Any way the wind blows...

Click and drag the green gem on the above .swf.

Large version here.

I was going to post something about randomizing text with input fields, but this little guy popped into my head on the drive home from work. At my place of work, Oxygen Education, I recently helped a co-worker develop a wind turbine simulator. It was fairly simple, where the _rotation property of a movie clip changed based on where a specific draggable movie clip was.

Well, I decided to take this concept a step further and control an entire ARRAY of movie clips with it. And I thought to myself, I thought "Well, why not allow movement in all directions?"

And so I did. A simple for loop adds the bead movie clips to the stage at random positions. As they are added, an empty variable called "weight" is filled in (which I've set as a number from 1-10). The weight adjusts how large the object is, and also has an effect on the movement speed. You'll notice the larger, and therefore "heavier", beads move a bit slowly. This is accomplished by setting the movement rate to a number multiplied by a decimal (determined by the weight).

So there you have it! Another useless, yet fun to watch, Flash experiment!

Placeholder

Okay, I really don't have anything for you guys today. I have SOME things I could post, but not really the time tonight to fully explain them. So...enjoy this hastily-scrawled vector turtle thingum I found sitting in my "Doodles" folder.

Tilepalooza

Large version here.

I'm really not sure what to DO with this yet, but I felt I'd share it anyhow. Seems like it's not a bad idea to try and keep posting a Flash working every day or two. Any ideas anybody? It almost seems like a nice start to a puzzle game or a fun little password system.

Mockery

A week or so ago, I was helping out a buddy Jake Mansfield with setting up the coding basics of his personal website. He essentially wanted the site to act like a desktop, with draggable icons and such. So, taking the little bits of code I used from that, I decided to whip this up last night.



Large version here.

No real content of worth on it, but you could definitely use this as a starting point for an actual website! In fact, I just may do that...

Capstone 2009

Well, a new year is upon us. And just about a month ago, I presented my final Capstone project at the 2009 MAS Capstone event at IUPUI.

This requires a larger space than I have available on this blog, so here's a link to the large version. And here's a link to the local version all zipped up nice and tidy for you to see on your local computer (running the .swf in a standalone Flash player is MUCH faster than through a web browser). You can run each .swf individually in the local version, but the main interface is titled "container_cursor.swf".

For now, just play around with it and let me know what you think! In the next few posts, I'll focus on each individual aspect of the project. I'd be happy to answer any questions and share with readers some of the source code.

Christmas Hurl

I recommend going to the large version here and saving the .swf to your desktop.

The holidays are here! In celebration, I've whipped up the above. It's a simple little tree decoration thing that showcases a few concepts. First off, we have gravity and physics. As each ornament falls, it picks up speed, giving the illusion of gravity pulling. Surprisingly, faking gravity is INCREDIBLY easy! You see, each movie clip is moving a set amount every frame (shown as _y+=dy where dy is a number). The trick here is that the "dy" constantly increases by a set amount. So let's say dy starts at 0 but increases by 1 every time.

Frame1:
dy = 1
old _y = 0
new _y = 1

Frame 2:
dy = 2
old_y = 1
new _y = 3

Frame 3:
dy = 3
old_y = 3
new _y = 6

and so on...but remember, you're likely running around 24 -31 fps, so your change in dy should probably be tiny (experiment with this to simulate different gravities! I tend to use .1 as a baseline, but it changes depending on how I want something to move).

Speaking of dy, the bouncing effect is a neat little trick, too. When the movie clip hits the bottom, it is first moved to the bottom edge of the screen (if something is moving fast enough it goes PAST the bottom of the screen, so this rights it) and then it's dy is multiplied by -.7. Why not -1? In the real world, some energy is lost to the ground when a ball bounces (ever have a really heavy box fall beside you? Even if you didn't get hit, you definitely felt the box thud! That's the dissipated energy...some of it, anyway).

The last little bit I'll share with you is how to calculate the speed of the thrown object. To be honest, this was an experiment that I really didn't expect to work. But surprise! Work it did. Essentially, we're keeping track of two values. Where the mouse is NOW and where the mouse was a frame ago. These values are updated every time the mouse moves, and the difference between the two is stored as a number. When you release the ornament, that difference is used to determine the speed of the the thrown object. Nifty, eh?

Well, that's it for now. Merry Christmas!

Feelin' Lucky?

Larger version here.

In a departure from the stuff I normally do, I decided to make an actual game. Here you have a 4-reeled slot machine. You place your bet (top 3 red buttons) and your risk of the spin (bottom 3 red buttons). Then click the purple "roll" button and you're off!

Your winnings are determined by how many of the rings line up once the spin is completed.
No Matches: 0
One Match: (your bet) x (risk/2)
Two Matches or 3 of-a-kind: (your bet) x (risk)
All Four: (your bet) x (risk) x 5

This isn't an absolutely crazy to program game. I use modulus (%) to determine when or if one of the rings should stop. Each ring is simple a tweened animation, and every 1, 2, or 5 frames (based on risk 1, risk 5, or risk 10 respectively) it rolls a counter to see if it should stop or not.

Once all four rings are stopped, the frame number of each is pushed into an array. Each value in the array is compared to the rest of the values to see if they match. Different numbers of matches indicate what the winnings should be. I wasn't quite able to compare a single value against everything else and then exclude it from the array (probably could, but not worth the headache), so a non-match actually shows up as 4 matches (the checked value in the array checks against itself as well).

Oh, and the little "$" button in the corner refills your credits to 100 if you are below 100 credits.