ed dickins

Bah. We didn’t win at the Big Chip Awards last night.

I really thought that we were in with a chance with the Mr Scruff site, and it was nice to get whoops from around the room when our nomination was read out. Nevermind, it was nice to be recognised and included in the category of Best Use of Design.

We lost to Code: ComputerLove for a website they did for a University. I can’t find a link to it on their site.

No matter, we had a brilliant time and scared all the people sat at our table when Mike told them that we were from Moss Side, and he scared me by wearing a suit. We were in full black tie outfits and I learned to tie a proper bow tie in just under an hour (thanks Dad).

Well, call it vanity publishing if you want, but Frank at WeLoveTheWeb and I have decided to submit www.mrscruff.com to see if it wins an award. The Big Chip Awards are to ‘celebrate the wealth of talent in digital industries in the North‘, and we are submitting the new Mr Scruff site in the ‘Best Use of Design’ category.

The awards are very well attended and the standard is always high, although they do tend to be dominated by a handful of the same companies each year. There are many categories that StarDotStar, the last company I worked for will be entering, and quite a few of those entries will be sites and applications I worked on. So if we don’t win directly for Mr Scruff I will probably win something by proxy, but I would be most proud to win in our own right.

Sadly the site only lists who our competition is, rather than what their product is, so I have no idea what we are up against. I think this might be because some of the entries are not online as they are maybe CD-Rom applications. I am quietly excited about it and crossing my fingers.

So it is bonfire night and you haven’t got any fireworks to let off, or maybe they won’t let you light any because you are sitting at your desk at work or something.

It is my pleasure to give you an everlasting sparkler that you can play with for as long as you are sitting in front of a computer. The only thing missing is the wonderful smell that sparklers give off.

I am starting to go deeper into the Actionscript 2.0 framework that is released with Flash mx 2004 pro. There is a lot that is new to learn.

This is the first proper Object Oriented language I have programmed in. All other versions of Actionscript using prototypes instead of proper classes. And I wimped out of learning .net although now I understand Actionscript 2.0 and classes I would probably not have too many problems.

I finally understand what one of my bosses meant all that time ago when he was trying to get me to write classes in flash. Of course no such thing was possible in Actionscript 1.0 and I did the closest thing I could using prototypes and basing the development on the Model View Controller design pattern as best I could.

But I didn’t really understand what he was getting at until now. It is really powerful stuff and I find that having a new way to program has made my code cleaner and it is making me be more organised before I start doing anything. I welcome this for lots of reasons.

I do have some complaints about Macromedia’s support for this new framework. I can barely find anything about what you need to do to get the most out of Actionscript 2.0, so thankfully I have found a few excellent resources online. But this doesn’t excuse Macromedia’s poor support.

I find reading the daft ‘help’ panel very frustrating. But the component dictionary is pretty good, and you can read up on all the classes if you want to extend one or find out what methods and events it supports.

I have found two books that are proving to be helpful.

Actionscript 2.0 Dictionary from the Macromedia Press.
Object-Oriented Programming with Actionscript 2.0 published by New Riders.

I feel really badly for the authors Jeff Tapper, James Talbot and Robin Haffner. The book is brilliant and they have done well to get it out so quickly, but it would appear that one of their technical editors/ proof readers bollocksed up the code examples and there are some mistakes in the examples.

But if you can understand what the body of the text is saying, you should spot these typos straight away as they are obvious. And even with these mistakes, the book is very well written and I would still recommend it to anyone who wants to progress from Actionscript 1.0 to Actionscript 2.0 and implement OOP for maybe the first time.

So, if you are interested I have added some good flash links to the links section. These others are all Actionscript 2.0 specific ones, many referring to how to build components properly.

Jesse Warden
Jesse Warden’s component tutorial. Shows you step by step what to do. Invaluable.

http://www.flashcomponents.net/
A little difficult to read but still good.

levitated.net
Nice to see components that are just for drawing and fun.

Macromedia
Macromedia’s component info. Hidden away on the site.

I have made a new animation for the frontpage of www.bleepbloop.net.

