3-1-2005

Couple of updates:

Was working on a control panel type SWF for various movies. I am putting this one on a back burner for now. Ditto for the 'density of motion' sensor in Eyesweb, to make the big floaty eye look toward the region with the most screen motion.

Pulled in an Actionscript 2.0 grid-based proximity sensor class, courtesy of one Grant Skinner. This necessitated finding an Actionscript 2.0 version of Laco's tweening library, which happened to be available at his site. I encountered no problems dropping this into an older version of the interactive foggy windows test - just had to update the #includes to import commands.

I have a larger idea for handling tracking nodes, which dovetails into techniques for handling larger populations of screen objects. In the last version of Foggy Windows that I saw, the squares faded out to a given value then stayed clear. JJ had their reactions directly tied to tracking node updates; as updates streamed in, they would trigger object reactions at that rate - the reaction methods are directly called in the input parser.

This approach works well enough in a test environment, but I can foresee management and development issues as our exhibits become more complicated. Right now, I'm thinking of creating a simple 'tracking node' class that the tracking nodes will be instantiated from (as opposed to taking an empty movie clip and drawing a circle in it. This should let us assign default behaviors to them, like clearing to a safe area off the stage when they don't get updates. This may necessitate setting up listeners in each object, while relegating the XML input parser to the role of a broadcaster. I think this will work, assuming I understand those concepts correctly.

A little after that, I think I can use those same techniques to instantiate other primitive objects, on which prettier, more interactive objects can be based.

Also to do: get Skinner's proximity manager working with our tracking points. This is critical to later object interactions, though I need the tracking points handled a little differently, first.