Many of my demos here are based on the same principles: create a rectangular grid and animate bending it in some groovy way. Flash Player 10’s graphics.drawTriangles has been quite a perfect tool for doing that.
Usually I’ve handled the vertices and triangles – or indices – by some for-loop, like this example initialized the triangles for a mesh of size n*m:

for (ii=i=0 ; i!=n-1; i++) {
	for (j=0 ; j!=m-1; j++) {
		indices.push(
			ii,ii+m+1,ii+1,
			ii+m,ii+m+1,ii++);
	}
	ii++;
}

Ok, even if it’s an old code of your own, anyone might get confused with all these i,j,ii and ++’s – specially seeing it after some months. Well, this time went a bit further and wanted to try manipulating items on the grid with some more advanced way: I guess anyone interested in optimizing as-code, has came across Joa Ebert’s great results of using LinkedLists.

Ok, I ended up taking similar approach to dealing with the grid. In this version every node has two links to the nodes on the right and below it:

Now the code iterating through the grid will look like this:

var itemX:GridItem = firstItem, itemY:GridItem = itemX;
do {
	do doSomething(itemY) while (itemY = itemY.itemBelow)
} while (itemY = itemX = itemX.itemRight)

or simply by a single public function:

myLinkedGrid.forEach(doSomething);

When dealing with a grid, you every so often need to iterate the areas -like for instance the triangles – between nodes – like in the for-for -example above – now that’s just:

myLinkedGrid.forArea(doSomethingElseEvenMoreComplicated);

And the best part of course are the results of running a test code 2000 times:

*    linked list : 5722 ms
*    for-loops accessing vector[ ][ ]  : 9340 ms

Results of different methods:

- 5810 ms : Iteration by public function  Grid.forEach(doSomething)

- 5705 ms :  Using public static function  Grid.forEach( GridItem.doSomething) //  (for being ’static’ the results were varying a lot, at worse ~7500)

- 4807 ms :  Using an inline function  Grid.forEach(function (item: ){…

- 3306 ms :  Using do-while loops with inline code

Ok, finally, here’s a couple of demos using these methods, some weird physics simulations , don’t know if they’re cloth, water, landscape or architecture – but who cares, as long as it’s cool :

… press ’space’ for a different looking grid !

with sources:
Main – of later demo
LinkedGrid.as

GridItem.as
GridTriangle.as