Category: Programming

The Gyruss Clone Revisited

John Winkelman

Click the image to see the experiment in action.

 

Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins. Click the movie if nothing happens at first.

My tile game experiments led me back to an old project where I was trying to recreate/reinvent the game Gyruss in Flash. I was playing around with the Perlin Noise generation functionality in Flash, and co-incidentally came across a polar distortion class at BIT-101. I took it, played with it a bit, and figured out how to go from Polar Distortion to Twirl, with the addition of one very short line of code. Voila! I had the thing you see above. The addition of a simple gradient provides the depth.

Crime Map Interface Update

John Winkelman

I just made a small update to the UI of the Grand Rapids Crime Map. There is now a tally of the incidents displayed, based on the selections from the filters.

Some stats, as of February 21, 2008, mid-afternoon:

Total incidents: 209
Homicides: 44
Armed Robberies: 88
Armed Assaults: 55

..and so forth. Some interesting pattern arise as you poke around in the map. I found this one, which makes me want to stay away from the 44th Street/Kalamazoo Ave area in the month of May:

Armed robberies, in the month of May, in Zip Code 49508

I am thinking of adding the ability to filter by street name, too. I don’t know how useful that would be, but it would be interesting to be able to call out, say, Plainfield, and watch the armed robberies march north from Leonard Street to Northland Drive.

Makes me not want to go there, either.

Updates and Upgrades

John Winkelman

I just added a new entry to the Crime Map – an Armed Assault. Some dude got shot down on the SouthWest side. I also changed the status of one of the crimes. This is the first time I have needed to do such a thing, and it upset me a little. There was a kid got beat up outside of a bar back on the 10th of this month. Well, a few days ago, he died of his injuries. So now the Crime Map has its first homicide of the year. My sympathies go out to the family of Jonathan Krystiniak.

This bothered me more than it might have, because of the similarities to an incident that nearly took the life of a good friend. Long time readers of this blog may remember this particularly stressful month, back in 2004.

I have to say that WOOD TV is doing a very good job of covering the Krystiniak story. Of the few local news websites that actually cover local news, theirs is the only one where information is easily accessible, and regularly archived.

Sigh.

In other news, I have begun the process of re-designing and upgrading this website. Hopefully things will go smoothly and (for readers) invisibly, but there is the possibility that es.o could be down for a little while. I am going to upgrade the blogging software – TextPattern – to the newest build, which is 4.something. I am currently using 1.something. The new design should be ready to go in a few more weeks. I have some other things to get off my plate before I can attend to my own desires.

[EDIT: 6:15pm]
Turns out that I just had to upgrade last night’s shooting to a homicide. So now we are up to two murders in Grand Rapids in the month of January, 2008. January 2007 also had 2 murders. With four days left in the month we still have a chance to beat that record!

Interference Globe

John Winkelman

Actionscript 3 and Mathematics and Art

I’m not sure precisely what I was going for with this one, but I really like how it turned out. In the longer view, I am playing around with making some generative art, things which I can print out and frame…and maybe offer up to the community at large.

But right now, I am going to turn this thing off and look outside at the first thunderstorm of the year. January 7. Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thunderstorm. It was almost 60 degrees Fahrenheit this afternoon.