I don’t get to use Photoshop for illustrations very often anymore, so it’s fun when I do. I created this little thing to replace some uglier images on the same theme in a WBT we’re working on. Origional is here.
WiiFlash Graffiti Gestures
I’ve been playing around with using gestures with WiiFlash as an alternative input scheme. As a first step, I’ve taken the Flash Gesture recognition code from Didier Brun and modified it to work with a Wii remote instead of the mouse. It works pretty well – some of the letters aren’t easy to hit – but not bad for a first try. I’d like to modify with further have more “shapes” rather than “letters” to match. More to come on this when I get extra time.
We had a baby!
It’s been quieter than usual around here be cause on July 9th, our son Gabriel James was born.
Casey went to the hospital with chest pains – and it turned out that she was in labor! After 14 hours of labor, Gabe arrived, 3 weeks early, at 11:21am. He was pretty big at 7lbs 2oz and dispite being early, everything was OK and we went home on time.
Sophie’s getting used to him, and we’re getting used to the two of them.
SCOMaster – WiiFlash mulitplayer learning game
After a week and a half I finally finished my first real WiiFlash game – SCOMaster. It’s a competative, 2 player learning game designed to be played in a group setting. It illustrates the concepts of assembling a course in an LMS system. Bonus points are awarded for content reuse – they are SCOs after all! Unneeded objects and faulty objects can be sent back to the development team to be reworked – but at a cost.First one to build a completed activity tree wins.
Ben Hutchens, our graphic designer, created the art work for it. It took about 60 hours to program it using the WiiFlash classes that I had developed earlier in the year.
WiiFlash Tip #4 – Revisiting Wii-mouse in a multiplayer scenario
In February, I posted about using the Wii remote as a virtual mouse in Flash. While that approach seems to work just fine in a simple single player application, I found that it breaks really badly when you another player to it. I just completed my first two player WiiFlash game and I’ll document a few things that I had to differently.
Originally, based all of the interaction with the cursors off of the typical mouse events (rollover, rollout, etc.), but this did allow for find out which player rollover the sprite or which player “clicked” on the sprite.
Each player’s cursor is just a sprite itself, so I switched to using the hitTestObject function against each players cursor sprite and the object sprite on a mouse event. This returns which of the cursors interacted with the object. Additionally, since the cursor sprites are big, you do have to see them from a distance, I found that I needed to add an additional sprite to the cursor – the cursor “point” – at 0,0 and use that for the hitTest rather than the actual big cursor sprite. If the “tail” of the cursor arrow is still over the object sprite, you shouldn’t count that as a roll over, since the point of the arrow is the important part.
So here are the functions for a rollover:
 private function onItemOver(e:MouseEvent):void {
var wm:Array = whichWiiMotesAreOverMe(Sprite(e.target))
for (var i:int = 0; i < wm.length; i++) {
_WiiMotes[wm[i]].doRumbleSeconds(.1);
_WiiMotes[wm[i]].cursorState = WiiCursorView.CURSOR_POINT;
}
}// returns array of which wiimote cursors are over the sprite
private function whichWiiMotesAreOverMe(tgt:Sprite):Array {
var a:Array = new Array();
// _WiiMotes is an array of Wii controller objects
for (var i:int; i < _WiiMotes.length; i++) {
if (tgt.hitTestObject(_WiiMotes[i].cursorPoint)) {
a.push(i);
}
}
return a;
}
The functions for a mousedown are:
private function onItemDown(e:MouseEvent):void {
// gets the index of the _WiiMote object that clicked the sprite
var wm:int = whichWiiMoteClickedMe(Sprite(e.target));
}// returns index of which wii mote cursor is over with the A button down
private function whichWiiMoteClickedMe(tgt:Sprite):int {
var wm:Array = whichWiiMotesAreOverMe(tgt);
for (var i:int = 0; i < wm.length; i++) {
if (tgt.hitTestObject(_WiiMotes[wm[i]].cursorPoint)) {
if (wm.length == 1) {
// simple test if only one cursor is over
if(_WiiMotes[wm[i]].isADown) return wm[i];
} else {
// little harder if 2+ are over, _LastClickWMIdx is the last Wii mote to have pressed a button
if(_WiiMotes[wm[i]].isADown && _LastClickWMIdx==wm[i]) return wm[i];
}
}
}
return -1;
}
This method, while probably not the best way, turned out to work really well in the game.
Creating a Flash WBT on the timeline
I’m presenting to the Bank’s Flash Community of Practice this Thursday on how to create a basic Flash WBT that includes SCORMÂ tracking. Below is the PPT deck that I’ll be using and below that is the sample file.
This is an example file of a Flash WBT on the timeline, where my previous example was pure script. SCORM 1.2 compliant using my wrapper and Pipwerks SCORM API.
Flash Template “2” release
I’m releasing the source code to the 2nd WBT framework that I created for Wachovia in mid-2004. Essentially, it works just like the example demo that I posed a few days ago: 1) an array of page IDs and 2) pages are movie clips in the library attached as the learner progressed though.
This version is pretty complicated, so it’ll be a challenge to figure out how it all works. But there is value in seeing the code for the individual page interactions. It’s not SCORM or AICC compliant – but it did track as a Docent Outliner module – those files aren’t included.
The framework file is the main file for a course. It loads an structure XML file (xmlframework.xml) that defines the list of modules for the course. The blank file what each lesson is built from. It contains all of the templates and is capable of running a course from an XML document.
These are Flash 7 FLAs. The code is Flash 6/MX level Actionscript. There aren’t really many comments in the code since I coded it for myself. But I did train a few coworkers how to use it. I haven’t worked in the code for over 3 years, so if you ask a question about it, I probably won’t remember what I did.
Here’s a preview of the interactions in the blank file:
http://www.nudoru.com/assets/portfolio/experimentalflash/ft2_samp.htm
Creating a Flash WBT Framework, part 1
I put together part 1 of what I plan on being a multi-part series documeting the creation of a Flash WBT framework for creating SCORM compliant courses. This first once starts with an interface created in Flash CS3 and goes though the steps of adding the code to make it all work – and track on a SCORM 1.2 LMS. I’m using a custom wrapper class that I made for Pipwerks’ SCORM class. You need to know a bit about programming in Actionscript 3 – nothing advanced, but this isn’t in a tutoral format.
I’m hoping to fill a void with this – I know that there are a lot of people trying to develop WBTs in Flash and they have no idea where to start. I’ve been doing this for 4 years, and I know that I would have loved something like this when I started.
Please let me know if you find a bug, have a question, or have a comment or suggestion on what to cover next or how to make this better.
Scientia
A few months ago, I made a comment about spinning off my ramen player for use at work and turning it into a player for learning content. Well, my first project with it is about to go live, so it’s worth another mention.
I’m calling this player “Scientia.” I’ve added a lot of code for progress, tracking and completion. I’ve also integrated Pipwerks excellent SCORM wrapper into it.
The project is a system walk-though that’s presented to the learner with an avatar character. I’ve written up a short explanation of how the avatar SWF and audio player SWF work together. It’s pretty brief – post a comment if you want more information on it and I’ll see what more I can write.
Using XML events in a Flash player system
Also, I’m presenting at this month’s Bank of America Flash CoP meeting on Flash and SCORM communication. I’m going to create a very simple WBT/SCORM framework using Pipwerk’s wrapper. I’ll post the files and how-to when I get it written.
The background of Nudoru.com
Someone asked me how I the background animation on my new site. Here’s the code. You’ll need to download TweenLite and have it in the class path. This is a Flash 9 FLA with AS3.