by pixelpusher on Tuesday 31 August 2010
[Blog]
For Creative Pact 2010 I’m going to be teaching myself how to make a game using the open source AndEngine for Android mobile devices. apparently, Android apps are the next goldrush, the biggest thing since skinny jeans, and I never got a pair of skinny jeans so I might as well jump in the deep end here.
Firstly, I already blogged about starting with AndEngine, so I won’t repeat myself here. I’ll instead start with my current app, which is going to be a physics-based game with draggable characters.
AndEngine uses Box2D under the hood as its physics engine, which you can find here in project form. Of course, you don’t need to download the project unless you want to see the source code (which can be useful as I couldn’t find any javadocs as of yet). You can instead use the Java jar that comes with the main AndEngine project from GoogleCode.
To get started, I imported the main AndEngine project into Eclipse (New Project->Android Project->create from existing source) and followed the 5 minute video on starting a project in Eclipse, then dragged one of the Physics example Activities from the main project into my new game project (called, funnily enough, GameTest).
The next bit caught me – I need to drag the andenginephysicsbox2dextension.jar (whew… what a name) into my lib folder from the AndEngine main project, and also create a libs folder in my new project and then drag the libandenginephysicsbox2dextension.so from the main project’s libs folder into my new libs folder. If you don’t do this, you will get immediate, fatal errors every time you launch your new app. Of course, in hindsight, this seems perfectly obvious, doesn’t it?
Ok, finished the app but ran out of time to explain – here is the code and all that fun.
Try installing the apk on your phone!
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 5 January 2010
[Blog, Visuals, images]
hands-smooth-inner02
Originally uploaded by da mad pixelist
I’ve been experimenting with extruded shapes, with the end goal of fabricating some interesting ones using a 3D printer at the University I teach at, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (UK).
So far, it has been a long learning process – first, making extrusions of my hands using Fluxus and a custom-written OpenCV-based image-outline-tracer in C++ (using some OpenFrameworks); then, using Dave’s extrusion functions in fluxus mixed with my live-drawing sketches, coupled with the OBJ-file export, and finally imported into Blender (for some nice ray-tracing).
The trouble is, I can create 3D shapes but hey have no “solidity,” which means their outlines have no thickness. Apparently you can’t 3D print objects and just hope that they are thick enough, or tweak it on the machine, as I’d hoped. No, as with all computers and electronic devices, they only do EXACTLY what you tell them to do, and nothing more or less.
The image here is a reject from Fluxus/Blender, where I created an inner shape by duplicating the original shape and growing it outward along its normals (used for lighting, normals are perpendicular to the surface of the object, meaning they point exactly outwards and are useful for expanding shapes). The problem is that my shape is so complex, I can’t get away with simply growing it. I’m going to need to do some horrible maths, I can feel it…
Still, I really like this image. I’m a big fan of Salvador Dali (don’t laugh) and the infinite blue background and contrasting, surreally-melted hand shape in front lends this image a particularly Dali-esque quality, I think.
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 22 September 2009
[Blog, Visuals, video]
More fun with old-tymey animations in fluxus, “parenting” objects so they move together, and making rings of things
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by pixelpusher on Friday 26 September 2008
[Blog, Software, images]
This is my suped-up version of the old flight404 and toxi Processing sketch – it uses Perlin noise to create a moving field of very organic-looking daggers. toxi used it for hairs, and now I made an intricate version that uses 3D daggers drawn using OpenGL.
Noise Spears - PixelPusher (after toxi and flight404)
Read on for more plus source code
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