Published at August 17, 2008
in Games.
This is yet another entry in line with my recent non-game posts. I’ve always been a reasonably fast reader, both in English and my native language Swedish. However, it’s always nice to have some numbers to back up that general feeling. Thus I created readspeeder. It uses the complete book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, which he has graciously made available under a Creative Commons license.
You control the speed with your mouse, move it to the right to go faster and towards the center to go slower. If you move to the left you will go in reverse, farther to the left will move faster in reverse.
You can click the progress bar at the bottom to skip ahead. The Words per minute counter is an average of your last 50 words. I’ve made it so that it makes slightly longer pauses for words with more syllables. It also makes a small pause between sentences, I’ve found that really helps with reading comprehension. I guess it gives your brain a chance to process the actual meaning of the sentence before getting on with the next one.
According to Wikipedias entry on speedreading anything above 600 wpm can be considered quite good. 1000-2000 wpm is on a World Championship level. The very fastest readers claim speeds of 10 000 wpm or more. But I find that somewhat hard to believe.
This is more of a tech demo than anything else. It’s something that’s in damn near every game they make nowadays, but i still haven’t seen in a 2D game, maybe because nearly no one makes those anymore.
I’ve made bloom. I’ve been wanting to make this ever since bitmap effects were introduced back in Flash player 8, but AS2 is far to slow to pull it of with performance to spare for an actual game.
The following is a bit actionscript focused, so if you just want the pretty pictures feel free to skip ahead.
The way it works is that it, instead of just adding the different sprites to the stage, i have a canvas (essentially a Bitmap) i draw them on. This canvas is then copied into a lower resolution bitmap. It could just aswell be the same size, but I’m running it at a half or a quarter of the original resolution for better performance. This copy is then transformed into a black and white image by lowering the saturation to zero, in this step i also crank up contrast way up to get nice big white fields. Then i apply a simple BlurFilter to get the fuzzy effect.
This is then drawn on top of the canvas with additive blending.
The effect works a lot better if you can do some pseudo (or actual) HDR, since what it does is that it takes the very brightest pixels and makes them glow. This is all fine and dandy, but having variable exposure really makes it pop.
As an added bonus a beta of the Flash Player 10 was released this week, this gives amongst other things, a nice speed boost for blitting. It also supports something called Pixel Bender, which basically is pixel shaders, they run on the graphics card and everything. This demo however, does not use them.
See the demo after the break.
In other news; I attended the Nordic Game Conference this week. The conference itself was so-so, in my opinion a bit too many lectures/panels. I realize that you need the wide appeal for a conference like this, but that can’t be at the expense of quality. It is still nice to have something like that almost on your own doorstep though.
The real highlight of this was however that I got to meet a bunch of indie people. I mostly hung out with Petri Purho of Kloonigames and Erik Svedäng that is making the very interesting looking Blueberry garden. We also did some beer drinking with thewreck and jeb of Oxeye games. Pure gold.
Continue reading ‘It moves!’
Published at April 16, 2008
in Games.
I thought it would be easier to work all week and then be creative on nights/weekends, but as you’ve no doubt seen here it wasn’t all that easy. There’s a reason for “all” this posting all of a sudden, I am now a little bit less of a working man. I’ve taken Wednesdays off for the foreseeable future to try and make some more fun little apps and games for you to enjoy.
There’s also a little bit bigger project in the works, but that’s a bit too early to talk about now, it might not even make it into development if i jinx it by writing about it here.
But enough with the rants already.
In other news, I’ve spent the last two days failing miserably at growing some form of upper-lip facial hair.
Today I channeled this frustration into Flex and came up with the Super Moustache Generator 500. It’s a bit dodgy in almost every sense as I wrote it in about four hours. You get what you pay for, as they say. Play around with the sliders to make your very own ’stache, once you’re done I recommend saving the image, print it and then cut it out and play grown up for a while. That’s what I did.
You can send the patterns to your friends, isotope-style. The images stay on the server “permanently”, but if I see a lot of hotlinking going on I’ll change that in a jiffy.
Please do post any fun patterns you find in the comments, preferably with what you would call that particular type o’ stache!
