23 Aug 09 Sploidz Revisited (Unofficially)
I’ve already written about the semi-conductor project and how I’ve written some Flash animations/applications for it. Of course, I’m more interested in making fun stuff´, so I decided to put my knowledge to good use and write a small game to see how difficult/awkward Flash actually is.
To sum it up, it is somewhat awkward, at least if you use the IDE itself. FlashDevelop still is as nice as ever, but you can quickly develop games nonetheless. I prefer Torque Game Builder though in retrospect.
Before I continue talking about the development itself, let’s take a look at the actual game. Sploidz was the first game I wrote using Torque Game Builder for Joshua Dallman, and since I still had all the assets in my subversion repository, it was an easy decision to try and port this game. If you want to play it, you can download it for free here.
I haven’t ported everything: I’ve just rewritten the main characteristic features that make up Sploidz’s code in ActionScript.
Without further ado´ here is the game:
Click to open Sploidz in its own window
Because the art is still copyrighted and I haven’t heard back from Joshua yet ´, I decided to create a free version that only uses “coder art” – in this hand-drawn coder art 
Some´ have said that this version looks cuter, decide for yourself:
Click to open SploidzCC in its own window
Below you’ll find a description of the development and at least one helpful trick and most importantly a link to the source code of the “copyright-free” version.
Because the orginal version is way too difficult to be really fun, I actually sat down one more time and added code to make the platform slower if you’re in danger of losing (up to 3 times slower):
Click to open SploidzMoreFun in its own window
Tags: ActionScript, Flash, FlashDevelop, game, Photoshop, Sploidz
02 Aug 09 Semi-Conductor Optimization (Uni Project)
I’ve written my last exam yesterday (except for two oral exams in September), so now I have got some spare time before I start working on my Bachelor Thesis tomorrow and I want to use it to wrap up a few things.
During this term I took part in a course that was both a (research) project/presentation/lecture thing, which was fun but also a lot of work.
I’ve already written about one mathematical aspect of it in my post about Analysis, Cauchy-Schwarz and Reciprocal Sums.
The project was about optimizing semi-conductor wiring placement. We wrote a small paper about our findings and the work it was based one – you can look download it here.
We also created a self-running presentation that doesn’t contain any Maths at all but makes heavy use of Flash animations (which were exported to .gif manually, which was a huge pain in the ass, which I will never do again if possible) to visualize all the concepts and algorithms.
You can download a PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) version here or one that works with PowerPoint 2003 here.
For the Student’s I sat down and wrote a small Flash application to show the algorithms at work. It’s not obvious how it works, so let me explain the major points:
- On the right you have a number of panels that you can enlarge by clicking on the small button in the upper right of each panel.
- The upper three panels show different views of the same dataset. They will all be updated as you run the algorithm step by step.
- The fourth panel lets you change the number of wires and/or their activity.
- The last panel shows the electrical field that is created by one active wire in the center. It was created using MatLAB. I’ve also uploaded the script here.
Last but not least I’ve also uploaded the current version of all my .fla and .as files. You can download it here.
ActionScript is a nice language and you can quickly learn it using the available resources from Adobe.
While ActionScript 2.0 is arguably weird, ActionScript 3.0 is quite logical and it’s syntax is straight-forward and consistent, too. You can’t say that about the IDE (Flash CS4), which is braindead, but if you’re only interested in writing ActionScript code, FlashDevelop is an excellent and free alternative.
This is it for now, maybe I’ll play around with Flash some more another time.
Cheers,
Andreas
Tags: ActionScript, Flash, MatLAB, PowerPoint, Semi-Conductor Optimization
