greenle

like blackle, but greenler.

evil google 1

aah, the irony - complaining about google on a google owned site. still, i'm sure i'm not the first. after spending way too long finding the contact form (including following serveral links from google pages that promised with no return) i felt it necessary to right this:

i just purchased a product on google checkout and had the worst internet shopping experience in years. the form was too thin to show the text fields. the maximum characters allowed cropped my address. there weren't enough field to have my city and county on seperate lines. when google made me sign in, it reset the form. the second time i filled out the form, it came in two parts (card address thendelivery address, rather than both together as the first time round). finally, the receipt page contained both secure and non-secure items (prompting a warning from ie7) i'm a web developer myself, and work on enough large sights to know it's unlikely this will ever get read, but on the off chance it is i'd like to say that although i've stuck doggedly with google over the years, my loyalty has begun to wane. your news and search results still use tables for layout. you employ the use of framesets. the homepage has become cluttered. the use of reference.com weas replaced with answers.com. the product search show all sort of erroneous products (particlarly when ordering by price). it's a constant battle to avoid installing google toolbar (even though my broser has a perfectly adequet search box (although i use it for wiki)) and google desktop search (even though agent ransack is more than adequate)... i'm only stopping there so i'm not angry before i go to bed. i'm worried that google is turning evil. do some nice things. please.

what do google need to do to stop them from turning bad?

The Periodic Cookbook

One day, when i have a shed, i'm going to want to start tinkering. This little project could be that starting point of many a tinker. I'm going to add to it for a while, and see if it takes off.

• The Periodic Cookbook

Feel free to add your wisdom

sweetie balance

i made this as a demo for a pitch with rountrees. in the end, most of the budget went to tv, so i didn't get to make any games for them (well, yet - the budget will be back yet!). still though, it's an almost complete mini game. it just needs engineering for cpu use, some original sound, and something doing about the way you can cheat (see if you can work out how).

• sweetie balance

move the mouse left or right to tilt the packet. keep the sweetie on the packet, while collecting the berries. i've marked some circles to give you an idea of where you should move the mouse. i had a lot of fun adding lighting effects. there are 2 types of light on the packet, sparkly sugar on the sweetie, a light spot on the berries, and the foil ends of the packet glint when they are raised. i also like the flash that engulfs the berries whenyou collect them

a special prize to whoever guesses the tune!

new steam part 1

isn't it a shame how so many technologies get superseded by advances in science, before they've really finished being engineered. so many game systems with games unmade etc. well i was thinking about steam engines, and i'm not convinced we've really done the best we can with them. i'm not going to go into how steam engine work - if you don't know, then this won't interest you any way.

• new steam

the movie shows the valve system that controls the direction the steam travels in (actually, which part of the drive piston is connected to the high pressure supply, and which to the exhaust - but it's easier to think of the steam travelling through the engine). a modern steam engine would have this system controlled electronically, just as the timing in modern cars is becoming electronic, so the shape of the device is purely for efficiency.

there are two levels - blue and red (magenta denotes a passage for steam on both levels. the red level is the hot, high pressure steam level. the blue level is the exhaust. at the top are two pink connectors the marry with either end of a piston. one one stroke the piston fills at one end from the red layer, and exhaust at the other end to the blue layer; the valve is switched; the piston is powered in the opposite direction (giving one piston two power stroked); then the valve is switched again.

in 'new steam part 2' i will demonstrate a piston designed for better cyclic efficiency

flash 8 fun

when flash 8 first came out, i couldn't wait to get my hands on the new filters. here's a couple of tech tests i made to play around with blur a lighten

• hemaroids - left mouse button to shoot
• lens flare - around the sky, and beyond the horizon

i think hemaroids is the start of what could be a great little game

pup world

once every few years blue peter train a new dog. to coinside with their most recent or such projects, i made a game for them. take control of a young puppy and guide him around the streets. avoid distractions, and complete the tasks in time

• pup world

the engine is based on turd heroes, but introduces z scaling. the bbc were so pleased with the game as it was being made, they extended the budget so i could tweak the balence and add a couple more levels

a pretty little butterfly

i made this a couple of years ago. i love this kind of stuff - things living in a website. it's getting quite common now for things to move over the page you're looking at, but not usually with this level of disney magic

• butterfly

the background has been mocked here, and published into the swf, but it was originally a html page. let the butterfly settle, then disturb it with your mouse

virus

okay, it's not actually a virus clone, but it's similar. you control this space craft (called a 'lump of lem') to a safe landing, then get graded on how well you did. it uses a physics api called math engine and is written in c++

about half way through university, my attitude changed to one of wanting to just get a decent grade by completing the tasks in hand well (instead of faffing about adding things that i liked to projects, but got me nowhere). it was an important step towards the style of working you need to do to survive the private sector. this program sticks in my mind as one of the first projects post that point. that's why the graphics are so poor. the only thing i did extra to requirement, was add the grading system - which was quick to do, made the game more fun, and probably got me some extra credit.

