Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Tag: Flash

Flash 8 Stress Test

John Winkelman

This is my most recent Flash 8 experiment. I used it to see what some of the possible limits of rendering might be; specifically, multiple levels of alpha transparency rendering over a complex background.

It works like this: A .jpg (the background) and a .png with alpha transparency (a Green Floating Chad Head) are loaded at runtime. I copy the .jpg and the Chad Head into Bitmap objects, then run a simple math algorithm to copy 100 instances of the Chad Head onto the background, then clone that bitmap onto the one which is displayed in the Flash player. This combines two concepts known as blitting and double buffering, which help to speed up otherwise lengthy and/or processor-intensive rendering jobs.

SkaBoom, 100 objects moving at a high rate of speed with, in effect, 100 levels of alpha transparency displayed at once. All combined into a single 480 pixel square bitmap.

Thanks to the folks over at Bit-101’s forums for help with some of the new functionality.

Click to launch the Flash 8 stress test.

Kingdom

John Winkelman

This is the first draft of my version of one of the first video games I ever played. Variously called Kingdom or Hammurabi, it is a simple economic game. I first played it in the Impressions 5 Science Center in Lansing, Michigan. I must have been about eleven years old.

You are the ruler of a kingdom. Your duty is to acquire land and peasants. You do this by planting crops, feeding your peasants, and indulging in simple land speculation (buy low, sell high). Chaos enters the system in the form of rats eating your grain, peasants dying of plague, and variation in the price and fertility of your land. The “bushel of grain” is the standard unit of currency.

Right now the balance of values is as follows:

-Each peasant eats 20 bushels of grain a year
-It takes 2 bushels of grain to plant an acre of land
-Each acre of planted land will grow between 2 and 5 bushels of grain
-If you under-feed your peasants, they will starve to death.

If you try to spend more grain than you have, the game will simply do nothing when you click the button. And this leads me into the “to do” list for the game

-alerts which tell you when you are spending too much.
-adding logic so that each peasant can farm no more than 10 acres of land
-allowing a set number of years so the game does not continue forever
-if too many peasants die, the survivors revolt and cast you from power

I like this kind of game. It packs a nice amount of complexity into a very small package. I imagine that the idea for Warcraft grew out of something very like this.

Click here to play my version of The Kingdom of Hamurabi.

Back to Work

John Winkelman

Well, it looks like my days as a Gentleman of Leisure are coming to an end. Starting Monday I am back to somewhat regular work hours, albeit this time as a contractor rather than a full-time employee. No more soap operas. No more sleeping in until noon. No more spending the entire day in my pajamas.

So it is appropriate that I hereby announce the release of Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom v1.0 . This is the first game I have completed in eighteen years. The last one was a dungeon crawl written in BASIC on a Commodore-64.

Having reached every milestone I set myself for this release I already see room for a dozen improvements, and I have ideas for the creation of another dozen games.

Stay tuned!