10.03.07
New Blog
My blog has moved! You can now find it on my brand spanking new portfolio website: oholmwood.com
I’m building it myself from scratch in PHP, which I learned over the summer. So it’s work in progress, at the moment.
04.04.07
Asteroids Completed
Finally got round to uploading my asteroids game for anyone who’s interested in having a play. People seem to like it!
I guess I got a bit carried away and just found myself constantly adding stuff above and beyond the brief. The final version features four different power-ups that appear out of certain large asteroids and a simple health system whereby a single hit from a small asteroid will only damage the ship (reducing its speed and losing the ability to hyperspace). There’s also a fuel variable that depletes according to your speed and when it runs out, you lose the ability to move around the screen, and a timer that gives you only a minute to complete the game. At the end, your score is tallied up taking these things and others into account and you’re given a final score, and a rank, A-E. You get an S Rank if you manage to get 3000 points or over, which I myself have only managed once so far. My top score is 3024 I think, so if you beat that, do let me know!
I know, I’m only going to get like 3 extra marks for all of that extra stuff, but those ideas just kept coming to me and I wanted to see if I could do them.
Well, enjoy!
03.26.07
Asteroids Updates
Been a while since I last updated on this, and I’ve added a lot since my last post, so lets see now..
I’ve got my relatively simple health system in place, whereby a hit from a small asteroid will only change the ship’s state to damaged, rather than destroy it instantly, and it’ll two small ones to lose a life, whereas you lose one instantly when pelted by a big one. Was a bit complex, and some bugs occured that needed fixing, but now it works very well. Frame 5 is the damaged frame, in the ship’s movieclip, and it features some explosions and smoke etc. In the collision with the small asteroid, it simply determines whether the current frame the ship is on is and moves it to 5 if on 1 (after a temporary invincibility animation), then jumps to the dying and regenerating animation if it’s already on frame 5. For both asteroids, if the ship is at a frame other than 1 or 5, it will not affect it, and the asteroid will only explode if it’s shot or causes any damage at all, and only gives you points if you shoot it.
I found an annoying bug where if the ship happens to occupy the same space as an asteroid when it comes out of its temporary invincibility and into frame 1 or 5, it’ll get stuck on the first frame of its exploding animation and will therefore be stuck in an invincible form. Emerging from hyperspace also caused this problem, and it also stopped me from begining the game in temporary invincibility to protect the player from dying straight away. This was eventually solved by sticking a “play();” in the frame actionscript, which it should have been doing anyway, but wasn’t for some reason.
Had a bit of a problem with my arrays as well, specifically removing the asteroids from the array, using the splice method. I could eventually get it to do it correctly in the bullet class, but I also needed to remove them when they collided with the ship too, which wasn’t using a do loop to run through all the known asteroid names. It was all a bit fiddly, and I couldn’t do it, so in the end I just used additional variables to count the number of large and small asteroids, altering on creation of new ones and their removal. This allowed the game to finish when the number of both reached zero.
As an additional feature, I fairly easily implemented a fuel system, where a fuel variable, begining at a value of 1000, declines based on the speed of the ship, divided by a particular amount on every frame. So the faster you move around the area, the faster your fuel is depleted, and when it reaches zero, the moveForward function for playership is disabled, so you lose your ability to travel. Using setInterval, I also created a timer that begins at 99, and counts down the seconds, until you run out of time and the game will be over. It’s actually difficult to make the game last that long, so I think I’ll reduce that amount. It’s all in aid of creatinga more complex scoring system though, as the higher your timer and fuel amounts are at the end of the game, the more bonus points you’ll get, and I want to make sure there are plenty of elements in creating a score that can always be improved upon.
Next, I’m on the xml scoreboard, and it’s proving confusing to say the least. Then, I have the preloader to take care of, and still need to make my stars actually. Then it’s on to more extra stuff, including my final score tally, and powerups!
03.19.07
Final things
Mapping
My final map animation: http://www.oholmwood.com/stuff/digitalmap.swf
And a video that Kat and Claudia have made about a nifty expanding fibre-optics variation of the kind of thing I’ve done in my map: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh1_LO1akQg
In my animated map, the different colours represent different stages along the chain mail. If you hover over the points, the names of the places will pop up as a guide. Dashed lines represent travel overseas and are to a different scale to the complete lines.
Interstices
My BBC news page, set in the year 2037 (isn’t it funny how BBC news haven’t changed their website layout and style at all in 30 years?.. hmm..) http://www.oholmwood.com/stuff/bbcnews.html The article talks about the new teleportation technology emerging at that time, and while it hasn’t yet had an impact on much, it discusses the possible ways in which it could affect things socially, environmentally and economically, all based on the ideas Claudia and I discussed.
Her Sun newspaper stuff, set in the year 2106, talks about what has gone wrong, raising similar issues to mine, and can be found at the bottom of this page in her lovely blog.
