Follow up

The exhibition went very well.
I had my little station nicely decorated.  Got some good feedback.  No big job offers or anything.
Also, a couple days ago we were having a family barbecue and my step nephew in law was playing with the site and really liked it!  I was very happy with that.  I kind of expected him to maybe be kind of interested but then walk away in favor of something else in a couple of minutes, but he loved the habitat maker.  Just simple things like making big animals small and making the animals sit on each others heads.  He enjoyed printing them out as well.  (which is no longer disabled online).
I got some good additional notes on some user interface and other assorted things that could be improved from that as well as from the exhibition.
Also, and this is super lame of me, the site was not working in Internet Explorer.  I assumed that the computers in school were just lame, but As it turned out my parents could not get it working and they probably use EI.  So I checked that out and fixed the problem (I changed the classid of my SWF object) this morning.  This is probably the reason why the zoo did not get back to me when I mailed them a link to the site a few weeks ago.
Whoops, silly mistake!  Taken care of now.

and for my reference, here is a little list of future improvements and adjustments that could be made:

quick fixes:  Iframes in history,  organize folders

Later on:size limit and reset/clear, home button, speed, music, better gallery, movable puppets, names on map, map console, print popup fix?, sound off/on, enlarge animal drag zone. 

Uhg, Still not done

We set up our for the exhibition today and that went well enough.  But I ran into some trouble with my project.

The darn computer will not let me download Safari or Chrome, so I am stuck with Firefox which if you remember freezes up when you try to print (again, only on those computers).

I was going to bring in a printer, but it doesnt look like there is much point.

So I got home today and disable the print feature.

I was also having a problem with the whole application really slowing down quickly and occasionally, the text and image imported to the map from xml in the Map gets stuck on top of the movies and will not go away.

I hopefully sort of fixed this issue, just for the exhibition by remaking the map without the use of XML so it runs directly out of the SWF with the same functions.  I also put a note on there for people to only CLICK ONCE! because over clicking will really slow things down.

URG!!! I was hoping I could relax by now.

A little Bonus

ol' wifey made this for me today.
 Nice little addition for the exhibition.

Sound and final touches

A flurry of work this weekend adding some sound and fixing little bits and pieces.

I got my wife, brother, and sister to do some voice work for the animals.  I'll also add a voice when you hover over buttons.

Aside from that I have done some work on the iframe so I can moderate the comments a bit and so something different appears on the map and builder.  There are some other little changes as well.  Stuff just keeps coming up!

If I have time I want to make it so the iframe does not register in the browser history.  I can do that with a bit of javascript I think.  Another odd problem is that occasionally, if you click on the map buttons too fast the animal image and text that pops up moves to the front of the display and never goes away even when new movies are loaded.  I don't even know where to start with that, so i'll not worry about it right now.

I have the sound mostly done, I just need my sister to give me the elephant voice.
I need to finish my final report.  I have a lot of words right now, but it is a big mess.  I am also getting some business cards prepared for the exhibition.

ALMOST DONE!

Yeah I have been quiet

I have spent the last few days mostly working on the webpage.

Tomorrow is the presentation so I prepared a bit for that.  I submitted the website to the critical eye of my wife today and got a stack of sticky notes on mistakes, suggestions, and things that need to be improved so I am pretty much working on that today.  It is mostly for the written content.  Misspellings and suggestions to fix up fonts.
There are some suggestions to fix some of the layout and functional things, so I'll see what I get to with that.

I have done some testing of the website on different browsers here are the results:
Safari seems to work best.  No major problems and runs fast.
Firefox.  a little slower.  At school the browser completely freezes up when you try to print from Flash.  Lame.  Works fine at home though.
Chrome. Runs a little slow but it looks like everything works.
IE.  Meh, at school it just tells me that it needs to update the flash player.  So I updated the flash player and, big surprise, no difference.  When is the internet explorer 9 coming out allready?

Web page

The web page surrounding the flash movies was never meant to be anything to impressive, mostly just a holder.

I started working on that simple web page again today.  A while back I thought it would be nice if people could make comments at each animal page, but I had not done much about it.  So today I gave it a try.  I started by putting my flash page online, which was easier than I expected.  The page also ran better than I expected it to online.
I tried putting the flash movies into joomla page because it would be an easy way to allow users to make comments, but they ran very poorly so I scrapped that idea.

I searched online and found this comment box page that lets you make a nice comment box in your html page and you manage it with your gmail account.  So with a little bit of work I managed to run a test in which I load these comment boxes in my single web page using an iFrame that is activated by the flash movies.  This way each animal should have its own comment page set right under it.  I tried a couple of these online and it seems like it works perfectly.  So i need to do some styling and then throw it in with the rest of the pages.  It looks very promising.

