I collaborated with Mieka Lake to make a version of the Pixel Generator optimised for generating prints (patterns) for her final year collection ‘Destination: Infinity’. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the final image we made, but you can clearly see it repeated in the red and black prints in the style shots below . Here are some of the final products:

From the collection ‘Destination: Infinity’ by Mieka Lake (2008)

ULTRA MAGNUS /w BLADE CATSUIT

VORTEX pants

ULTRA MAGNUS /w BLADE CATSUIT

some of the collection...

computational arts, fashion, pixelgenerator, pixels Hide

New Pixel Generator for the Flamingo Crash myspace http://www.myspace.com/flamingocrash.

Move your mouse like you just don’t care! Click, click, click. and… Combine the two, click and drag!

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Dolphin Hero: Agent Duski to the rescue! now available on the App Store.

Six weeks of development later and I have my first iPhone and iPod Touch game available on the iTunes App Store!! You play as a dolphin and save drowning people. The game is a balancing act between getting a high score, saving people and dodging enemies. I’m really happy with the result, especially since it is our first title as a company and on this platform. Buy it now!

Check it out http://www.thevoxelagents.com/dolphinhero/

Follow us on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thevoxelagents/
Read about our development process: http://www.thevoxelagents.com/agentlogs/

game development, Games, iphone, iphone dev, iphone games Hide

For years I struggled with waaay too many game controller cables, and I dreamed up a better solution than the old “ignore-the-pessimists-and-wind’n’stash-anyway”.

The results (after being roughed up by a couple months of use):
half artwork, half convenience, bonus half just cool.

Thanks to Archer Davies for the organic collaborative additions...

More photos [1], [2], [3].

And just recently we were invaded down here in Melbourne!

consoles, cool stuff, found object, Games, installation Hide

I make these for fun, and now … I have a little collection growing.

Flamingo Crash’s necklaces:

Tron logo:

works well on a necklace

Soph’s Combi:

and the bead version is hanging in the combi!

Once I have permission to post people’s photos, I will post my growing family of pixel friends.

beads, Games, perler, pixels Hide

Finally I’ve uploaded the fix for Vista. You can find it on the projects page. I’ve also updated the actionscript so that the XBOX360Manager is now a singleton.

Really I didn’t do much to add support for Vista. Grant Peters provided the knowledge and the Vista PC to debug and fix the code. Thanks Grant.

Also, thanks to Dean Loades for pointing out a bug that made it impossible to compare a previous gamepad state to the current state. This is now fixed.

flash, game controllers, game development, Games, xbox 360 Hide

After wanting for many years to be able to get full access to analogue gamepads in flash, a friend showed me the work Thibault Imbert has done to get standard gamepads into flash using a C# socket server and the new ByteArray functionality of actionscript 3.

I took his code and stripped out directx, brought in XNA to grab the XBOX 360 gamepad values and built in support for multiplayer and the ability to specify the polling interval and port number.

I also created an XBOX 360 controller manager class in as3. It manages all the network code for you. Inside the demo flash file you will find four movieclips on the root of the scene and each movieclip is a copy of a nastily hacked together demo showing how to use the manager.

Its quite simple to find out if player 1 has the X button pressed, you simply call
XBOX360Manager.getState(1).X;
To see the data structure of the object passed back by getState, simply check out the com.GamePads.XBOX360GamepadState.

I will work on making an equivalent as2 server, as I myself still like to use as2 for really cheap and nasty gameplay prototypes. Unfortunately without binary socket support in as2, I will need to generate xml, and use an xml socket. This will run slower and will take some time to code… so bare with me or beat me to it!

To download the files check out the projects page.

flash, game controllers, game development, xbox 360 Hide

It animates now, and I can run two at a time. I’m only impeded by the epileptic fits I nearly break into because of the constant flickering. I’ve tried optimising and separating out the method calls so they all have a chance to run without interrupting the rendering… still my head is twitching.

The faded patterns in the middle image work nicely. I’d like to see more layering here even though its diverting from the originally intended path. It would be great to get a third line happening facing the opposite direction, but I can’t see it happening anytime soon.

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I didn’t consider how much groundwork I’d have to do to get this beast up and running… It’s taken quite a while. First output.

I’ve created the diagonals manually as images and loaded them all into Impromptu. I knew it was probably possible in Impromptu to create the same result with vector shapes… but considering the time constraints I figured it would be best not to invest too much time on tech. However in retrospect I think it may have taken just as long! oh well… now.. need to get it animating and fill in behind the shapes…

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Ok so its the last weekend and I’ve been postponing the third and final piece. I still haven’t succeeded with the CIShadedMaterial, so I’ll have to move on to a new idea…

I went back to the readings because I remembered some pretty
interesting bold monochrome line work that looked pretty nice. I was going to look for the line work in Logic and design: in art, science and mathematics [1], but the first paper I opened caught my attention. The simple diagonal line work in The Generative Order and the Implicate Order on page 177 looks pretty interesting to me. So I’ve mocked up a quick demo to work out how I want it to animate (for some reason I can only imagine animated and interactive works…). I imagine the two layers moving vertically very slowly, and bouncing back and forth horizontally in a choatic turbulent fashion.

[1] Logic and design : in art, science and mathematics, B. Krome. Design Books, New York. 1980.

[2] The Generative Order and the Implicate Order, B. David & F. David. Routledge, London. 2000.

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