03.05.07
Instant Teleportation
Claudia and I had another brainstorm for our interstices project today, this time focusing on our chosen idea; instant teleportation devices. We’re going to do two written articles about them, one a news website article based on the technology when it first emerges, highlighting all the possible implications for its introduction into society, aswell as the negative ones. I’ll write that, while Claud will make a tabloid newspaper article that highlights the destructive power and scandals about the technology going wrong, and having a large scale negative impact, based in the later years when the technology has become well established, and vital for our day to day life.
Initially, the teleportation device will take the form of booths situated all over the world, like phone booths, which people can use at a cost to travel anywhere they like. Further in the future, everyone will have their own handheld device that can instantly transport them away anywhere in the whole world they want, very specifically.
The repercussions of which could be massive. For one, all other methods of transportation could become obsolete. No more cars or roads, no more planes. Less pollution, although perhaps the machines emit more dangerous radiation that can have an impact on our health. The social implications would be the breakdown of boundaries between territories, as it will become much easier for cultures and nationalities to blend in with each other. Everyone will become more similar, have increased understanding of each other and there could be fewer wars or disputes. Distance no longer means that we have to see any less of family and friends who live far away, and less time spent travelling means more time for everyone, so perhaps more work or more social lives for all. It also adds to the desire people will have for everything to be instant, and time can no longer be wasted waiting for things, and this can affect all manner of the way we see things. And then in her article set later on, Claudia will be examining what happens when things go wrong, and the radiation gets too much or the teleportation devices, at this point now integral to our daily life, suddenly stop working properly, sending only bits of people across the world, disfiguring them forever. What happens when our trust in this technology is lost when isolated cases like this happen and people are too afraid to make use of it, after abandonning all other alternatives.
Just a few ideas we’ve had so far. I’m thinking it might be a bit too far fetched for what the brief wants, but we’ll tailor it. I’d like to get Mike’s opinion before we start anything definate.
Mapping email: Sent
We finally sent off the first emails for our mapping project today, after finalising the contents of them, which read thusly;
“Hi,
We’re students in Plymouth University, and we have a project that we were hoping you could help us out with. Basically all you have to do is visit this website, fill in the form, and pass this e-mail on to at least five friends.
We know we all hate chain mails but this would really help us out.
The site is http://www.oholmwood.com/mapping
Thank you for your time.”
With the website all set up and the form able to email its contents to us, we’re now ready to send it off and see where it goes. The first stage is the four of us, and the email has been sent off to our respective addresses, and we’re now each going to forward it on to five people, who, being our friends, should be helpful and forward it on to five of their friends. From then on, it’s anyone’s guess how many responses we’ll get back, but whatever happens, I’m sure we’ll find ways of working with our results. How we’re going to map them all out though is the hard part.
If things are a bit quiet for this week, we’ll try the alternative method and have a new email that’s passed on to as many people as humanly possible, not worry about linking up the senders and recievers, and just get back as many locations as possible.
03.02.07
Asteroids
The final assignment for 102 requires us to develop an Asteroids style game in Flash, where the user navigates a small space ship around the stage using the mouse, firing missiles by clicking. The object is to avoid being hit by the asteroids floating around and to destroy them using the missiles. When hit, the asteroids break into two smaller pieces which also need to be destroyed.
Some of this code can be borrowed from the cannon game that we’ve been working on during the lectures, so my first step was to transfer this code into the flash starter file provided, and it contained the necessary actionscript to make the ship rotate according to the position of the cursor, and to fire missiles. My first challenge was to make the ship move towards the cursor, with decreasing speed the closer it gets to it, as shown in the example. This was achieved slightly more easily than expected, and I worked out that for both the y and x coordinates, you subtract the cursor location from the ship location, convert both to a positive value (for when it yields a negative when the mouse is on the other side), add both x and y distances together to get a single figure that represents the distance between the two points. Then state that the speed of the ship is equal to this amount of distance, divided by 50, which ensures a relationship between the two, so the further away the ship is from the mouse, the faster it moves, to catch up to it. Complex stuff, but it’s great when it actually works, and you know you figured it out all by yourself! At first I was trying some sort of complex trigonometry thing, but turns out it wasn’t necessary. Mostly written in the SpaceObject.as file, so it can be reused by something else if necessary.
Today, I started work on the large asteroids, just getting them to rotate and move in a random direction. This would be slightly different code to that used for the ship, because it needs to rotate continually, by itself, yet also move in a single direction, which isn’t influenced by the rotation. In the generate function of the asteroid class, a random number between 1 and 5 is generated which represents both the speed of movement, and speed of rotation. The SpaceObject class then uses a function, called on every frame, to add the current rotation value of the object to this rotation speed. A seperate number between 0 and 359 is also generated to represent a random direction (in degrees) for the asteroid to start moving in, and this is used as a parameter for the moveForward function. The result is 20 asteroids that each hurtle through space at a random speed (rotating accordingly), and in a random direction.
That’s enough for now, but next I’ll be trying to make sure that the asteroids reappear on the other side of the stage when they go off of it, and then start to tackle the collision between missiles and asteroids, and the creation of the smaller ones. So far so good though, and I’m really enjoying this project. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to add extra features such as power ups that make your missiles faster and larger, or perhaps create a health system so that it takes two hits from the smaller asteroids to kill the player, not just one.