Artefact
To add to the previous blog post, here’s a photo of an A4 printout of my artefact that I got today:
I did want an A3 one, but for some technical reasons, it wasn’t possible for the printing people to do it for me. Oh well, it’s on nice shiny photo quality paper and I can at least see the point about getting all the details in on the printout, rather than sticking with a resized on-screen jpeg. It goes some way to achieving what Satoshi Matsuyama lives by.
03.18.07
The final artefact
All done now.
Here’s the original, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” By Satoshi Matsuyama.
And here’s mine, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” by me.
And, because the original artist is so enthusiastic about presenting the image in full res glory, rather than only presenting resized versions for the web, here it is.
It’s very tough to get absolutely everything perfect for that kind of size, especially as I’m used to creating images that are more likely to squeeze neatly onto a monitor, and clearly not everything is absolutely perfect, due to time constraints, but I could at least see how much devotion the artist needs to have in order to attain the quality of work that he creates. I’ve tried to follow it very closely, using techniques that the artist employs, including the use of both high res photos, and drawn objects such as the tree and birds. I would have used photos of birds but every time I set my camera up towards my window, they all decided to hide away. So screw them, I can make my own. They don’t want to be in my picture, that’s fine by me.
It was very important to get the vibrancy in colour just right, though admittedly, this is easier to do when working from a “template”, as the original image was to me, than building up the colours from scratch. Starting with the background is a good idea, as it determines the precise colours and shades that the foreground objects need to have, and the red sky and almost white sun are key to the colour in this whole image. Overall, I’m very pleased with it.
03.17.07
Final dollop of mapping work
Dollop.. nice word that, isn’t it? I should use it more often.
So it’s all kicking off for the mapping project this weekend. I’m not around, as I’ve buggered off home until Sunday, so we can’t work on anything as a complete group, but we met on Friday and discussed our plan of attack. We’re going for two maps, one digital, one based on paper, and I’ll be taking on the digital one while the girls will sort something out for the paper-based one. I think they’re going to print out a large UK map from digimap on some sheets of A4, and pinpoint all of the inidividual email recipients and utilise a kind of thermal imaging system, where the most popular areas such as Plymouth and Essex will be hottest, and places like Bristol and Norwich will be cooler to certain amounts. I think that map will be less concerned about linking people up along the chains, but I’m not sure yet. I did hear talk of the use of strings and stuff.
My digital map, which will be made into a flash animation, is less concerned about pinpointing exact locations on a map, although distance is measured, the chains are illustrated in more of a branching tree style of doing things, similar to how maps of the internet are presented. I looked at Cyber Geography and found images like these quite interesting..
And particularly the kind of stuff on this site.
They’re maps of cyberspace, as messages travel through servers and things, and that’s sort of what my map will be presenting. Here’s a Photoshop image of what I have so far, and I’ll make this into a snazzy Flash animation this afternoon…
The seven stages that our replies extended to are colour coded, starting from red into purple, blue, green, yellow, etc. Stage 1, which is us four group members, extends out from the central point towards the four corners, and this is a bit like the seperation of people or ideas in a family tree or brainstorm diagram. Our following chains will extend out seperately into the four corners of the image, even if say I have someone from Bristol in my chain and Vicky has someone in Bristol on hers, they don’t appear in the exact same spot on the map because it’s more concerned with how the chains branch out and separate. It does however, vaguely measure distance, as the solid lines relate to how far the email has travelled across the country to appear in that persons inbox. The occasional deviancy of the lines as they take sudden turns on their route to the next person represents the different servers and junctions the electronic signals are changing at, in order to get there. It’s by no means completely accurate, but adds to the whole digital, cyberspace style thing, and makes it more interesting to look at, if nothing else. The dashed lines represent travel across countries, as we had a few responses from places like New York and Prague, and purely to make it easier to view, their distance is not to the same scale as the solid, UK lines are.
It’s quite abstract, which is what I think we’re supposed to come up with. I’ll see what my fellow group members think about it, and as I say, I’ll adapt it into a Flash animation with growing lines and maybe rollover places names to make it easier to see which point is which.
For good measure, here’s some workbook stuff, including notes we made about linking people up and a rough idea I sketched out for my flash map.
03.15.07
Neeearly done..!
I’m losing count, but about 10-12 hours in now I’d say, and a whopping 169 megs. Not quite the 30 gigs of the original, but it’s by far the biggest .psd I’ve ever worked with, and the G5’s can still handle it pretty well too. It would probably kill my laptop if I gave this to it.
So, nearly done and now it’s all coming together quite nicely and looking pretty darn sexy. The spiny plants on the right were taking absolutely ages to cut out, and I was only halfway through, so I cheated a bit and just duplicated the half, flipped one of them horizontally and made whole ones out of that. Whether or not Matsuyama-San does that on a regular basis, I don’t know, but I bet he does. The layer for the tree in the background has had the “multiply” feature applied to it, to seperate the background from the tree, and the contrast has been kicked up to help it along, which is a big help if you’re working with things like silhouettes. Still need to make some adjustments to that, then I’ve got to add some large leaves in the foreground, in the top right hand corner, plus the birds and make some general tightening up, and hopefully I’ll then be all done.
