Hi there, almost 10 months without posting… this blog is not dead. I am just working very much and my spare time to dedicate to actionscript experiments has lowered.

Lately I have been working with different companies. Some who doesn’t pay (I will probably post here name, url, email address everything of who didn’t pay me) and others who pay, and pay fast.

Now I am working on many different projects with the one who pays fast, and we/I simply need collaboration on the actionscript/flex side.

What do we need is an actionscript developers, not necessarily a senior one, but neither the noob who just wrote some gotoAndPlay in the flash timeline.
What we need is a developer who knows everything about AS3 itself and OOP and something about code architecture and design patterns, who can actually write a simple game (given the graphics obviously) or with little or no supervision. He must know well the Flash Builder IDE and knowing the Flex 4 framework is a BIG plus. His skills will be probably used on small self-contained projects or well defined parts and components of the main projects.

He must be friendly, available to constructive discussion, and respect terms and agreements.

We are preferably looking for an italian developer living at a resonable distance from Milan so we can meet and spend some time together to evaluate his skills. If no local candidates will be found, remote collaboration is also welcome, preferably within Europe so we can call on Skype or telephone without hours of different time zone.

The collaboration type will be project based and (initially) no recruitment is intended.

Please feel free to write me at info [at] oaxoa [dot] com with this subject:
[FLASH developer] Name Surname

with just a brief description of you and your skills (please don’t send 20 page resumes) and some links of work you have done are available online. Also include a phone number and a Skype account if you have one.

Yo.

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Hi there,

lot of time without posting some code. I have been working three months on a Disney project, which will be on-line soon and makes me very proud, but almost drained all of my energies.

Here is my Christmas card/gift for my readers, in less than 80 lines of code. Obviously with source code. The lights are vector graphics in the attached FLA’s library to make it easy to customize or animate.

Nothing too fancy here about the code, just some trigonometric math. You can have a look at the correctOrientations function which can be interesting to avoid lights deformations due to the FP10 native 3D.
Download source code.

I wish you all great winter holidays, and an awesome beginning of 2010!
And make me smile by leaving a greetings comment

Watch the running example:
Click to start (mouseX affects rotation)

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Google Translate goes realtime… Ooooooh! -_-

Just a quick (non-technical) post, but I cannot resist… Ok, Google translate introduces a realtime translation feature as highlighted as every new Google feature by billions of blogs (I saw it here: http://mashable.com/2009/11/16/google-translate-update/), but where is the GTranslate database taken from?

Does Anyone know? I do…
The Google Translate source database is… Windows Font Viewer!

Any other way to explain how is it possible that writing:
“a quick brown fox”

is translated in

“uno Cantami o Diva” (literally: “one Sing, O goddess”)

(Try it yourself)

For those not into Greek epic poems translated in Italian, this is the beginning of the Homer’s Iliad which in my language reads:

Cantami, o Diva, del Pelìde Achille
l’ira funesta che infiniti addusse
lutti agli Achei, molte anzi tempo all’Orco
generose travolse alme d’eroi,
e di cani e d’augelli orrido pasto
lor salme abbandonò (così di Giove
l’alto consiglio s’adempìa), da quando
primamente disgiunse aspra contesa
il re de’ prodi Atride e il divo Achille.
E qual de’ numi inimicolli?

So how is it possible that a brown fox becomes a singing Goddess? I couldn’t remember but then I realized that the beginning of that poem is used by the Italian version of Windows in the font viewer to preview fonts!

So “A quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog” (which is used in the English version since it contains every letter of the alphabet –a pangram) according to GTranslate in Italian should be translated with the beginning of a classical piece of literature… just because it’s another common pangram (almost)).

Obviously the magic doesn’t end here: just change “a quick brown fox” in “A quick brown fox” (with capital A) and the result is “Una volpe veloce” (correct)…

or remove the article: “quick brown fox” and the result is “quick brown fox” (not translated at all)!

