I wanted to use the top-view of a building as a menu(navigation) for the users. When they hover over one of the rooms in the building, it should state what room it is and show some sort of effect. The thing is, however, the rooms of this building(only ground floor ofc) are not just squares or rectangles but have different shapes.
I have found the method css sprites already, but this method also uses the bounding boxes(so when your cursor approaches the edge of the room it already triggers the effect) of the shapes, and is thus not usable in my situation.
The top-view of the building can be very simplistic, as in a cross-section of the building with just coloured walls and the rest is background colour. When the cursor is exactly hovering over one of the rooms it should trigger the effect.
Does anyone know a way to tackle this? Thanks alot, Niels.
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I'm currently trying to implement a "crouch" function in my game. I'm using WCK with Box2D.
I have something rather basic, I generate my main character as an extension of a shape. This means that collision is automatically generated from the getgo. This is wonderful for a lot of things, but not everything.
I have a crouch/roll function. The problem is that the hitbox for crouching and standing are the same, so if a box drops onto you while crouching it "levitates" ontop of you since the hitbox is still the standing hitbox.
How would I go about "refreshing" the shape collision? Is there a way to delete the collision and make Box2D recalculate?
It's possible to filter contacts and prevent them from happening (using a contact listener or iterating the world's contact list) but I think there are better ways to do what you want.
You could split the body in two parts, and connect them with a prismatic joint (limits and motor enabled, collideConnected disabled). Standing up you'd have the motor push the parts apart to the upper limit and when crouching you'd pull them together to the lower limit thus reducing the height.
If you need really different shapes (e.g. a rectangle when standing and a circle for rolling around metroid style) this might work: Add both shape's fixtures to the body and use mask filtering to prevent the one you don't need from colliding with anything.
I'm having trouble understand how DisplacementMapFilter works. Basically, I'm trying to create a revolving planet through a combination of fisheye/masking.
Also, how do I go about doing this via timeline? I'm not too familiar with coding within it, but this is more of an animation project than anything else, so classes are out of the question. Sorry for the lack of code -- I'm simply stuck.
As noted in the comments above, this probably only answers half the problem;
Generating a displacement map image isn't too difficult with the right tools. I'll assume you're using Photoshop, GIMP, Fireworks, or similar.
It's probably best to work on a 128x128 image or smaller with this method. Some editors have more specialised tools which let you work on pretty much any size of image, but this is a generic process that needs no special tools. You can always enlarge the end result, but the quality will begin to go down.
Start with a gradient fill. It should go from pure black on the left to dark red on the right (specifically 128,0,0). Add a vertical fill from black at the top to dark green at the bottom (specifically 0,128,0), and combine them with a LIGHTEN or ADD filter. You should now have an image which has black, red, green and yellow corners. Flatten it.
Copy this image to another layer / whatever the term-of-choice is for your editor. Apply whatever displacement filter you want to it (maybe a fish eye, maybe a manual smudge, maybe a perspective transform, anything)
Add a third layer between the two. Flood-fill it with dark yellow (128,128,0) and set it to ADD / ADDITION blend mode. Set the top layer to SUBTRACT / SUBTRACTION blend mode.
That's it. You should get a mostly yellow image which will function as a displacement map.
Update:
To use this in the example program (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/filters/DisplacementMapFilter.html#includeExamplesSummary), replace the createBitmapData function with this:
private function createBitmapData():BitmapData {
return myBitmapObject.bitmapData;
}
where myBitmapObject is the instance name (I think) of your displacement Bitmap. There are tidier ways of setting that up, but this is the easiest.
We're developing a game with impactjs that allows 'chaining' of entities as they are clicked. Basically this just draws a line between the two points, with a neon glow effect. So far, so good. Now, we have a request to make the 'chain' connections animated - fire, sparkles, etc. Essentially things that seem like they'd need actual graphic animations to look right. As the entities can be any distance/angle from each other, we're stuck at how to best implement a solution for this - that is, how to draw a diagonal image, for example, between two random points that we can animate. Any thoughts our suggestions on how to pull this off would be much appreciated.
Maybe create a particle entity with an Animation Sheet containing the necessary animations/particle effects. And then draw these particles along the line that from point A to point B.
When you want to animate it to fire/sparkles etc. run the animation for all those entities. in that line.
I'd be inclined to agree with Prat. Particle effects would most likely be what you need.
