game works. Basically you need to kill the red circle in each level by shooting at it. The catch is that to shoot you need to get as close as possible to the enemy “bullets” without touching them. It’s actually quite fun. It’s a Java Web Start application, so you need to have Java installed to be able to play it. You can download it from here.

That’s all the links I’ve got for now. Sorry about not posting any sources, but I don’t remember where I got each link from. All I know is that they all come from one of these: digg.com, Jay is Games, the IGN boards, my brother, or my friend Nor.

Today, while I was working on my article about the chaos game, I discovered a critical flaw in Chaotica. When I was developing Chaotica, I noticed that when the fraction was less than 0.5 the image did not fill the window, and when it was bigger than 0.5 the image was also bigger than the window. To solve the problem what I did was to zoom the fractal in/out according to the fraction. Today, while I was looking at some IFSs(Iterated Function Systems) that represent instances of the chaos game, I suddenly realized that I had made a somewhat stupid mistake in the code that calculated the position of every new point. Instead of calculating the right position it was mapping all of the positions to a resized copy of the image placed in the upper left corner. I know that’s not very clear, but it’s not easy to explain where the mistake was; the important thing is that it is now fixed. To be quite honest I feel kinda stupid that this mistake went unnoticed, but I find it somewhat funny that instead of assuming there was a mistake in my code I just thought that was the normal behavior and implemented a workaround.

Because of the workaround, there is almost no difference between the images generated by Chaotica 1.0 and Chaotica 1.1. The only noticeable difference in the images is that now you should always be able to see where the original points of the polygon are located (in Chaotica 1.0 when the image was zoomed to fit, the points would end up outside of the visible part of the image so you were not able to see them). Other than that, the only change is that I have removed the “Keep real size” option from the preferences since all it did was enable/disable the “workaround”, and should have never been there in the first place. I have updated the article were Chaotica was posted accordingly, you can download Chaotica 1.1 here.