I have no idea if you need to have Vizard installed for this to work but I have published my application as an EXE file.
Click here to download and play around with it.
Use the arrow keys to control the ball, press space once to drop the ball, press R to reset everything.
Finally everything is almost completed for my presentation tomorrow. Actually I have really liked messing around in Vizard the past few days and it seems as though I’m getting the hang of it… all be it in a very clumsy way.
After many IF statements I have finallly managed to get the code to do what I want. Unable to use an ‘if position = x then play this’ line I used collisions and physics to make the ball drop onto the cubes and then use IF statements to change the properties of each cube from white to red and also play a sound.
It works pretty well and I have just about finished the reset function. Turns out I needed to create a function to position all the cubes and turn them white, call it during the script and then call it again when the ‘r’ button is pressed.
Coding was neither a weakness nor a strength but I’m learning, and learning the principles in one can help with aspects in another. So while I have been struggling with my PHP I think it may have inadvertently help me in Vizard.
Anyway, here are some screen shots of the (for lack of a better word) game.
An article reports that today Firefox announced that it had reached a milestone of 500 million downloads of the open-source browser. I think that’s great. I love the whole open-source ethos but I am in a quandary, can you make any money from open-source software? Not that I’m a money hungry tycoon, but Microsoft are about to release IE8 beta and undoubtedly they will have copied the very useful features from Firefox. Tabbed browsing for example? A separate search box with customisable engines? Good ideas, but I can’t help but feel Firefox are getting ripped off.
After not really concentrating on this project for the last month or so since the previous project deadline was set, I have not really progressed as far as I would have liked. There are many things I want to be able to do but I don’t have the time / desire / knowledge to execute them.
So far I have imported my model into Vizard I managed to control of the ball you use to move over the cubes. I followed the move tutorial on the WorldViz but had to change the ‘move’ instruction to ‘translate’ so that it adds a number to its position rather than move it to a specified point each time. So you have free roaming environment.
Next on the list of things to do is get some kind of collision detection going on between cube and ball, then once that has been achieved I can work out how to get the cube to change colour and play a sound.
A few options are available for navigation of this, what I want to do is have a fixed camera position and you control the ball from a bird’s eye position. All I have managed to do so far is create a ‘window’ that looks down on the environment. This is a small updating image located in the top right of the main window.
I wanted to have 3D sound so as you move through the environment playing sounds, they appear to go behind you. Problems with this include no adequate speakers in the 3D projector room and the facet that the control system with the ball would have to change so the camera is a fixed distance behind the ball and translates through the environment accordingly. The sound itself is not complicated as their is a specific tutorial addressing 3D sound.
One more problem I have just realised is that my model of many cubes is interpreted as a single model, so currently I am re-importing a single cube and placing instances of it around the environment.
I may end up just having one cube that does some stuff but not very well… which is not really what I want but lack of anything better may preclude the possibility of a good final presentation.
I know how tempting it is to set up a fake Facebook page and then message your friends with all kinds of abuse or stalker-like behaviour, but have you ever stopped to think what the ramifications could be?
Well a Moroccan computer engineer certainly didn’t, although he did sign up to Facebook as Prince Moulay Rachid, younger brother of King Mohammed VI. I don’t think the guy was ever expecting to get caught and if he did I suppose he thought he would just get a slap on the wrist from Facebook and not be allowed to play with the other kids.
Far from it, this guy has been sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to pay $1,300. I think that’s a little extreme myself but hey, now I’m not going to sign up to Facebook pretending to be the queen as originally planned!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7258950.stm
I saw a prototype for this a few years ago and thought it was a genius idea. It’s a keyboard that has OLED screens built into the keys. With the bundled software this means you can change the layout of the keys, what the keys do and even what the keys look like. I saw the prototype using a layout designed for Quake, but ANY software program or game could use a customised keyboard layout.
“Optimus’s customizable layout allows convenient use of any language—Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian, Arabic, Quenya, hiragana, etc.—as well as of any other character sets: notes, numerals, special symbols, HTML codes, math functions and so on to infinity.”
Priced at around $400 its a lot to pay for a keyboard, and I’m not sure if they’re available over here yet but at least you know that you can change the layout to UK with ease!
A planned meeting by the FCC has been announced to tackle the problem of ‘traffic shaping’ - the process of ISP’s dictating access to certain websites, services (such as peer-2-peer) and bandwidth - which is apparently in violation of the ‘net neutrality’ policy employed by the FCC.
“The issue of net neutrality has come to the fore mainly as a result of Comcast, which is under investigation by the FCC for sabotaging peer-to-peer traffic such as BitTorrent downloads.”
I was expecting the presentation to be inclusive of other members of the class, but no it was just each group or individual with Flo and Dave. Valid feedback was received and the main thing I got out of it was that our idea (Myself and Robert Andre) is very VERY large in scope and we need to refine down each aspect we want to present. Flo made a good point that we should present as if we were pitching to TFL and not only to someone with technical understanding but also to someone who could potentially buy the idea of us.
With this information we have decided on 4 things to prepare for our final presentation (even though they are slightly off brief).
1. Plan a route through multiple points (done but with manual if statements).
2. Create a flash animation of what the interface will look like and what information it displays.
3. Have a small demo video showing real-time implementation of an SMS text based system.
4. Have an image map that allows the user to select the route directly (might have to be a flash file rather than php as I can’t get the selection to input the data into a ‘$_GET’ field.
Here’s the presentation we used for the formative anyway.
I love gadgets, so whenever a new one comes along, I sit at my laptop drooling over the sleek lines, the glossy finish, the system specs and what it would be like to hold one in my hand… Not once do I think about trivial things like cost.
So when I came across this little gadget wonder I did as described above.
It’s a box from ASUS (good start) which will convert ANY signal into HD and beyond! Actually it goes up to 1,920×1,200 and can even take signals from RF… if you have something thats decade old. It allows you to connect anything to an HD monitor and use it as a universal HD display. Even comes with it’s own remote and has features like Picture-in-Picture. It claims to have better picture quality than anything else because of superior picture processing and some kind of ‘anti-blocking’ system.
Cool… if I needed it… which I don’t… but I want it anyway!
Reading this article on El Reg, it made me chuckle. The overall weight of it seems to be that a court judge has ordered a site to be taken down because of nefarious content (no surprise there) and in response to that, the site remains up (no surprise there either).
What is surprising is the details of the hosting provider enabling the site to remain up. It’s something called ‘bulletproof hosting’ - The servers are maintained at numerous undisclosed locations, they use military grade encryption on sources and they keep none of their own logs… Oh and it was started by the same people who set-up ‘The Pirate Bay’!