Here is a tutorial on generating particle effects in impact.js that might help you out.
http://www.pointofimpactjs.com/snippets/view/24/particle-effects-generation
I was wondering how does pygame.blit manages the images blitted on screen. When I blit an multiple images on the screen, I see that each image is stacked on top the previous one.
How do I clear all these images? Wouldn't(somehow) there be a big problem when there are LOTS of images stacking on top of each other on the screen? Currently, I'm just blitting a white bg or custom bg on the whole screen to "clear" the screen. So far no problems or anything since the app I am working on is very small.
When you blit an image to a surface, it basicly draws it on the surface. The location of the blitting or the object blitted is not saved and cannot be changed. It's like if you were painting the images onto a canvas. The new ones would go over the old ones and there would be no way to get rid of one image if it were colliding with another image.
The most common approach to solving this is to just completly clear the screen using surface.fill(), and redraw the images each frame.
To answer your question about if there woudl be problems when there are lots of images, no. The window will only be saved as each individual pixel being a certain color, much like a regular picture you would take a camera, so no matter how many objects you blit, the game will always take the same amount of time.
There are multiple approaches:
Clean the whole background, as you are doing.
If the computer keeps up with the fps, perhaps it's better to leave it like this.
Clean only the areas where you blitted objects (see pygame.sprite.RenderUpdates)
In your case, if you have many stacked objects, perhaps it's better to write your own solution, trying to find the union between colliding rectangles, to avoid reblitting the same background over and over.
I've been thinking of a dynamic way of creating a CAPTCHA that uses morphing shapes or dynamic colors.
My first idea is to have a graphic, flash or something, that gradually changes from, say a square into a sphere. The user will be required to click the button when it becomes spherical enough.
Second idea is to have an area of color that slowly changes from, say, red to blue and the user will be required to press a button when it becomes blue enough.
Third idea is a combination of both methods.
I'd say the difficulty will be to match the clicks with the transitions. But it should be hard for automated code to detect shades or shapes.
Can people please offer some comments on my idea.
edit -
Thanks for the feedback. I'm now considering using a flash based video playback of a server fed video feed of a few colored shapes that morph into other colored shapes. The user will be required to pause the feed when the colors and shapes match some canned questions: such as : click on the video when you see two green squares turn into 3 blue triangles. The shapes will be amongst over overlapping and moving morphing shapes. Fun for the whole family!
Color is a bad idea as (a) its very easy for a computer to detect; (b) very hard for some humans — the color blind — to detect. Even if you're OK with denying access to the disabled, you'd have to worry about different monitors, systems, lighting conditions, etc. giving rise to different color perceptions.
How hard do you think it is for a computer to compare the red component and blue component in a pixel (or averaged over several pixels)? Trivial. So this isn't a problem for a computer.
Similarly, it isn't that hard to program the difference between a square and a circle. One has strait lines, one doesn't!
Good idea, you could also do it so that the shapes keep turning or moving.
I don't know if it would be safer than a regular letter capcha tho.
I'm not sure why you think color would be any harder to detect than text. Shapes possibly, but they would have to be more complex than n-sided polygons. The gradual animation is a good idea however. But if you can code it to show, someone can code something that watches it.
The real test is to prove humanness by identifying semantic meanings, rather than syntactic meanings.
For instance show pictures of animals and make the user click when a bird shows up. Or just say "click on the thing that can fly." And show some pictures of animals. This would be rather unbeatable by a machine until all images had been cataloged. The trouble with CAPTCHA of course is trying to make semantics with syntax. Therefore defeating itself from the onset.
You're on the right track, and I'm sure your proof of concepts are interesting. But remember: made by a computer: solved by a computer.
Although these ideas will almost certainly work, it's a security-through-obscurity effect. Classic CAPTCHA images are "one-way" in that the correct answer can't (theoretically) be deduced by a computer. The problem with saying "click here when the image turns blue" is that a computer could easily do this, if somebody considered the stakes to be worth developing a program for.
Additionally, unusual captchas will force your users to think. Depending on your audience this may mean losing some users.
I did a fair bit of research when developing a CAPTCHA system, and the classic method of printing text to an image seems to be the most effective. The trick is not in having lots of "background noise" behind the text, or different colours. It's about the following two things:
1) Random text kerning, with most or all letters slightly overlapping each other.
2) Random distortion, translation and rotation of the text.
If you have a look at Google's CAPTCHA, they pretty well only have those two features: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?service=mail