Posts
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The Ridiculous Raspberry Pi Winamp Remote – Part I
Back story
I wanted a media center. I priced out cases, power supplies, hard drives, cheap motherboards, etc. and figured I could build one for a couple hundred bucks or so. Then I heard about people using Raspberry Pi’s as media centers. Did a bit of research and got me a Pi and set up OpenElec on it. Plugged in an old 500 GB USB drive. I had a media center for about a quarter of what I was going to pay.
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Joining the Magic Kingdom
I purposely held off until today to break this news as I didn’t think anyone would believe it if I posted it on April 1.
After 5 1/2 years with Infrared5, I am moving on to new endeavors. Specifically, I’ve signed on with Playdom, which is part of Disney Interactive. The position is a principal engineer / senior architect type of role. I’m still getting my head around the structure, but basically Playdom oversees a dozenish semi-independent game studios. I’ll be in the core technology unit, architecting, coordinating, building libraries, etc. I’m excited to get started next week. The offices are in Palo Alto, but I’ll continue to live in the Boston area, work remotely from home, and fly out west every once in a while.
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Send to Kindle
Just a quick note that I added the “Send to Kindle” plugin to the site here. At the bottom of each post you should see a Send to Kindle button that will prompt you to log in to your Amazon account and send that post to any registered Kindle. I know it’s something I do a lot with posts I’m reading on other sites via the Chrome extension. So it’s nice that Amazon has created this.
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Building a MAME Arcade
Background
I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. The golden age of arcade games. My best friend and I would hit up the various arcades in the surrounding town, and at 25 cents a game, I’d easily spend $10 for a couple hours of entertainment. My favorite game of all time, hands-down, is Tempest. In the arcades of the South Shore of Boston, I was the second best player. I could walk in to any arcade and get my initials on the high score board. Most often, after a few games I could get to the number one spot. Unless my nemesis had been there before me. Who this other person was, I have no idea. He (possibly she, but given the demographics of the time, most likely he) wasn’t amazingly better than me, but better enough to nudge me out of the top spot. I could usually get a number two spot though.
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“Infiltration” live in Windows Store
My latest game, Infiltration, for Windows 8 is live in the Windows Store.
Get it here!
This is a game that I’ve wanted to make for a long time. One of my favorite old time arcade games was Gravitar. I’ve played it a bunch in the last year or so on MAME. It’s such a difficult game, but very addicting for me anyway. Infiltration is a homage to that game. It has a lot of the same basic game play – you fly a ship into an area, avoid getting shot or running out of fuel while achieving an objective. In Gravitar the only real objective is to destroy all the guns. In Infiltration there is a target or multiple targets you need to capture. When all targets are captured, the exit appears and you use it to complete the level. Destroying all the guns and collecting all the fuel is optional, but worth bonus points.
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Microsoft Surface Pro
Background
A few years back I was invited to Microsoft for a day with a small group of other bloggers to be briefed on what MS had going on and to speak with Bill Gates himself for a full hour. One of the things they showed us was the early prototype of the Microsoft Surface. At the time, it was basically a touch screen table. And it was amazing. This was before anyone had seen an iPhone or an iPad, so seeing and touching a real time interactive multitouch device left us all in awe. They also said that the future of the Surface probably included a more portable device – something you could carry from room to room, and maybe hang on the wall to watch movies,s play games, etc.
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Winding Rules in HTML’s Canvas
This is another one that a lot of people should already know, but I’m still betting that a few will find useful. Winding refers to the direction a path is drawn in – clockwise or counterclockwise. In many cases, this makes no difference at all, but there are cases where this is very important and can become a very useful tool.
Just realized that most of the examples I’m showing here could have been done just using a fat stroke instead of fills. My fault for poor examples. I was just trying to show simple shapes. This is still a very valid technique and useful for more complex shapes, such as the last example.
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Scaling in HTML’s Canvas
I’m probably not dropping any huge knowledge bombs here on many of you, but there are a few neat things about scaling when drawing to an HTML5 Canvas that I didn’t realize until a few months ago. So there are probably one or two of you who might find the info handy too.
Let’s say we’re drawing a circle in a canvas. We do this:
[php lang=“JavaScript”] context.beginPath();
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context.arc(100, 100, 50, 0, Math.PI * 2, false);
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Circle Layering
If you were wondering where my last post was heading…
Oops, gotta turn off the “capture cursor” on that screenshot program. 🙂
Anyway, this was an idea I first explored several years ago on my art from code site, but has been in the back of my mind as something I wanted to play with more. (see: https://www.artfromcode.com/?s=cells) In the end I ditched the whole idea of perfection I was going for in the last post, as the fact of the outer circles having some space at the end gives it a more organic feel. In fact, you can see that I even exaggerated the space in some of the examples. Well, just a quick follow up. Carry on.
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Working out a Math Problem
So I had this idea the other day for a graphic effect. I thought it might be interesting to walk through how it went from concept to functional code. So here it is. The effect involved placing smaller circles around a larger circle. Here’s about what I was looking to do:
Note that all the outer circles exactly touch the inner circle and all the outer circles exactly touch each other. There are no spaces and no overlapping. When I went about coding it and found there were a few different ways to do such a thing and it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it’d be.
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