Sam's Blog

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I have been working on my animatic for The Makeover and I was getting ready for posting the animatic here when I realized that I need a preloader so I spent yesterday making a preloader. It is not the smallest preloader (might need a preloader for the preloader!) but it will do:
[kml_flashembed movie="/gallery2/d/4093-1/cyclist_preloader3.swf" height="330" width="450" /]

On and off for the last couple of weeks I have been working on a flash effect for a client. The brief was to create 12 or so tentacles which would respond to the movement of the mouse as if it was the wind. After a bit of research I discovered Flade which is a 2D physics simulation library for Flash, I did a number of tests for the client but in the end they decided not to go head with this particular effect but I still like it, it is like one of those executive toys.

Here is one of the tests:

[kml_flashembed movie="/gallery2/d/3184-1/Tentacles.swf" height="240" width="450" /]

EDIT:
I have been asked for the source for this, I didnt find exactly the one I was looking for but inside the following zip file you will find /examples/two boxes/twoboxes.fla, that will give you the general idea of how it is working. I also modified some of the primitive graphics routines to draw a solid black line, you will have to change things to suit your project.

tentacle_wind.zip

I found this flash site full of Open Source resources for flash developers, check it out there are so many flash projects happening it is amazing:

http://www.osflash.org/

I ran into this while looking for a way of accessing a SQL database on a Windows Server from Flash. You can do it with Flash Remoting but that is pretty expensive. I found Fluorine which is an open source implementation of .NET Flash Remoting Gateway but I haven’t got my head around all the jargon yet so I am not sure if it is any good for what I want it for. All I want to do is access the database but unfortunately this server doesn’t have PHP so I have to do things through .NET, and jump through all these Microsoft jargon hoops.

Also found this article which might be what I am looking for but still not to sure, it would help if I had a sample database running on my own machine to fiddle with and learn about it.

Found this very interesting and useful site: http://www.27bobs.com/. It’s full of flash components and interesting experiments.

I have been pretty busy the last week or so working on a couple of flash projects. The first one was a Sky Diving game for promoting “The Fray’s” new album, “How to save a life”. Studio Emotion contacted me to do some coding, debugging and testing on the game before the release, it was a good experience and I enjoyed working on the game even though the time available was very short. I will put a link here when the game gets released, the album is due 22nd of July.

The second project was a very small one regarding passing Query Strings into Flash. It is very easy, the tricky part is to make sure you add the following java code to the html so that the query string is read from the url and passed on to the flash object.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> <!-- // QueryString() & QueryString_Parse courtesy of http://javascript.about.com/library/scripts/blquerystring.htm function QueryString(key) { var value = null; for (var i=0;i<QueryString.keys.length;i++) { if (QueryString.keys[i]==key) { value = QueryString.values[i]; break; } } return value; } QueryString.keys = new Array(); QueryString.values = new Array(); function QueryString_Parse() { var query = window.location.search.substring(1); var pairs = query.split("&"); for (var i=0;i<pairs.length;i++) { var pos = pairs[i].indexOf('='); if (pos >= 0) { var argname = pairs[i].substring(0,pos); var value = pairs[i].substring(pos+1); QueryString.keys[QueryString.keys.length] = argname; QueryString.values[QueryString.values.length] = value; } } } QueryString_Parse(); // write flash obj with query string function writeFlash() { // appearance vars, these can be customized to your liking var width = '540' var height = '396' var src = 'test_url.swf' // queries -- type in the variables you want to send to flash here var queries = '?LocationID='+QueryString('LocationID') // assemble flash obj var l1 = '<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0" width="'+width+'" height="'+height+'">' var l2 = '<param name="movie" value="'+src+queries+'" />' var l3 = '<param name="quality" value="high" />' var l4 = '<embed src="'+src+queries+'" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="'+width+'" height="'+height+'"></embed>' var l5 = '</object>' // write all lines document.write(l1+l2+l3+l4+l5) } //--> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> <!-- writeFlash(); --> </script>

Once that is done you just change the query string name in the above code and also the swf file name and then you have access to the value of the query string with the following flash code:

.....= _level0.yourQueryString;

The other project that I am working on is a little slideshow swf which reads an array of text and some images and then animates the text while revealing the images. The idea was to just have a little script which you could plug any text or image into. The following is a work in progress with only 2 images for testing. The idea was to have a wave come in and bring the text in and then reveal the image as it went out again. I need to do more work on the wave, right now it looks more like a curtain than a wave and also I want to make the text rotate a bit as it is pushed by the wave.

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The last week has been very hectic with getting a web host, moving my blog, doing a bit of design for the new site and getting Gallery to work with WordPress. But finally things are at a stage where they are usable, there are so many things which can be done with this new setup which I will probably explore a bit later. For now I am back to doing cartooning exercises, here is today’s:

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Couple of weeks ago I put my application in for the RMIT, Master of Animation and Interactive Media, course and I received a letter acknowledging that my application has gone in but I havent heard anything more yet.

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For a while now I have been thinking about getting my photos organized on the computer but it is such a daunting task that I have been putting it off and off. A couple of days ago I ran into a website which mentioned a photo library written in PHP for MySQL which could be used to catalogue photos and search through them.I did a wider search on the net and found a large number of other Open Source projects which were doing the same thing,so I sorted through them by looking for the ones which had been regularly updated and had the ability to store and search EXIF data and I ended up with the following candidates: Zoph, OSIC and LinPHA.

I started with LinPHA which looks quite good but had a lot of troubles after the installation. I am running Suse 10.1 on the Linux box and I think LinPHA was not developed under that platform, there seemed to be a problem with some of the files which needed to be included for PHP to connect to the database. Anyway after banging my head against this problem for a couple of hours I moved onto Zoph.

I had some login issues but eventually got it working only to find that the importing of the photos was very strange and not very nice to use. So I moved on to OSIC. It got this one working without too much trouble (probably because of the experience gained from the other installs) and it looks more organized than Zoph but it is still a young project and didn’t have all the EXIF features that I needed so after hours of wrestling with the Linux box I decided to get some sleep and to go back to LinPHA tomorrow and try to fix whatever it was that was breaking it.

It is amazing how some problems don’t look as daunting with a fresh mind. I did some searching on the LinPHA forum and found that someone else was having the same problem and there was a fix. Just uncommenting a line in that PHP file and commenting one in this PHP file and LinPHA was ALIVE! For a while anyway, it broke again when I tried uploading some images but this time I was better prepared, did some searching for include files and made sure they were all going from the TOPDIR of the web server and that fixed the problem.

Now I have started the huge task of going through all the photos, categorizing them and adding keywords to them, once this is done I will be a able to search through the photos by just typing a keyword and LinPHA will search the filenname, description and the EXIF data for a match. It will be great for my partner H as well, she is studying Graphic Design and they use photos all the time and it would be great to have her own searchable photo library. I want to use this database to make a travel website that I have been thinking about since we came back from India, but that will take a while…

Here are some of my life drawings from the class yesterday.

I am doing a bit of cartooning in flash everyday and getting used to the tools more and more. Here is another little exercise I did.

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Drawing with the tablet is quite tricky and a bit frustrating, I keep wanting to pickup a pencil which responds so much more predictably. I have been doing more cartooning exercises in flash and using the undo button alot because the lines just dont come out looking right and going over them creates some jagged edges which I then have to erase which can be alot of work so I use the undo and try to draw the line again.
I could use the pen tool instead of the brush tool but I find the perfection of the pen tool’s line a bit lifeless.

I am sure after a while I will get used to the new tool, does anyone have any tips for me?

Here is today’s cartooning exercise.

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