Adding content

The builder is now pretty much finished.

Today I am adding in the text and content for chatting with the animals.  Simple stuff, nothing very complicated.  
I also realized the other day that I am getting less useless with programming code.  I am still not very good, but I have gotten to the point where I can make some simple stuff work and it doesn't take days to do it.

Today: Almost a disaster.

So I was working away and things were actually going pretty well.  I solved a couple of problems and figured out how the builder could work with a single swf.

Then my computer started to get sluggish, so I closed everything and started to back up to my external hard drive.  I came down an hour later and the computer was pretty much frozen up.  After that I could only get the operating system to start up on safe mode.  I ran a test and it looked like my hard drive was half busted. But through some trials and stuff I seem to have it working to where it was earlier.  I still don't trust it though.. I am a little nervous working on this computer now.

But the builder is starting to come together, my computer did not explode, and I did not lose any work.  So i lost a few hours, but all in all it was a successful day.

here is a screen cap of the builder for you.
You can pick two animals to put on the screen.  Change the size or flip them.  You can also chose different backgrounds.  You can even write a message and print the whole thing!

Builder

I finished all of the stop motion just before the weekend.  Got almost nothing done on Easter (darn family you know).
Since then I have been working on improving the "builder" where users can make a scene and print it out.  Yesterday I was able to make it pull in backgrounds from XML so you can flip through different background options (*note to self~go back and fix the xmllist length issue).

I also had a fair amount of trouble controlling the animals.  I made it so you can scale up, scale down, and flip the animals for your scene.  I found there was a a conflict the way I had written it that would skew the animal if you flipped it before scaling.  After trying numerous solutions I finally figured out that I could scale the objects using height and width with multiplication rather than the scaleX and scaleY and there would no longer be a conflict with flipping the object anymore!
Seriously, it took me hours to figure this out.

My hope is that I can make the entire builder dynamic and not have to make a new one for each animal.  I already have the backgrounds worked out.  If I can figure out how to bring the animals in from XML and keep my functions working I will be thrilled.  Then if i can do that I would like to be able to make it so flash knows what animal to load depending on where the user is coming from.  So if they come from the redpanda.swf it will start with a red panda loaded in.  I think i might be able to get flash to do this using local connection or shared objects, but I am not sure.

I know from class that kind of stuff is pretty easy in PHP, but actionscript tends to make life difficult and suck hours out of my life.  We will just have to see how it goes.


But aside from the builder,  sound and text are the next big things.

Ostrich!

Finished the Ostrich running animation this morning and inserted our meerkat friend into the movie.  I also made a few new buttons during the day.  Tonight I shot the stop motion stills for the gorilla and started editing the images.  Photoshop is giving me some grief so it is taking a while to get the batch editing actions correct.  Very time consuming this stop motion business is.  A lot more fun than hunching over code though!


If the video works correctly below then you can see how the Ostrich animation sequence went.  There is a little more to it, this is just the running cycle.

took a little longer than I wanted, but the new guys are finished

Race to the finish

Easter break has started.  Project is due in 3 weeks.  Still lots to be done.

I started the marathon to the finish today.  Drew up three new animals in Illustrator (red panda, Gorilla, and Ostrich) and I'll be cutting them out and assembling them tomorrow.

Also did a few assorted preparations with new .fla files, xml, and gallery photos to make that process go along smoothly.

I'll have to get the stop motion studio set up again.

Some photos for you from the stop motion process from a few weeks ago.

There is me using the Dragon stop motion software

Shooting in process

My wife helping out

weekend

started fixing up a code for a better drag/drop application. 


I thought I might use xml to bring in different images for this but then I realized that would probably make my life a lot more difficult.  There is a chance I will still do that down the line, but for now I am going to try to find the easiest way to make it do what I want it to do. 


So I messed around with that for a few hours and hopefully made some progress.  It is kind of difficult to figure out the best way of doing things.  Something seems very simple until you break it down and try to figure out how it will actually work. 
I need to refresh myself on using 'export to actionscript'

Elephant stop motion and Map navigation

Shot the stop motion for the elephant last night and put it together in premiere pro today.

There are still some things that need to be sorted out with it.  I am a little concerned with the quality of video that I am getting by the time I bring this into flash.  The quality is a bit lacking.  I can go back if I have time at the end of it and fix any problems easily enough.  I have everything saved with the stop motion sequences.  But probably best to figure these things out earlier.  I am trying some different export settings to see if that helps.

