Bonus Post! Collatz Conjecture

I definitely suggest you look at the large version.

Actionscript, of course, is a programming language. And one thing computers and programming languages do much more efficiently than humans is...well...compute! We can use this to our advantage and help display very complex math problems nearly instantly. Flash is a wonderful tool to use in eLearning in that the behind-the-scenes number crunching can easily be reflected graphically.

In this case, I stumbled upon something called the Collatz Conjecture. It's a conjecture that basically says that if you start with an integer, you check to see if it's even or odd. If it's even, divide by 2. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Repeat that over and over, and you will ALWAYS wind up with a value of 1.

With larger numbers, this process could take quite a while...so...enter Flash! Simply type in a number you want to check (I've limited it to 8 digits) and click "Go!" to quickly see the resulting path to 1.

Dynamically Shifting Menu UPDATED

Large version.

Okay, as promised...I've updated this. I was considering making the image loading dynamic, but I kept running into little pitfalls. Nothing a little more time couldn't have solved, but there are already plenty of fantastic external image loaders out there!

Anywho, I've updated this into a photo gallery with a dynamically sized frame to house the images. To preserve the rounded corners' proportions, I enabled 9-slice scaling guides on the movie clip. If you're not aware of it, next time you create a movie clip, look for the little check box titled "Enable Guides for 9-Slice Scaling. When you go in to modify your movie clip, you'll see some dashed lines that are draggable. Whatever is inside of those guides will scale like you'd expect, but the four corners outside of the guides will NOT! Pretty fantastic when you're enlarging rounded curves, especially if the scaling is not proportionate.

Dynamically Shifting Menu

Large version.

This is the first of a two-stage little doodle I put together. At this point, it is just a grid of menu items that reacts to whatever button you've rolled over. It was a nice little exercise in two-dimensional arrays. Nothing too crazy, but pretty useful for adding a little life to an otherwise ordinary field of buttons. Keep in mind that you can adjust anything about these buttons with the same basic code. You can shift the alpha, the color overlays, size...whatever your little heart desires!

The next step is to turn this into a dynamically loading photo gallery. Why? Why not?

Stay tuned for part 2 in the coming days!

EDIT: Fixed the little odd rollOver issue.

Coming Along...

It's been a little while! Here we have some progress on the BubBomb game shown in the past couple of posts.

What's new?
Well, there's a new scoring mechanism in place that allows for chaining of pops. In other words, if you pop captured enemies in rapid succession without firing off another bubble, your score stacks!
You'll notice a few new visual features, such as a living background, start button, and score feedback messages.
Powerups are in! Well...sort of. Every so often, you'll see a gold enemy. Pop them to release a powerup into the field. Capture and pop the powerup and you'll get....NOTHING! I've not actually put in powerups yet, just a placeholder item. So as of now, powerups don't do squat. Some potential ideas are modifying your bubbles' behavior or offering a bonus multiplier on your chain pops. Any other suggestions?

Finally, and this is a minor fix, I had noticed an occasional bug that occurred when capturing an enemy too close to the edge of the stage. That seems to have been fixed, but be sure to let me know if it happens again!

That's it for now. Keep it funky!