Don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I’ve mostly been using layer masks to cut out all the objects, so that if I need to bring anything back, after going a bit overboard with all the cutting, it’s easy enough to do so.
03.13.07
Mapping Results
Our email mapping project, where we’ve been receiving responses all week about the chain email we sent out last monday, has been going well. We made the “closing date” yesterday and got a total of 36 responses within the week, so that’s pretty good. Now we have one more week to sort through the data and create a map, maybe two actually, about it.
Our email responses.
The contents of a response.
A table of all of the locations of everyone who responded, plus the location of the person they recieved the email from.
Some thinking I did about how the map might look.
Yesterday, we looked at the results together, and made a list of everyone’s location and the location of the person who sent them the email. Using the stage numbers they filled in, it was possible to link up some people fairly easily, which Claudia and I attempted to do today, but there are many people for whom it’s going to be really hard to link up, as can be seen in the spreadsheet above, put together by Kat. There are an awful lot of Plymouth’s and in many cases, people haven’t been specific enough about the locations, so it’s impossible to know for sure who sent it where, for some. Particularly in the later stages. Perhaps this is a fault with how we organised it, and might have been better if we risked breaking fairly invisible confidentiality concerns and asked for emails, so we could at least link them better. Still, we’re pleased with the amount of responses we’ve receieved.
We’ve been discussing how we’re going to present it and we seem to be going for two alternate maps. One based in Flash that shows a branching series of lines, depicting the chains that reach out to different areas of the country, colour coded according to the stages, much like some depictions of the internet. Another is an actual, physical map of the country, probably Digimap printouts, using pins and strings and stuff to mark out the locations. Not sure about that one, but we’ll discuss more soon, and start to build it.
03.10.07
Cutting out leaves takes too long
An update on the ‘ol artefact. Going well. I’m about 7-8 hours in now, and I’d say maybe about halfway through. Ish. I have a week to get it finished, so should be ok. Previously, I had drawn out my tree using the polygonal lasso tool, as I wanted it to look enough like the tree in the original, and I didn’t want to spend ages hunting around for a tree in a very specific shape so I could take a photo of it. Yesterday I started tackling the leaves, and they’re rather a pain in the arse, as you have to do a lot of cutting out and masking to make sure some of the background gets through, convincingly. Looks ok at this resolution but close up, they’ll need more work still. Today, I did a bit more of that, and textured the tree using closing up photos of tree bark, plus I added the grass and bushes. The clone stamp tool came in handy for the grass. Some of the colours are looking a bit too bland at the moment, which goes against the Satoshi Matsuyama way, but it’ll all come together when I add the other elements.
03.09.07
Asteroids (they explode and everything now!)
That’s right.
Since my last 102 update, my large asteroids now reappear on the opposite sides of the stage whenever they go 50 pixels beyond the boundaries (so you get nice smooth entrances and exits instead of having them just randomly vanish) and they also create two smaller asteroids when hit. This was a bit of bother as at first I wasn’t able to get an array for the smaller asteroids working properly for some reason. Adding them to the existing large asteroid array (as it recommends in the brief, actually) worked but it meant that everytime you shoot a small asteroid, two more appear, which just leads to anarchy. So I went back to the seperate array for them, and I’m not sure what I did differently this time, but it works and I got them to remove themselves when hit, so that’s great.
Today, I also managed to get them exploding too, before removal, which makes quite an aesthetic difference actually. Originally I tried getting the actual bullets to explode on contact, but the large circles they created instantly removed the small asteroids that were created. Making a whole new movieclip just for an explosion didn’t seem to work either, so I scrapped that and just got the two different asteroid sizes to explode, by creating the animations in their respective movie clips, and inserting a label, which is triggered in the bullet actionscript file when it comes into contact with them. I also created a score variable and you get 10 points for the larger ones and 20 for the small ones, as they’re harder to hit. Maybe it makes more sense the other way around though, I don’t know.
I thought that if you complete the game, you’re always going to get the same, maximum score though, so I thought at some point I’d add a timer to the mix which counts the number of seconds your game lasts. At the end, the fewer seconds you took, the bigger bonus score you get, so it should make for a more interesting scoreboard. Next though, I need to get the collision with the ship sorted so lives get knocked down when you hit the asteroids. I also want to make a health system so that it takes two small asteroids to lose a life, not just one. And, because the asteroid positions are all randomly generated, you could theoretically lose a life right at the start of the game if one happens to be put in the middle, so I need a temporary invincibility feature for the start of the game and after you’ve been hit, so that you’re protected for a second or two.
To me this is almost definately the best project yet, and I really think this is the kind of thing I would particularly like to do for a job. I think I might even adapt my own game out of this as a personal project afterwards, and create a scrolling environment beyond the size of the stage. Fortunately, ActionScript has just suddenly clicked for me, and things are actually working properly without too much stress, so I definately want to keep going and try new things with it.