I also finally figured out how to link to different .swf movies with in my map using XML and an actionscript class.  The solution turned out to be fairly simple and I think it works better than what I was going to do before.

elephant

Hav'nt gotten quite as much as i would like to have gotten done this weekend so far.  Some decent progress though.  I have my animal gallery's almost sorted out.  There is always one problem though, I can't get my path correct with something so the photos won't show up when you go through the web page.

if I was to go back to the start of this project, i would downplay the importance of actionscript type things.  Not that i am really even using that much, but what I am using tends to be a struggle every single step of the way.  I am just really not all that good at it.  At the beginning of the year I assumed I would eventually start to 'get it' like with HTML or CSS, but despite extra studying and all that...  aww well.  I'll just have to keep struggling on and do what I can.

In more fun news, I finished making my elephant today.  Stop motion shooting scheduled for tomorrow night. 

Work continues

After taking the good part of a week off to work on other class projects I am back into Major Project work.

I have put together a good part of the "welcome" and "den" movies, incorporating my stop motion video into the flash timeline with some basic actionscript linking things together.
I also scanned in some new textures so I can make some images that appear to be made out of paper in photoshop for buttons and the like.
I should have, for the most part those two movies done in the next couple of days.  There is more that could be done, but I will save that for the 'make everything look pretty and right' phase, which follows the get everything together phase and the "oh balls, how do I make actionscript actually do what I want" panic phase#2.

I plan on restarting the former phase this weekend.

welcome sequence finished (mostly)!

Here is the mostly complete welcome stop motion sequence.  A lot of work there for just a few seconds.  Of course I will be stopping the movie part of they way through so the user has a chance to read the speech bubble I will be putting in.  So a little flash functionality and I'll be moving on the the next step. 

Meerkat motion!

I did a practice at moving my meerkat puppet around and inserting that into a video, keying out the background.

I have to say I am pretty thrilled with the result.  There are still some problems you can see in the video ( a bit of green popping up, he runs a bit floaty, my silly hand popping in) but most importantly it all works!  Now I just have to iron out a few problems, do some planning and then I should almost be ready to start working on the welcoming sequence.

Video is below (you have to wait a few minutes for the videos to load, be patient)

new stuff

I decided to take a break from the irritating action script for a while and work on some other elements of the project.  I finally busted out the materials I have been collecting and did a test run of some stop motion I would like to use in the flash videos.  I will probably only use stop motion sequences for a few bits, like the opening welcome and a few other spots.  I was able to take the video below and put it in flash as a movieclip (it seems that it will only work right if it is an FLV).  I can still apply other layers and all that.  

So I will build those sequences in Premier.  I also have made a puppet of the meerkat with 6 points of movement and interchangeable facial features!  I will probably do those stop motion sequences over a piece of green poster board, key out the background, and then add that video in seperately.  Coordinating the puppet with other backgrounds could be a bit of a challenge, but I am fairly confident it will work.  

It was nice to get away from code and hunching over a computer for a while!

Sending email out

I have got the code right to send an attachment out from a server using PHP.  It was pretty simple really.

All I have to do now is figure out how to save an image from my flash movie onto the server and it is proving to be much more difficult.  Actionscript continues to suck hours away from my life.
I'll see if I can find a better example than the one I am using now but the comments say this is a good one.  It is just the way the author intertwined a bunch of his class files.  It is very frusterating and I am getting a class location error and I cannot find a reason.

But I did get the php part working so little progress there.

Oh, hey! it's mid-term.

Spent time this last week trying to get the e-mail working.  We actually spent nearly 2 hours of class time figuring out how to get it done.

originally, I was using this code http://designreviver.com/tutorials/actionscript-3-jpeg-encoder-revealed-saving-images-from-flash/
But that was not quite working.  The reason we figured was because the PHP was not actually doing much of anything but trying to echo the JPG created in flash.

Now the working theory is that I should have the actionscript create a JPG or image that will be saved onto the server.  Then I will create some php that will take that image and send it out to an email.  Easy as could be right?

here is a big ol' collection of links.

http://ntt.cc/2009/01/09/as3corelib-tutorialhow-to-use-jpegencoder-and-pngencoder-class-in-flex.html

http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.imagick.php   or also try GD?

http://email.about.com/od/emailprogrammingtips/qt/How_to_Send_Email_from_a_PHP_Script.htm



http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4635820/as3-save-media-file-to-server

http://ask.amoeba.co.in/save-images-from-flash-actionsctipt-3-filereference-save-jpgencoder/

http://www.quietless.com/kitchen/upload-bitmapdata-snapshot-to-server-in-as3/

http://www.webcheatsheet.com/PHP/send_email_text_html_attachment.php#attachment






_________________________________________________________________

So over mid-term I will hopefully get that working over break.  I also plan on improving things from a visual point of view over the week. 

