Warhawk Leaderboard: Version 2

This is the updated version of the Warhawk stats widget I posted a while ago. It's been through a lot of changes with 2 new modes: Head-2-Head and MyStats which let the user chose which players' data to display. There's also more control over how the data is sorted and which fields are displayed. The data itself can be displayed as text values or as a bar chart.

Although I did all of the coding and design myself, I discussed the design and functionality of the widget with people at Eike Consulting before starting this new version of the widget. One thing that was very important was to ensure that this would run on the Playstation 3. This meant I had to work within the constraints of Flash Player 7. We also anticipated this being downloaded thousands of times each day so I wanted to keep the file size as small as possible. By removing the Accordion component, I ended up with a smaller file than the original version.

The whole widget is built on an extension of the MVC framework I used for the Mystery Clock. This should allow me to easily add new or change existing functionality without breaking the widget.

Trace statement finder/remover

Having my actionscript code split across different files for each class is great but it does make it harder to find where rogue trace() statements are coming from.

I made this handy Perl tool to scan through all the .as files in a directory looking for these trace statements. It has three modes:

Find - print a report giving the file and line number of all trace statements
Comment - comment out all of the trace statements in the directory
Remove - remove trace statement lines from the file

It will ignore any previously commented out trace statements. You can download the code from here.

Mystery Clock

The look of this clock is inspired by the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot. The clock uses the Actionscrip2 Model-View-Controller pattern as implemented in Colin Moock's 'Essential Actionscript 2'.

I have added a few of my own ideas to this beyond simply changing the look of the clock. The biggest change is that I have removed the need for the mx.Controls.Button component, reducing the file size from 108Kb to 13Kb. This type of saving would be very useful in a widget application which is deployed across social networks and download many times each day. To make this work, I extended the MovieClip class, allowing listeners to subscribe to the onRelease event. These movieclips act more like ActionScript 3 DisplayObjects in that they now implement the EventDispatcher interface.

Interactive Cat

Taking this as inspiration I am currently developing this interactive cat widget. The current artwork and functionality is obviously very similar to the original (although I have redrawn it myself). However, the point of this widget was to gain a better understanding of Actionscript 3 interaction with the Clearspring platform.

Eventually I intend to make the colours and behaviours of the cat customisable. Hopefully I will have some updates on this soon.

Video Editing

I took a film making course at the University of Bath and this was the result. All the editing was done in Windows Movie Maker and I'm fairly happy with the result. Working with strangers on creative projects where no one is in charge is always interesting and insightful.

This was several years ago and it was originally published to the web as an .swf file, compressed and rendered with Flash 8 Video Encoder. Things have moved on and I'm happy with result of recompressing the video in the F4V format using Media Encoder CS4. The file size is larger but the progressive download ensures there's very little delay. I used the Flash CS4 FLVPlayback component but just to be interesting the player is published as a Flex application. I made a few small changes to the player skin to get the combination of controls that I wanted - mute is essential! I also manually changed the highlight colour of the buttons. The highlights are not symbols so this change can't be made via code - I'm sure someone has changed that by now.

Warhawk Leaderboard

This is the first example of the viral widgets I made for Eike Consulting. The widgets are currently hosted on the development site so a password is required to download the XML feed which will populate the fields. Hopefully you can imagine the player names and ranks being displayed in the grey accordion headers with the stats for each player displayed in the body of their accordion tab, I am currently working on two further widgets which are configurable to show only the stats for selected users.The widget is distributed using the Clearspring platform and it has been interesting working with this new API. Because the widget is still in development, I would appreciate it if you wait until it is released before making use of the sharing features.

Astroman Arcade Game

I made this retro arcade game to get a better understanding of OOP in Actionscript 2. It is played by two players simultaneously at one keyboard and the keys are fully configurable. I plan to add powerups, AI and eventually a remote multiplayer mode with XMLSocket.