So it’s finally done. My project is a little whimsical, I will admit, but it was fun and it turned out great. I came up with my project because of the discussions that we had in class last Thursday and the fact that my friend uses many tokens in his Magic the Gathering deck. His tokens are goblins, so I wanted to make something that could keep track of the goblins, since we lose track a lot, and could make the goblins seem funnier. In all honestly, this project is kind of a jab at his play style since it annoys me and I just generally don’t like it. Still, this project has been very very fun and worked out great.

My program is a random generation program that makes randomly positioned goblins depending on the count of goblins. You would use the left and right keys to subtract and add goblins, while the up key would make them run across the screen and attack. Each time you click one of the keys the goblins are all repositioned allowing for the creation of some very random and interesting configurations that can be some really cool images. There was even one time where I could have sworn that the string of variations spelled out goblin.

The code wasn’t too complex, but there were a few problems in getting things to work. The first problem was getting the string at the top to display a number since all references online where just consistent and never changing. This was solved by making the string a variable so that it would change with the value. The second, and by far the most annoying problem that I ran into was getting the run function to activate on a key press. This problem was solved thanks to Dennis by changing the key press functions to run and change a button value instead of actually pressing the key to run the function. This way the running function could be in the draw section allowing it to actually work and run multiple times instead of just once like it was in the key pressed section. So thank you Dennis.

The video of it being used is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mjAWM6mmAE&feature=youtu.be

Thanks. It was a great class and term.

Ok, so for my final project, I really liked the idea of doing a play mat for a game that got mentioned in class today. I think I’m going to try something similar to his idea but using my friend’s Magic deck instead of using Yugioh. I don’t really want to do a mat, but I do want to do some kind of interactive video or audio to the game and the methods that my friend uses to play. Luckily, he uses multiple copies of the same cards a lot so it would be easy to make images or animation that are like cut outs of the cards that he uses. He uses goblin card so I figure that it shouldn’t be too hard to find or make animations for it. I would want to have it be very specific to him and not really a generalization because it seems a bit easier. I would hope to use actual cards as the sensors, but I feel like that would actually mess up the cards a lot because of the alligator clips, so I will probably end up using some spare card covers that we have. I will definitely need to look up some animations or images of goblin quickly so that if I don’t find any I have time to make my own. Of course I will also need to test to see if the cards or the card cover are actually conductive, but if not I could always put a little bit of aluminum foil on them. For the program itself, I don’t really think that it should be too hard if I just use images. I could just have each keycode be registered to put up a different image and then to reset after a few seconds. All in all, it seems like the project could be very fun and I am looking forward to getting started on it.

Well, I couldn’t get my project to work. I started out trying to do it in PD, but PD makes very little sense to me in all honesty, so I tried to do it in processing too. Then it sort of worked, but it wouldn’t render out when I tried to play it. The error was that the file was too big or something since I turned a gif into a mov file. But even without that particular problem it wasn’t working right. When I got that error I was like, well let’s see if it works without the video file. Then it would load, but for some reason it wouldn’t load the pictures and there were no errors. I have no idea how to fix this, so I’m just going to post up about what I was trying to do.

For my project I was trying to do something with a picture that I found online, this one, where I would have multiple pictures of different people and/or animals screaming noooooooo. Then I wanted to have a gif , this one, that would be like assemble the troops. Then it was supposed to go to picture of armies lined up ready to attack. This movement between images was suppose to be done with the A and D keys to go forward and back in the progression.

P.S. I hope those pictures are actually there since it is only showing the link on my add new post page.

There were a lot of blog posts for the nature and machine assignment that I thought were really well done. I feel that the best of them was the Nebulae project, it just looked great every time it reset and really felt like you were looking up at the night sky. Another project that I loved was the atomic flower project. The shape is interesting in its own right, but with all of the colors that it generates, it looks amazing. One of the other projects that I liked a lot was the one that created the color bubbles that mixed colors as the bubbles spread out. For the suggestions, I will have to say that the abnormal tomato could be changed slightly. Nothing big, but I would suggest that the background be in the draw section so that there isn’t the build up of the stem/leaves. Another thing I would suggest would be to change the speed of the bubbles on the magic bubbles piece. I feel like it would make the image seem to flow better. The rolling eggs one is the one that I make an association with because, a few times I was able to make the eggs in a pattern that seems like a hypnotic spiral. It just looks cool because its actually spinning.
The interactive piece that inspires me most of all is the Shadow Garden at the Tech Museum in San Jose. It is a shadow art piece that is cool in it’s own right because shadow art is pretty cool in it’s own right, but the screen has little butterflies on it that land on the shadows that you cast. If I were to try to improve the Shadow Garden, it would be really hard. I guess I would add more of a background to it to try to make the scene more alive and I would also try to make the butterflies a little more defined. It is still probably my favorite interactive piece though.

This is just the rain falling down the screen. It does a weird bunching thing at the beginning where more will fall than usual, but that makes sense with the use of arrays and it trying to have the same number of drops on screen at all times. It’s just here to look pretty, so it doesn’t do anything really special.

This one is just a simple little flower. I know it’s out of character with the others, but I couldn’t really think of a good sky scene that would be interactive. So instead you get a little flower that will be centered around the mouse and will change colors when you click the mouse. Be sure to click three times.

This is way more in keeping with the sky projects I planned on doing. It is someone looking up at the clouds moving across the sky on a clear day. The code for it is really similar to the code from the rain sketch, so this one was much easier to do than the others in my opinion. Sorry that the clouds are just lame circles I was trying to make then more cloud shaped, but I couldn’t really get it right.

Well, since I really have no idea about other things that I would be posting up on the blog right now, let’s talk about my ideas for the nature and machine project. I’ve got a few that I think should be really cool. First off, the animated one. This one, I think, should be pretty simple. I plan on have rain run diagonally across the screen, which I feel like arrays would be best for, but I don’t know how I would get it to work. And to have the background be an image of the sea. I mean if we can put an image into the foreground, why no the background too. For the interactive one, I want to make a forest with some trees of course, that will make like a bird chirping sound, or some other forest sound depending on where the mouse is. For the last one I was thinking of trying to do a river running through a grassland and for the hell of it making the river seem to move. Well that’s all of my best ideas. If you were stuck on one, I hope this inspired you.