visualplayground

I was just cleaning up some folders and found an old school project. Here is the first flash game that I’ve ever done. It was part of the class “Multimedia Programming” that i took in early 2003. It is a super simple snowboard game. Use your arrow keys to control the snowboarder and try to collect the points and avoid the trees. It’s a really rough prototype and i never completely finished it but it’s fun!

Stumpled upon this set of gadgets and i really like those fishies. Feed them by clicking into it!

new york city night panorama, originally uploaded by visualplayground.de.

Some photomerge stitchering that i did saturday night. I took most of the pictures very fast, but i think it turned out pretty nice for a first quick experiment.

To provide a better user experience, we often use content delivery solutions at Big Spaceship, like Limelight or Akamai, to host bigger files and reduce load time. (Although this cuts into the user’s time spent watching pretty loaders.)

During a recent project, we ran into a couple of security errors loading external module.swf files from a different domain than main.swf. The idea was to have a basic framework in main that controls IN and OUT animations of the modules and have all additional functionality in the module.swf itself. All loaded swf files extended Big Spaceships StandardInOut Class to be controllable from the main file, so we could easily cast the loaded modules.

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Jasmine and me had the pleasure to visit our good friends Ferdinand (portfolio13.de) and Nini in Beijing China for the week of November 21-28, 2009. It was an amazing trip and we took some nice photos. enjoy.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and Alienware’s All Powerful have been named Pixel Award winners in the categories of “Movies” and “Geek,” respectively.

Six Big Spaceship projects have been nominated for Pixel Awards (in as many categories). Vote today for the People’s Champ. Polls close October 31.

Experimental: Qapture
Games: Terminator Salvation
Geek: All Powerful
Movies: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Music: Guvera
Weird: Pretty Loaded

Lasker, Central Park, NYC, originally uploaded by schibbi.

Shot during a nice and relaxing bikre ride through central park on August 16th, 2009. Note to myself: Bring a lock for the locker next time!

http://www.centralpark.com/pages/attractions/lasker-pool-rink.html

Ever had the problem to shrink a picture so that it fits into a Box that has a specific width and height?
Here is a really nice and very useful method that helps finding the needed ratio:

/**
 * The <code>findPreferredRatio</code> method is used to find the correct ratio to fit content in a container using a maximum area.
 *  
 * @param $width		Number
 * @param $height		Number
 * @param $maxWidth		Number
 * @param $maxHeight	Number
 * @return 
 * 
 */
public static function findPreferredRatio($width:Number, $height:Number, $maxWidth:Number, $maxHeight:Number):Number
{
	var dw:Number = $maxWidth/$width;
	var dh:Number = $maxHeight/$height;
	return dw < dh ? dw : dh;
}

Example:

var pic:Bitmap = new Bitmap(new BitmapData(1000, 1000, false, 0));
var ratio:Number = MathUtils.findPreferredRatio(pic.width, pic.height, 280, 180);
pic.width *= ratio;
pic.height *= ratio;
trace(pic.width+'x'+pic.height); //output: 180x180

The usual flash sites that we build at Big Spaceship contain tons of huge graphics, animations, dynamic motion, videos, timeline transitions as well as tons of code, utilizing huge open source libraries like papervision 3d, tweening engines and so on.

We want everyone to be able to use their preferred design/dev environment to ensure a fast way to produce innovative high quality work. That includes using the Flash IDE and still being able to use Flex/Flash Builder as a developer. Read the rest of this entry »