I use the webspace for hosting all kinds of nonsense that I make but it has never made sense for all of it to be available in one place through a single frontpage. So as such I have no intention to bring it all together. Maybe I will find a common link between it all one day and it will make sense.

I create a new animation for the frontpage every now and then and this idea occured to me whilst I was messing with MovieClips and writing classes in Actionscript. I tried to make the animation look as natural as I could. I should really write something so that the falling tiles bump into each other, or bounce off the tiles in the lettering.

This addition may have to wait until I have time.

klik : Modern Foreign Language games for children on Channel 4’s GridClub site. Work done whilst working for StarDotStar.

Finally finished the ‘klik’ suite of games for the Channel 4 ‘GridClub’ childrens’ website. A very ambitious collection of games that will hopefully teach primary age kids how to learn some Spanish and French whilst playing computer games.

We chose games that have eternal gameplay values, like breakout, pellmanism and Simon Says so that they would hopefully engage with them quickly. There is currently one outstanding game to finish - a multiplayer game that may well end up different to how it was imagined. We shall see…..

There was lots to do on these games and everyone worked their socks off. Particularly Guy and Rick. We made the decision to build it using the new Flash mx 2004 Actionscript 2.0, and build proper classes and wherever possible build components so that we could distribute working code easily, as well as make modifications easy to implement whenever they happened. Like when the game names changed. Every hour. On the hour.

It was pretty tough modelling how the games were going to work, but we based the model on how S.C.O.R.M. implements learning objects. We built a nice rich shell that loads in games rather like how an Learning Management System loads in S.C.O.R.M. learning objects, and let the games be ‘dumb’ as to what language they were in, or the mode in which they were being played - 1 player, 2player, multiplayer.

It all came down to creating different xml for different games, and setting the mode of play when the game starts. Sadly I can’t link to the games as you need to be a child attending school to be able to login - to prevent the misuse of the site by non-approved users - but you will have to take my word for it when I say it was a very broad reaching and rich project, with some really nice touches.

My favourite being a little face icon that represents the player in each game. Guy worked very hard on that so that the kids could choose a body with accessories and hairdos, which is then changed to a faceIcon that represents them as they play each game. We were even able to make up a face for each person in the office.

www.mrscruff.com

Mr Scruff is DJ/Producer Andy Carthy. He is from Stockport in Cheshire.
He has eclectic musical tastes and a wonderful and instantly recognisable graphic style that is well and truly identified with his music. As well as DJing and releasing records as Mr Scruff on NinjaTunes he also does a radio show called HotPotRadio with Treva Whateva on Picadilly Key 103 in Manchester.

In Oct 1999 with much help from Frank at WeLoveTheWeb we built the first version of his website, centered around Andy’s drawings and sense of silliness. Based on original drawings by Andy we tried to make the site as animated and as rich as possible. Every page had at least two black and white flash animations on it, featuring something daft like dinosaurs, breakdancers or sheep. And of course lots of pies. It was also available in either French, Spanish, Japanese or English. I learned a lot of ASP on this project.

Andy updated the site regularly himself with diary notes and the latest news and the site was a popular success with over 25,000 registering on the mailing list. It supported Mr Scruff’s releases, live dates and DJ nights around the UK and the rest of the world, but most importantly it was a great point of contact between Mr Scruff and his fans.

Then in August 2004 we got the chance to rebuild the site as we had always imagined it should be. Working closely with Andy we created a fully immersive Flash Scruff World with animated street scenes and characters, building interiors including nightclubs and record shops, and finally Mr Scruff was in colour!. There were even opportunities to make daft animated shorts that appear here and there throughout the site.

Maximum respect goes to Frank and Mike from WeLoveTheWeb for the many hours of scanning and animating that went into it (somewhere near 400 hours of animation), as well as the steep learning curve with the Flash xml connectors. Also big thanks to Richard Tingley who did stirling animation work for us. I mostly got to do fun stuff!

I am most proud of the main animating street scene as it was my first application of ActionScript 2.0 classes, and there are some data-aware MovieClips here and there that load in content from xml sources so that items in the environment continue to be fresh when you return to the site - like the airship and the adverts on the sides of trucks.