How does Google do the little animation that replace the Google logo every day?
I know the whole world lost almost 5 million hours playing Pacman at work last year (but it was worth it :D). But I am still very impressed by these little interactive games.
I was wondering what technology google is using to have an animation that perfect on their home page?
The Pacman one was some fairly fancy JavaScript, so I'd imagine most of them are done in a similar manner. The Les Paul one yesterday was JavaScript and embedded a SWF file to play the sounds.
They most likely use HTML5 and JavaScript. But you could acheive the same with Flash.
Related
This is my first post, wooohooo! I've been using stack exchange when I needed information but usually someone had the same problem as me and I didn't need to make a post. Which means this website is really good.
Now turns out I have a pretty unique problem.
Please check out http://gaia.tru.ca/birdMOVES/
You will see a website with a google map. It is connected to a db which will be automatically updated.
The purpose of this website is to track how birds feed. There is going to be bird feeders equipped with NFC all over the world to track birds equipped with RFID when they feed.
I am taking care of the front-end, the web app for visualizing.
This is a work in progress so try not to care about the looks of it.
Apparently everything was written in RApache because the person who made everything this far is a Geography teacher(Not a lot of programming background, I had to refactor his code and learn R because it wasn't in my array of known languages.)
My client asked me to add time animation to his map. Feasible with the help of Google Earth.
I made the existing R code generate a tour. It works perfectly and even shows on my map.
Here is the address of my dev server: http://thelab.dyndns.org:1080/birdmoves/
You can see that there is an extra check box for time animation. If you check it, the tour will appear as an object on the map (no way to use it whatsoever right now).
So what I'd like to know is how do I make it work? How do I make it autoplay when the submit button is pressed? With standard google earth controls for rewind, pause and fast-forward. And independently from the google maps without tour?
This is intense. I have the feeling google earth isn't going to work because they deprecated all their gadgets.
I'm on the clock and I need help.
In case you were wandering what eventually happened:
We ended up making a hybrid website where the static visualization is within Google maps using kml and the time animation is within CesiumJs using CZML.
CZML is based off JSON and can be used very similarly to kml.
The api is also very nice, it only takes one line of javascript code to get a map running on an existing server.
To implement time visualization CZML supports putting multiple consecutive values for almost any property(like position, to animate movement, or even color to change colors) and takes account of time.
Also very nice, CesiumJs supports animated 3d models!
If you're interested http://cesiumjs.org/
It also has a lot of support, documentation and tutorials... etc..
It's being maintained by professionals. I really recommend it.
The Google Earth API got deprecated and will not function by December this year which is not a viable option for a long term service. So cesium was the only option for this specific project.
Cheers
I'm developing some platform-like game in Flash using AS3. Everything is quite clean. The whole code is class based etc.
I've already done the most of the mechanics, and now I need to do some main character animations. I've already designed it, and it's waiting to be animated as a vector graphics.
A the problem starts here... What is the proper way of doing that? I would like to use bone tools to make it smooth. But as far as I tried to find any materials about it on the Internet everybody just do some simple animations and play it separately one after another. How about playing legs animation simultaneously arms and other parts of the body? Maybe some tricky usage of state machine... I don't know.. Is there any ready solution for that?
More tips is better here, or even some tutorials - just anything.
This tutorial by Chris Georgenes seems to be exactly what your looking for: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/character_animation_ik.html. Chris teaches the reader while animating a simple character. Having a strong overall knowledge of the bone tool will allow you to get the nice crisp animations you seek. I sincerely wish you the best of luck with your project.
I'm a beginner in programming world, never touch any programming language before. But last 3 days I decide to try make a flash game, I looked some tutorial about AS3, try it, yes I understand a little bit. But I'm still confused about this:
How do I know or to decide what codes I write first, what next? example: I want to add a hero, then a enemy, then a tiles, then a background, event listener.
Is it okay if I write code randomly, example: first I add enemy, then add tiles, add background, then add hero, etc?
What is the best way to completely learn all AS3 codes, especially about flash game dev?
I'm now in frustration mode, so I decide to learn from you all who have mastered AS3.
Check out this guide by Michael James Williams. I was in the same situation as you, and that guide helped me a lot. It goes through a lot of the basics and does a good job of explaining each step.
