Jaketastic http://jaketastic.com/blog Jake's Blog Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:47:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Semblance Solutions.com http://jaketastic.com/blog/semblance-solutions-com/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/semblance-solutions-com/#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 01:30:30 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=312 I’ve made another website!

Some of the more interesting features of semblancesolutions.com are:

  • Twitter feed on the home page.
  • A mobile version that automatically loads on most smartphones.
  • Neato logo!

Normal

Mobile

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/semblance-solutions-com/feed/ 0 MechJeff.com http://jaketastic.com/blog/mechjeff-com/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/mechjeff-com/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:30:27 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=306

MechJeff.com

My cousin Jeff needed a site to show off his cool craft creations, so I made him one! If you happen to need a skilled welder, and fabricator and mechanic to build anything you can imagine for your home or business, he’s the man to contact.

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/mechjeff-com/feed/ 0 Voronoi shattering complete! http://jaketastic.com/blog/voronoi-shattering-complete/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/voronoi-shattering-complete/#comments Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:15:03 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=278 With the wonderful Voronoi implementation by Alan Shaw I’ve managed to get the destructible blocks in my game crumbling in an elegant manner. The initial shattering of the breakable blocks splits them into the convex Voronoi regions, subsequent breaks are less complicated.

Screenshot
go to demo
Demo Controls:

WASD=move direction .. SPACEBAR=shoot bullets .. T=tractor beam .. ESC=menu/pause

click-> ‘start new game’, then, click-> ‘load test area’

Other new features include keyframed animation of physical objects, a new wall-hugger enemy type(he’s still buggy), some sounds, exits and entrances, a new control scheme for low gravity maps that uses the mouse to control direction, and numerous other things.

With such a wonderfully destructible environment I hope to put to good use my crazy ray-casting-path-finding experiments. I’m sure there is some overlap with voronoi and path finding here as well.

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/voronoi-shattering-complete/feed/ 1 Flash Slideshow for pods, etc. http://jaketastic.com/blog/flash-slideshow-for-pods-etc/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/flash-slideshow-for-pods-etc/#comments Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:11:39 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=199 I’ve made a simple slide show in flash to work with the pods plugin for wordpress. In principle, you can use the slide show in any situation, because it uses a ‘magic’ string to get the images, links etc it needs to load.

The compiled .swf is just under 4kB and uses a config_slideshow.txt file to get itself started.

The slideshow.swf looks for config_slideshow.txt in the same directory (as itself) and loads some configuration variables from it. (Don’t rename slideshow.swf or config_slideshow.txt.) The config_slideshow.txt will look like this:

url=http://your domain.com/flash_slideshow/&delay=6&suppressLoadInfo=false&linkText=Click here to learn more.

The format for the magic string the slideshow will read is:

title of image^http://my domain.com/path_to_image.jpg.gif.png.bmp^http://link when you click the linkText^image description text in simple html or txt#<br>
title of image2^http://my domain.com/path_to_image2.jpg.gif.png.bmp^http://link when you click the linkText^
image description text in simple html or txt#<br>

etc…
You can see the magic string uses carrots “^” and “#<br>” to break into usable data. The order of the elements in the magic strings is important, but you may leave an element blank if you like: “^^”

Here is an example with intentional missing images to show how errors are handled:

Here are the files:

Flash slideshow files and source

Still to do:
back/forward buttons. + configure in config_slideshow.txt file.
Fullscreen button. + on/off in config_slideshow.txt file.
Play music .mp3 or midi with the slideshow. +config_slideshow.txt file controlled.

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/flash-slideshow-for-pods-etc/feed/ 2 Cracking the crumble. http://jaketastic.com/blog/cracking-the-crumble/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/cracking-the-crumble/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:11:37 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=165 With any luck, I’ll be able to put my pathfinding explorations to good use with this destructable 2D environment.

This screenshot really does not do justice to what is going on here.  Polygons are breaking all over the place. Also, loot is dropping.

crumble

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/cracking-the-crumble/feed/ 0 BridgeCityPM.com http://jaketastic.com/blog/bridgecitypm-com/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/bridgecitypm-com/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:25:25 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=179 I’ve made a more complicated WordPress website using the excellent pods plugin.

BridgeCityPM.com
bridgecitypm.com_screenshot

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/bridgecitypm-com/feed/ 0 SpeechTherapyPDX.com http://jaketastic.com/blog/speechtherapypdx-com/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/speechtherapypdx-com/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 20:52:47 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/177/ I’ve made another simple wordpress site.

speechtherapypdx.com

speechtherapypdx.com_screenshot

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/speechtherapypdx-com/feed/ 0 Floralsunshine.com http://jaketastic.com/blog/floralsunshinecom/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/floralsunshinecom/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:41:06 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=129 floral-sunshine

I made a simple wordpress site for a friend: floralsunshine.com
She was delighted with the way it came out, even though I was rushed into completing most of it in one day!

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/floralsunshinecom/feed/ 0 Everyone is FLARTing! http://jaketastic.com/blog/everyone-is-flarting/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/everyone-is-flarting/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:33:30 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=111 I’ve recently had some interesting dicussions with my friend John about the possibilities of Augmented reality + video projectors for live events. In addition to my recent research with SwisTrack and Blender3D I’ve jumped on the bandwagon with every other flash developer and tinkered with the FLART toolkit. I havn’t gotten much further than a working compile of the source with a few custom triggered events on my own patterns, but when I get around to cracking open Blender and get a few of my own models and textures exported to .as my I can probably motivate myself to do some more experiments with it.

]]> http://jaketastic.com/blog/everyone-is-flarting/feed/ 0 Further down the ray-cast path.. http://jaketastic.com/blog/further-down-the-ray-cast-path/ http://jaketastic.com/blog/further-down-the-ray-cast-path/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:26:12 +0000 admin http://jaketastic.com/blog/?p=97 Still very primative, but more progress has been made.
path2-demo1
WASD, spacebar

P to attempt path solution
R casts a ray at the mouse and shows the first sidewalk.
The enemy will stop if it is to far offscreen.  It helps if you resize the flash window to make it bigger.

To avoid needless backtracking and cut corners when possible, extra tests are now performed each time a way point is reached. These tests  cast more rays at way points further down the list. The furthest way point touched without obstruction will become the next way point and the points in between discarded. Every second or third way point reached will probably need to trigger a completely new path finding solution, because of the time it takes to travel that far.

I’ve added a coefficient of average obstacle size that for now is just a variable, but might (eventually) be set automatically after a few solution attempts. The coefficient helps by hinting when the path should to turn off the ‘sidewalk’. In spaces with small obstacles, you’ll want to get off the sidewalk sooner and the coefficient will be smaller.

It turns out, that a sparse,  empty space is ill suited to the ray casting approach, because it relies on bouncing rays off walls. Luckily, featureless spaces are simple in every other way, and often require no path finding whatsoever.

I’ll need to do some observation and tests to determine what order of left or right turns in a row is most likely to make progress towards the destination.  I’d like to think that a lot of this can be done at runtime, but I need to be careful not to push this project towards the informed sort of pathfinding. I’m determined to keep the AI in the first person. It will have to learn it’s own space by casting ‘learning rays’. A lot of the tests I’ll need to make will be towards finding the important characteristics of obstacle filled spaces, and hopefully finding a few soft rules to follow.

It’s fun to program a solution with such unpredictable results.  As I fly around and press P, I can see the rays cast, but if they were not shown, I’d anthropromophize the behavior of the pathfinding enemy. If the enemy was a bit faster and deadly to touch I think it’d be fun to try outsmart it.

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