i haven't got the game any more, so you'll have to settle for these pictures.

these pictures were all bmps when i uploaded them - it took ages. i'm hoping blogger will convert them all to jpegs or pngs so they'll be a little smaller on the way down.

the lem still someway from landing, as seen through one of the bird cameras. you must try and land in the middle of the landing pad, at a slow rate and in a reasonable time to get the best grade

this is the best grade you can get. all of the tests are within the parameters. x and z are ground position, dy is impact velocity, and t is time taken

turds

here are four games i made for codemasters. they wanted some retro (read: 8/16 bit sylee) games for a brand they were launching called 'turds'. two of the games are based on the frogger and kong engines i posted a while back; the racing game is based on 'craft rally'; heroes was a new engine for a side scrolling beat 'em up.

the games were available for purchase and download, as well as playable online with adverts. the are the downloadable versions. because of codemasters's terrible financial state, don't expect the scoreboards to work.

• bogger
• pong
• dung beetle rally
• turd heroes

it was sonic the hedgehog that got in to playing games, but codemasters's micro machines game was early inspiration for my programming games. it's wierd making a clone of the game that got me in to programming for the company that orinally dveloped it!

NOTE - you will have to rename the extensions to 'zip'

brother bear

this rather simple, but quite addictive, little game was based made for disney when brother bear (a remake of king lear staring bears, and disney's last large budget 2d film) came to uk disney channel

• koda's quest

press the mouse to jump. the longer you hold the mouse, the further you'll jump. it's not easy, but some people get really high score. if i remember right, the game loops - so see how far you can get!

montuna

this was a rather low budget game i made for disney's hannah montana - a musical themed show aimed pre-teens and only-just-teens. the version i've put up is an alpha version. it has only a few of the final graphics in, is quite hard to read in some places and has poor quality garage band tune (that doesn't loop well) - but it was at hand (the final version will be tooked away in a safe full of backup cds)

• montuna

drag the white balls to the stave below the game area, avoiding the coloured balls. they will turn into noted. every time you fill the stave, you'll add to the tune.

charles yorke

i love it when a client wants their website to be pretty, above all else. i don't like it when they insist in having a title page (well done for coming to our website, now just one unnecessary click and you'll actually be able to use it), but that aside i really liked making this one.

• charles yorke

the really clever thing about this site is that it's a flash site, but works with your browser's back and forward buttons (even in firefox), but what i love about it though, is the main horizontal scroll bar - give it a push, it feels nice.

craft rally

this was the first flash game i ever made professionally. i made it for disney's art attack, but unfortunately they decided not to run the promotion it was connected to, so it was never released. i've reused the game engine a couple of times since then, but i think this is the only place you can find this version on the internet.

• the craft table rally

it's a top down racer, played over the work surfaces from the art attack studio. the game was styled on a similar codemasters game, but i'll save the rest of that story for a future post

retro gaming

i think i've more or less uploaded everything i want to from my pre-flash-programmer career. these two games were designed to be starting points for a later project for codemasters that would pay homage to classic gaming.

• donkey kong
• frogger

neither game is a complete creation, just a proof of concept. you have to have the sound on for the complete effect (spot the sound effect stolen from sonic, because i couldn't find all the donkey kong ones i needed). frogger is a bit more solid, but both feel like the arcade originals (or which ever versions it was that i emulated, i forget now. perhaps 8/16 bit console versions).

eephor

back in the day, e4 ran something called 'esketch'. they had a simple flash drawing app on their site, that you could diddle with, then upload your results. some of them were picked to show on e4 between programs. here are three i made

this is absolutely true. i met a shark once, so i can vouch for the authority of this image and the caption there in.

i made the queen look a little bit fat. sorry queeny. i had very limited drawing paraphernalia

this is the only pic that got on to the telly box. it's a shame, i don't really like this one.

happy easter

these bloody things are hollow!

anti revision propaganda

i finnished university a couple of months before most of my mates, so made started circulating anti revision propaganda so that i'd have somebody to go to the pub with

you'll probably recognise some of them. they're all world war 2 posters that have been diddled at the hands of photoshop

go alan, go

alan turing invented a theoretical computer, with a simple programming model that should be able to solve any problem. it is known as the 'turing machine'.

• turing machine

it has a program, and some data (a theoretical tape) as input. all it can do is change the sate of section of the tape. my tape has four states, but three is more taditional. i've inculded a program that adds 1 to whatever is on the tape. download it, unzip it, run it, load the program, load the number (or make your own), then click run (left hand side, second from bottom).