To answer some of your questions, the order in which you code stuff doesn't matter too much. You can always go back and adjust your old code, and you'll definitely end up doing that at some point.
For learning AS3 syntax, just look through some examples and tutorials, and don't be afraid to read the official AS3 docs. They might be intimidating at first, but once you start learning some of the terminology, they're very helpful.
you can try some video tutorials like these
http://www.lynda.com/ActionScript-tutorials/AS3-language-fundamentals/123492/129625-4.html
http://www.lynda.com/Flash-tutorials/Building-Flash-Games-Starling/98951-2.html?srchtrk=index:1%0Alinktypeid:2%0Aq:flash%2Bgames%0Apage:1%0As:relevance%0Asa:true%0Aproducttypeid:2
If you're frustrated NOW, are you sure that you're ready to invest a couple of YEARS in becoming half-good with Actionscript? You'll have to like learning from your mistakes (an excellent way to learn, actually), because you will make thousands of them and they will cost you thousands of hours!
Do NOT write 'randomly' unless you want to greatly lengthen your time to mastery. Everything you do should have a purpose. I would start (if I were starting again) by giving myself a series of the smallest challenges: make an object appear; make it disappear; make it appear in one second from now; make it appear when I tap a key or click my mouse; make it move across the screen; make it move back; make it follow my mouse... etc.
There are many hundreds of basic programmatic elements like these that will add to your growing grasp of logic, data-structures and language. There are usually many ways to accomplish the same task -- learn and practice all of them.
Luckily, the Internet is full of good tutorials and references to Actionscript, and some decent forums like this one where you can get help.
I know this is king of old but someone might still find this useful.
I think that if you are serious about game development and also want to learn some techniques that are independent of the platform (Flash/AS3 in this case) you should use a framework.
For Flash the best game framework is the Starling along with Feather for UI.
They run on Stage3D which means that run on the GPU not the CPU which make them very fast.
With Starling you can also create mobile games that run in AIR so I think it really is something to consider.
On hsharma.com you can find a free video tutorial that goes through everything you need to know to get starting with game development so it should answer the question on how to create enemies, backgrounds, etc.
Hope this helps someone.
everyone. This isn't as much of an specific technical question as it is about asking for some guidance on which steps should I follow.
The thing is I haven't worked with Flash in general for over a year and I'm very rusty, but now, here at work, I need to create an app that takes a picture, detects the face in said picture and then applies a certain animation effect. For example a slap to the face, so the detected face would shake from side-to-side or maybe something similar to the Fatify app, where it takes the pic, makes the person look fat and then you can touch it anywhere to see it animate. You get the idea.
So, my main problem is, that even after doing some extensive research, I'm still not clear on what the best method is or which would be the best tools to accomplish the animation effects on the detected face. I have read about Joa Ebert's Image Processing Library, but that seems to have been forgotten for quite a while and seeing as I have been out of the loop from the world of Flash for quite a while, I don't know if there's any novelty that could be what I'm looking for. I have also looked at countless image manipulation blog posts and tutorials, but most of it is simple stuff that doesn't really apply to what I need.
So, in summary, I would really apreciate it if anyone could point me to resources or topics that I should look into, that might prove useful for what I need to accomplish.
Thanks.
You should be using OpenCV. The library is quite extensive and has been ported to operate in many languages. OpenCV has an api for facial tracking. We've used it in our studio before for simple face tracking games.
These links are kind of dated, but should put you on the right track.
http://www.francois-tarlier.com/blog/marilena-opencv-port-to-actionscript-3-as3-flash/
http://www.marcpelland.com/2009/03/16/face-detection-opencv-in-as3/
Recently I've been learning HTML5 stuff, especially canvas.
I looked at many online drawing applications written in Flash(e.g. http://www.sumopaint.com, http://www.onemotion.com/flash/sketch-paint/) and they all seem packaged with awesome drawing effects. Smooth lines, simulated pencil/brush etc.
What I'd like to know is - is there a way to get such effects in canvas, and how?
I'm willing to put 1 month of (free-time)coding work to do it, but I'm not sure if it's even feasible.
Canvaspaint.org is an early now-public-domain project along these lines; the source is available here. Here (source) and here and are more recent interesting projects.