NeatTools AS3 Project

Let there be light.

sambaker — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:15:54 +0000

Engine works. Button passes it’s value to the LED, and the LED checks it’s value and lights up. The potential question now, is is my current mechanism for pinging the connection a bottleneck? I mean it is, but how bad of one. Right now, Connections are kept in an array in the Workspace. Connections have two modules as properties moduleA and moduleB. So, when the button is pressed, it first has to find all the connections where moduleA is the button, then pass moduleA’s value to moduleB’s engine. The more modules I have the slower this process will be obviously, but how fast will it reach critical mass. I will probably need to devise some benchmarking. Anyway…

Graphical Assets

sambaker — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:59:34 +0000

So I took a little detour on actual progress, and took a stab a some alternative looks for the modules. To this point the modules were drawn using the drawing api in as3. I decided to design a button and an led in the Flash IDE and then bring them into my project as graphical assets. I’d ultimately like to have skins for this, I could do an original NeatTools skin, but I though I would try an remove some of the ambiguity of the original modules, and make them a little prettier. No functionality yet, I have the LED on state ready to go, I just need to code it.

Connections: Take one

sambaker — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 05:56:26 +0000

So like last time, i’m starting by hard-wiring a connection to start with, then I’ll go back to how to create them dynamically. And since my last post, I’ve rethought the connections questions and I’m going to make it more outside in, rather than trying to figure out some hacky way of having children and grandchildren telling parents what to do. So… to that end, I created a neatWorkspace class. Structure as follows:

Workspace is the parent of everything (so far). It has children button and LED. They have children input and output (or in buttons case, inputs and outputs) Workspace also has a child Connection A, which contains a reference to button and LED, and which output of button will be connecting to what input of LED. Connection A has a child neatWire (the graphic connection) which is a line from button output, to LED input.

the wires fail if you try to create new ones by dragging out lines, but they’re just holdovers, I haven’t revisited them yet.

Back to NeatTools

sambaker — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:26:02 +0000

So, I’ve started over with NeatTools. There has been some recent interest in rebooting the real NeatTools, which got me more interested in the AS3 versions again. Last time, I got bogged down with figuring out how to manage the connections, so I’m rebuilding it from scratch, and hopefully I can figure out the best way to handle these pesky connections between modules. I have a lot of questions about how to handle them though.

Should connections be independent objects with references to the modules they connect?
Should modules contain the connection object instead?
Should connections just be imaginary and instead should modules contain a reference to any module they are connected to?
Should there be duplicate references (ie, should moduleA know it’s connected to moduleB and vice versa)?
Should modules only know what they’re outputting to, but not care what might be plugged into the back of them?

Anyway, here’s the current version. You can drag out a line from the outputs, but the connection function doesn’t do really anything at the moment, it just draws a strange line (so I can see something happened).

NeatTools on Android (sort of)

sambaker — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:18:36 +0000

Getting back to NeatTools related stuff, I’ve been playing around with the Android SDK and the Adobe Air 2.5 SDK, with support for Android. As one of my first tests, I created an Android version of the NeatTool AS3. Now, I don’t have an actual android phone. Or any phone for that matter, but I do have the emulator that comes with the SDK and here’s a screen shot:

It seems to work as well as the Flash version does, which isn’t all that well, but anyway. New links can be created, broken, modules can be clicked on or moved around. I’d be interested to see how well the connections would work with a touch screen, but until I can get my hands on an actual device, this will have to wait.

Augmented Reality

sambaker — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:44:23 +0000

My first foray into the world of augmented reality. FLARToolkit, is a Flash Augmented Reality library, a port of ARToolkit. It handles the detection, homography, and tracking of custom ‘markers’, onto which can be drawn, 3D objects, in this case using the Papervision3D library.

To view my example, download and print out my marker here: marker.pdf.

Then click allow below to give flash access to your webcam, and hold up the marker.

Chaos

sambaker — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:34:54 +0000

Here’s an old Flash project, I updated and converted to AS3. It uses a simple algorithm to draw the familiar triangle fractal. It’s set to add a point 24 times a second so wait for it…

Virtual Polyhedral Dice

sambaker — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:27:11 +0000

I’ve been interested in learning how to play D&D for a while and I recently acquired the Player’s Handbook so I could read up on the game before I ventured out into said game with others. One of the required items is a set of polyhedral dice for determining various things throughout the game, as I’m sure you all know, and since I didn’t own a set, I made one. It’s very straight forward but I wanted something a little more interesting to look at than text boxes.

Dice after the jump…

Searching for Elegance

sambaker — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:39:10 +0000

When you create multiple connections from the same module, they accumulate graphically as they should. Previously though, they didn’t deccumulate (if I may make up a word). New connections were added to total number of connections a module had, even if they didn’t have them anymore. I had simply forgotten to reduce the number of outputs. No biggie. But then I found something very frustrating. If you create multiple connections between two modules. then kill them in the opposite order, everything works perfect. Try and kill them out of order and poof, the whole system breaks down. I tried one solution, and it kinda worked, but I quickly realized that I’d need to create separate lists of connections for each side of the module and it just felt clunky. Plus, it had some bugs. I just think there is a more elegant solution eluding me at the moment.

Finally, Visable Lines

sambaker — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:43:41 +0000

Finally you can have your connections and eat them too. Or see them anyway. I’ve selected a nice red dashed line for the “pre-connection” wire. I hope you like it. In this version (0.1.99) I’ve also fixed some problems that cropped up when I created the lines. For modules that were in front of other modules (z depth), when you dragged the wire over the left input area of the intended module, it wouldn’t activate the input area -I think because the line (which is part of the first module) was in front of it. So…now, when you start a new connection, it moves the parent module down to the bottom of the display stack. When just dragging a module, I decided to pull it up to the top of the stack.

I played briefly writing my own dashed line class, and actually wrote a very simple function that drew the connecting line with 10 equally sized dashes and spaces (which scaled as you drew it), but then I found the wonderful dashed line class below:

http://www.cartogrammar.com/blog/drawing-dashed-lines-with-actionscript-3/