GPS Tracking Complete

So we have finally finished our GPS map and with Kathleen artistic skills we have craftily generated an image of a duck out of the information we collated through our journey.

This is an image of are we was going to cover before plotting anything:

This is the map after collecting the GPS data:

And this is our finale GPS drawing, Thanks to Kathleen:

Arr the Game

Well got an email from Chris today and in his email he states he wants the game to run on mac (which it does from a website), but he also states he wants to view it now that's the problem I have done this in Flash CS4 and at Uni its Flash CS3 so easy fix me thinks save it as CS3 file and jobs a good one but oh no, I get to Uni and nothing loads up comes up with error corrupted files, try saving again but same again nothing seems to work so I got on to my trusty online friend (google) and typed in the problems and guess what threes a problem in that I'm using Windows 7 and apparently windows 7 doesn't like flash Cs4, so with this in mind my next step was to download VM ware and install vista and then save the game that way and... I will tell you tomorrow when I test it.

It works....

It works well in a way the file now loads after saving it in vista but then comes some errors which I have tracked down to the levelUpButton but as its late in the day to be modifying code now for the game all I can do is hope that Chris is understanding and sees it does open up now in Cs3 so he can view the source code but the game wont really play the way it was intended i.e. hiding the levelUpButton but nothing I can really do now but to keep fingers crossed. Also I have got to admit how crap it is that Flash CS4 conflicts with Windows 7, also one more thing I been reading some more and I think its down to CS3 exporting the SWF file in flash 9 player when the code was written as a Flash 10 player.

GPS Tracking

GPS tracking, by many people can be considered as merely tracking were some one has been, but for a few members of society GPS tracking can be a form of art when you map it all out and connect the dots (links), so with this in mind me and Kathleen decided to go for a drive around the Plymouth area tracking our movements and the rules that we decided to come up with was that for every traffic light that we came to (main lights not pedestrian ones) we would make a decision to either turn left or right but not straight on by picking out paper pieces out of a tub that had left or right on them (Kathleen idea) this made sure that every turn was random. This gave us a huge area to travel so we decided to limit the experiment to a max of 30 minutes.

We have nearly completed the drawing so keep watching this space.

Hertzian Space

Was watching TV yesterday and I noticed how the little things can interfere with radio waves, The thing that I am talking about is the Airfreshner in my bedroom, how it interferes with the TV signal every time it sprays. this got me thinking more again on the same idea of radio waves that are transmitted around the Stonehouse and how they might be distorted by the traffic and even the people walking around the area.

Completed Game

So the Game is complete and I am proud of it, I actually got to finished the game I started in Java over 2 years ago so I am very pleased that it all works fully, I have taken some screen shots of the game in play and I even added in the external element for the game so depending what time of day it is the background will change again I feel this adds to the game.

So before I go marching on with the pictures I better put in why I chosen to do this game, the 1st reason is simple its an all time classic shoot em up, the 2nd reason is because I did start a game like this in Java for my HND but never got around to completing it fully and the final reason is I wanted a challenge with this game as I can say that I created a game from scratch and coded it with no help (OK some help from my friend Coffee) but that's really the only main reasons why I chose to do this game.

So like I said from the begging I started early to get it out of the way early and a pat on the back for me actually sticking to it and getting it complete.

So now that's all done here are some finish screen shots and then just me to put it up on my Web site: so you can play it here: http://www.retrostudent.co.uk/game.html

well here are the screen shots:

Some Errors on the Way

Well as you can probably tell I enjoyed doing this game, but I can say it wasn't without it's errors well OK at one point maybe 34 errors but didn't get a screen shot of that one as I just went straight back into the code to rectify the errors but here are some of the out takes of my Game.

Error due to switch statement.

Switch Statement Code

Switch Statment replacement Code

Error on about losing scope

Original Code:

Code fix:

Sheild Hit

So after getting the Tank and the Aliens tested for hits the next step was the Shields, I decided that I was going to create a function for this as I will be doing the same code over again for many different items such as the Tank Bombs and the Aliens bombs. The coding for this was straight forward, I did add a little extra to it so that every time the Shields were hit they would fade a little bit this was done with the Alpha setting and deducting 0.10 every hit.



