April 22nd, 2008
As part of the latest FRED website update, I’ve been asked to include a twitter feed integrated into the flash file itself. Not knowing much about twitter itself apart from the basics, like knowing I’d have to take data from a feed and have to make some actionscript that parses the XML, I started the necessary research to see what people had done before me.
It is fortunate then, that I stumbled across this post, Twitter Issues, which describes a scenario that is not unfamiliar to me. It also provides a solution which will ultimately save me time later on! Basically, since some major security updates in Flash quite a long while ago, it hasn’t been able to access data on any server different to the one it is hosted on without express permission from the other server in the form of a special file called crossdomain.xml. I had the same issue when developing the original FRED Roles database stored on one site and accessed via flash from the other. Now Twitter themselves could have solved the issue by simply using a * (star) in their file to allow access from anyone, but for whatever reason they chose not to.
March 13th, 2008
As a follower of the Half Life 2 series, naturally I have tried Portal and was kept amused by it for a little while, solving a series of puzzles with the portal gun set by a mad AI computer obsessed with cake.
However in my search for ideas for something I could make in Flash for my final year autumn term module Scripting for Digital Media (IDAT311) - (I am thinking I may as well get a long headstart on as much as I can now) - I found an amazing recreation of the portal game in a 2D Flash form. It can be found at http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/ - Portal: The Flash Version
January 4th, 2008
An opportunity to work on a flash based website came up shortly before christmas where the company previously named ‘Uncle Fred’ had rebranded themselves to simply FRED and wanted their site updated to reflect these changes. Their website can be found at http://www.fredstalent.com.
The updated version is currently being tested at http://www.srjm.co.uk/FRED/
November 6th, 2007
I was given a task to create a gallery in flash that cycled through portfolio images like so many you see.
Here is an example of my initial efforts. Its set for 40 pictures at 1 second per picture and doesn’t loop but flicks everything back to the start in quite an impressive (if accidental) manner.
October 31st, 2007
The next plan was to enable the flash in my new design’s header to change the dimensions of the div it was sat in so that for most the time it takes up less room, but when it needs it the space expands to allow for larger content there. I had already anticipated doing something like this so had included the mootools JS library at the very start of building my new design.
http://www.broken-links.com/2007/05/01/a-mootools-quickstart-guide/
October 20th, 2007
Alongside neovirtua efforts, I have found myself swinging back towards the more artistic side of things after spending what seemed like the entire second year of my course coding. My puzzle flash code-thing has been all-but finished scriptwise for a while and is now in the process of gaining some nice vector art (at one stage Illustrator was a bad, bad word) and creating images for websites has rekindled my love of all things photoshop.
September 16th, 2007
So I have been working for my placement with the guys behind http://www.neovirtua.com/ and realised I haven’t done much in the way of updating my website in a while.
I started a couple of days back a personal project to build a flash puzzle game, which can be found at http://www.srjm.co.uk/puzzle.swf. At this point it only swaps around a single piece to make it easy for me to complete (this still involves no less than 7 moves to get the pieces in place) as I test functions but soon that will change.
April 27th, 2007
Having worked right up to the deadline on the final courseworks for idat203 and 205 I’m pretty glad thats all over. And some good feedback from the few results I’ve had back.
AI Coursework
Exercise 4 - Tic Tac Toe AI - Play this simple noughts and crosses game against either an intelligent computer player, or one who choses moves at random.
Exercise 2/3 - A-Life and Genetic Algorithms - Demonstrates the evolution of insect-like organisms through the process of selection and mutation. Start by clicking ‘Initialise’ and then trying to catch 4 parent organisms before clicking ‘Replicate’ and watching the outcome of your selection.
Exercise 1 - Flash Arrays for Vectors and Matrices - A demonstration of the use of vectors and matrices, an important component of AI.
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.