NOTE - you will have to rename the extensions to 'zip'

pics2phones

it's getting quite late, but i didn't want to finnish the day wothout adding something to the blog. i'm trying to do something every day until i'm caught up. actually i've been working on the new blog style sheet, but there's nothing to see yet.

• pics2phones

this is a program i wrote while in my first proper programming job. it was designed to fill a gap while phones could display pictures, but people were still having difficulty getting them from their pc, but it still sells today. except for its database of supported phones, it's unchanged in nearly three years.

pics2phones lets you take any picture from your pc, crop and resize it to fit your phone (which you can select from the database), enhance the picture (colour, contrast, sepia, hue et al), then send it to your phone. if you don't have a datacable, it'll store it on a web server, and allow you to download it over wap.

rotating stars

it's not like i'm really into rotating things, it's just a happy coincedence (you have to be reading chronologicaly to get the reference).

• star rotate

i made this one summer at university. it's not very user friendly, because i was still just learning actionscript. run it, type one of the titles from the right into the text box, hit return, then hit return again. you'll have to refresh the page to go back to the start.

i updated this a few years later, when i came by some 3d glasses. i'm pretty sure it's on my work computer, so i'll see if i can dig it out

rotating isometric

i did a flash test similar to this in flash 5 when i was at uni, but recently got showed a racing game that used the same technique. i couldn't find my original, so i made a new one.

• rotating london

a fellow programmer (the one who showed me the game) was in complete awe of the technique. it's basically isometric (no depth correction), but can rotate - like sim city 3000. if you keep watching, i added a vertical pole (with a shadow!) to show how localToGlobal could be used to add other objects into a world of this kind

poncemonkey in space

this was an experiment with adding cg into a photo scene.

the room you can see is the cupola from the international space station. it was a 3d quicktime that i pulled apart. the creature floating by the window is a poncemonkey - star of a collection of student comics some friends and i made. his simplistic form is partly because of how badly drawn the initial conception was, and partly because the 3d model was originally created in 3d studio max to make a background for a nokia 3210 (monochrome, very small - so yes, overkill), although the rocket pack was added for this picture.

light from the stars, and the cupola both effect the 3d object. this was achieved by sandwiching the model between two textured surfaces, and shining light through them. the border that was pegged on later to make the picture 4:3 is a warped pleiades

my first ever flash anim

this should probably have come first, but i'm not recovering my old stuff in order. expect chronological fun after i've moved everything from my old blog, and verious other locations.

• untitled - car anim

i made this seven or eight years ago in flash 5. there's no preloader, but it streams fine over my connection. i added a stop frame at the end a few years later, but other from that, it's the very movie that had my flash cherry!

it's lights on for java

it's nice to sprinkle a bit of jaba abouit occasionally. i'll run out soon though, i don't really program in it anymore. you're going to need the java runtime environment to try these out

• player controlled
• computer controlled

these are two implementations of 'lights out'. i made them when i was slightly poorer than a student, just after leaving university, becuase i didn't want to fork out the money for a real one. the player version is a game you can play - press the blue button the randomise it. the computer version is an implementation of the algorithm i came up with to complete it, after playing the other version - press the blue button to step forwards.

NOTE - you will have to rename the extensions to 'zip'

glorious h2o

i like it when you have a glass of water on your desk that you're just sipping occasionally. it's like being on wogan!

first swf test

right, let's see how good blogger is at keyping my swfs...          ...damn. it doesn't look lke it wants them on itw own server. you'd think if youtube could handle entire movies for free, blogger could retain my swf files - especially since they're owned by the same people!

right, plan b - store them somewhere else.

• depth first
• best first
• dijkstra

these are three path finding solutions i demonstrated at university, and three swf hosting solutions i demonstrated a few moments ago. they're not sitting in a propper page, because the server hosting them adds banners to html pages, and you'll need javasacript to open the window, because i want it a specific size - but it was it was free and easy, and i trust 1asphost (where the swfs are kept) not to close down my account.

a little one - a picture, no more

i was just going to put programs on here, but i got back from work quite late today becuase i wanted to hang around and make a desktop buddy. it's basically a ball that bounces around on your taskbar. i'll post the final version here at some point, by which time it'll be a little character to interact with.

just so i can add something tonight, here's a picture. it's an anaglyph (3d thingy). you need red/cyan glasses, but red/blue or red/green should work. perhaps you could make some out of sweety rappers.

blog created

i'm gonna spend the next couple of weeks moving things across from my previous blog, and adding all the things i meant to blog but didn't because my previous blog was such a hastle. watch this space.

also note that this is a capital letter free zone (also sometimes a correct spelling free zone), so feel free to relax.