Well here is my code:

Hit test

Well the Hit test didnt really go down too well at first but after some trial and error I have managed now to get rid of all the aliens with the Tank Bombs hitting them but then encountered some errors this was down to that the timer was still running for something that wasnt on screen so I sorted that out so now the code in the Game is nice and long so now to compress it a bit and then continue with the rest i.e. maybe add some levels and even some lives for the Tank, I want this game to look as good as the original if not a little more updated :-).

p.s. I have used the HitTestObject method as this will detect and posistion with element not just a given posistion.

here is some more code for the HitTest:

This code detects if the aliens hit the Tank and if so goto frame six which is my End Screen.

Back to Class

Hello all, not been on here for a while with it been Christmas. So how did the first day go, to be honest not to bad got our new assignment brief today. In the brief Gianni wants us to do some work on Hertzian Space - this in lame man terms means that the we have to do some research of radio frequency how they act, how long frequency last for and what can happen to frequencies with human interaction. All this has to bind with what we are doing for Stonehouse, so i have been thinking of still sticking with the idea of traffic noise but I also thought about maybe getting data from radio signals that bounce around the given area and maybe even detect what radio stations are been played by cars. The Idea i think is good but I am not sure if it would be possible with limited technology and knowledge but then again when there's a will there's a way...

So after having a chat in class we all went down to Stonehouse to take some blue tooth readings. The device we used for the readings was our own telephones and as I didn't have mine at the time we used Kathleen's to take some notes down of how many devices we could find with our phones. To be honest we didn't really find that many, as I think the signal for blue tooth is too limiting and therefore we were mainly picking up the other groups Blue tooth signals.

We have compiled a map of what we found in Union street and we will be doing a test again with WI-FI other the following week in our own time.

Well here is the map/Image of how many devices we found:

Bombs moving

So finally got the bombs firing up screen, couldn't understand at first why the bombs were following the tank but then it hit me I needed to update the position of the bomb every frame so therefore I placed my code in the function every frame this was also where my code for the user inputs is. I then decided that due to the amount of code that was going into this function I would be best to place the code into its own function which is called SpaceKeyPressed this takes in a movie clip and then works on the movei clip updating the code every second again this ties in with the user pressing the Spacebay hece the function name SpaceKeyPressed.

I have another snippet of my code to try and make this a bit more understanable:

Tank Bombs

So now I have got the Aliens all moving across the screen at the same time, the next step is for me to actually get the Tank bomb moving up screen and not just follow the tank.

So some more coffee for me.

Aliens Moving YAY

So in my last post I had one alien moving at once but couldn't figure out how to get them all moving together, but I have now and with a little help from some old Games book "Black art of Game Programming" I found that I needed a tracker (O.k something for each alien to track on screen) this would let each alien basically follow it backwards and forward.


This is a snippit of my code:

This is the set up for the Tracker:

This i s the tracker array for which the aliens will follow left and rgith:

Game Coding

So after getting all the elements going to the correct scenes and actually acting how I want them to act the next step is to continue with the original plan of getting the Aliens moving across the screen and the Tank moving when the user clicks the arrow keys.

Well got that all working now which wasn't to hard modifying my original code to move one single Alien across screen but trying to move rows of them is a bit more trickier so I'm going to go and have a go at trying to get them moving all together.

Game Continued

Hi told you I wouldn't be back until after Crimbo,

So after drawing all the elements and creating all the scenes for them I then decided that before marching ahead with the game and the coding I would test each element in a simple game, i.e. creating a simple click action so that when I clicked the individual elements they would run their animation once.

So what did I do next well I created the little game layout, well OK just an empty screen with the elements on I then added a Mouse click event handler and clicked on the first element and guess what happen... well it did its little explosion and then did another and kept looping each time so what was going on?

I looked at each of the scenes and noticed that I didn't put stop(); in any of the scenes so after finding out that I needed to put stop on each scene so the animation wouldn't loop continually I then realised that I didn't need stop on all the elements as I wanted them some elemets to have the effect of them been broken down into smaller pieces. so with these elements I placed stop(); in the first scene and deleted the rest of the stop() out of all the other scenes and this gave me my desired look that I wanted.