*fingers crossed that things work well enough.

feedback from presentation

Feedback from presentation:
The presentation itself was just fine and dandy.

As far as the project goes, though, I am behind where I should be.  At this point all that tough stuff I am working on now should be done and I should be putting effort in to other things like the graphics and layout and putting the whole darn thing together.

My project is also at risk of being "middle of the road."

I am sorry to say that I do not completely disagree with this.  If I can make the thing look nice and make everything work I think I will be happy with it all.  But yeah.... we shall see.

Still getting printing right

Working away.

So I got it printing, but I only wanted it to print a specific movie clip.  It took me a couple days to get that right, but today I got it.

Unfortunately, I found that my drag and drop code was only dragging objects on top of the movie clip.  I will need the objects to be dropped inside of the movie clip.  I worked on this for a while and have not gotten it yet.  So i'll hopefully work out how to do that tomorrow.

Anyway, the actionscript continues to be a challenge every step of the way.  I am hoping that I am getting better as I go.  I can only assume I am.  I also hope I am not just making a big mess.

Print from Flash

I spent the day trying to figure out how to print from flash using AS3

it took me a couple tutorials to find one that was not lame.

I wound up using this one:
http://www.flepstudio.org/forum/tutorials/3503-using-printjob-class-actionscript-3-0-a.html

I was able to get the tutorial to work (after two or three attempts)
Next I will have to work this into my habitat builder code.
This will allow users to print out the images they make.

Good news/bad news.  You can only print out a specific movieclip/sprite.

This is good because users will only print the important part of the screen.
Bad because it means ill have to make sure what they build rests within one movieclip.  This may or may not end up being a problem because of children/parent complications.
My money is on it being very annoying.  I'll find out in a day or two.

been busy

Did the presentation on Friday.

Got a good amount done in the last couple of weeks.  I have a shell for the site built now.  The next big step is to figure out how
-to send off an ecard
-make the 'habitat builder' application work and not be too lame.

I bought an actionscript book for reference over the weekend and found some tutorials on Friday.  Hopefully I'll have some progress made by Friday and pretty much know how it will all work within the next two weeks.  If I can get that stuff done, then I should be able to build everything else around it.

Building Prototype

I started building the prototype this week.  Extremely basic version.
I am concentrating on getting the HTML page built with the .swf movies tucked in there.

With the swf movies I have 5 stages to include.
-there is the welcome screen that comes up right away.  Millie the Meerkat (Super Cheesy i know) welcomes you
-you go down in the burrow with Millie and from there
-you can view the map of the zoo and choose which animal to visit.
-you hang out with the animal, look at some pictures and get some info
-lastly is the e-card building application.

I have built basic versions of those first 4 in flash and linked 3 of them together.  The next step is to figure out how to link my XML map to the next step.  I think this will just take some actionscript fooling around (that should eat up some good time.)


Right now I have just been quickly plugging in art and images.  That all could change.  All in all though, things are going pretty smoothly for this basic prototype.

I also started thinking about how the e-card builder will work.  I found a couple tutorials online that will hopefully be useful.  (of course they are written for AS2).  I plan on looking deeper into that next week after I get this initial prototype stuff all linked together.

Oh, before I forget.  Another annoying problem.  To make all the .swf files link together I have to have them all in the same root folder as the index.  This is especially problematic for my XML movie because that requires multiple folders and files itself to work.   I am not sure what to do about that.  It is a pain.  I'm sure there is some easy solution to this.

That is all for now.  Good luck me.

Christmas break is over

So what is new?

I recently started making a skeleton of the website.  I have all the divs and such roughly arranged.  I was able to add the .swf to the and it loads fine, but the xml information will not load.   So I will have to figure that out.

I will also have to think of a way to include 3D into my project.  I do not know exactly how I plan to do this yet.  I have a few ideas but I need to have a better understanding of what we can and cannot do with the imported papervision stuff.  For example, can we import a 3D file that has motion or a moving camera? How do we add materials to what we import?  Besides being able to rotate the 3D image around with the mouse, what other controls can we have (and do we do that using actionscript and will that be pain in the butt) 
We are still going to be doing that papervision 3d flash stuff in class so hopefully those questions will be answered sooner than later.