I can understand translating from english to japanese (which are structurally completely different languages) back and forth can produce funny idiosyncrasies as seen on Translation Party but Italian is more similar and “quick”, “brown” and “fox” are common words learned at the first grade during the English lessons.

So I never wrote a dictionary db or algorithm and I am not so sure I could do better, but Google surely can, and first things should come first.

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This is the first time I publish a review, but since I am learning japanese and this game is so much fun and so much useful I think it deserves visibility.

NihongoUp is a japanese learning game developed in Adobe AIR by Philip Seyfi.
It is structured in four main categories:

• Kana (Hiragana, Katakana, All kana)
• Kanji (JLPT 3, JLPT 2)
• Vocabulary (JLPT 4, JLPT 3, JLPT 2, JLPT 1)
• Grammar (particles, counters)

There are mainly two kinds of games, a typing one, used in the “Kana” section where lots of balloon comes down the screen with a japanese symbol attached. You have to type the translitterated kana before the balloon disappears to gain score points and raise the level number. It’s simply funny and perfect for someone at the beginning of the studying process.

The other kind of game reuses the concept of the falling balloons but you simply have to choose between four possible answers to the question located at the bottom of the screen. This game concept is used in the other sections, where you can train your Kanji knowledge, grammar skills or the richness of your japanese vocabulary.

What else to say? It is well coded and the database is huge with 8000 10000 (!) records filled all the JLPT Kanjis and training sentences, so this game could really help the willing student to become a japanese language master, with fun.

So if you are studying japanese and you are a flash developer (likely as you are reading this…), support this valuable work. A license serial number costs only $4.99 and before buying you can trying a free trial to test it out.

http://nihongoup.com/

I’ll soon be back posting lots of new actionscript stuff. Have a nice sushi day

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Everybody knows about Rorschach inkblot tests, and they always charmed me… It’s like looking clouds and recognizing different shapes.

However I must admit the real turn on came after watching Watchmen the movie. Seeing those animated inkblots on the face of the character symbolically named Rorschach is something really fascinating. So here we are, after about an hour of coding fun this is what I came up with.

Click to start

Here after adding a cool persistence of the ink (call it motion blur if you like), and the face oval:

Click to start

How it’s made is quite simple:

- perlinNoise a bitmapData
- draw a circular gradient mask (I used a beginGradientFill on a Shape/Sprite)
- BitmapData.draw() the mask onto the perlinNoise bitmapData
- threshold
- (optional) a little blur to simulate antialias

Since a picture is worth a thousand words:

Click to see it moving

I’ve built a class to do this easily. Six parameters are optional to instance it:

public function Rorschach(w:uint=400, h:uint=400, mirror:Boolean=true, seed:uint=0, ovalClass:Class=null, ovalScale:Number=1, ovalYOffset:Number=0)

ovalClass is the (optional) reference to the class containing the face background.

So the usage is very simple, here an example:

import com.oaxoa.fx.Rorschach;
addChild(new Rorschach(300,300));
//addChild(new Rorschach(300,300,true,0,blankMaskImage, 1.2, -20));

Download Rorschach class for your experimentation pleasure.

All nice, but the aim of this simple experiment is seeing Rorschach animated face in action so here we go… we will be using this class in a practical example.

To simulate 3D volume and perspective we need flash CS4 (or any 3D engine):
we create a MovieClip which has the Rorschach class instanced and a rectangular solid background for composition reference in it. Then we set layer visibility to wireframe and add another instance to the stage, which is flipped horizontally.
Just position the two instances using 3D rotations and we are ready.

Just build et voilà!

Click to start

Rorschach’s Journal. October 12th, 1985. Dog Carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’ And I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’

The last (and D-E-F-I-N-I-T-I-V-E! ) usage for this is apply it to a realtime webcam face detection algorithm. I used this originally created by Ohtsuka Masakazu and optimized by Mario Klingemann. The result is totally weird (don’t expect photoreal hollywood effect LOL) but it’s funny, even if the face detection algorithm is not perfectly smooth.

Have fun being the definitive comics anti-hero:

Click to start

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