matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

I haven't actually worked on jsLive since moving, though that's not to say no work has been done since my last update. In fact, I made some great strides in the graphics department as you can see below.

Not perfect, of course, but much, much better. So much better, in fact, that YouTube flagged this video as having copyrighted material from VisualArts whereas it didn't in the last one.

Sadly, all that graphics code is getting scrapped as I move everything over to HTML5 canvas, so really I'm back at square one.

Pushing it a bit close tonight, but that's what happens when you go to a once in a lifetime screening of the extended cut of Two Towers in the theater and it's nearly four hours long. But, whatever.

Download: Source

Some time ago, a coworker passed along a link to this very nifty Colour Clock which displays the time and uses the values of said time to drive the background color. It's really quite pretty and nifty. Back when he linked me, there was the flash version on the site and a download for an OS X screen saver. No Windows love.

So, I fired up my copy of Visual Studio and set about correcting this sadness. I never really polished it to the extent I wanted, which is why I'm putting it up as a source code release. There is a binary in there, but no installer or anything.

Also, before I created this version, I also conjured up a JavaScript one as well, which you can see here.

A little more teaser of my progress on JsLive. Honestly, this video probably seems like less progress than the screen shots I put up previously, but it does demonstrate some things that static pictures cannot: "motion" and audio.

As can be seen by that video, the graphics have quite some major problems and will be my next area of concern. However, I did get jumping between scenario files working and, in theory, the entire game is playable. After getting the graphics to a place I can live with, I plan on rolling out the public beta for people to tinker with.

Somewhere around the time I began working at Wal-Mart, I thought it would be a nice challenge to write an NES emulator. One of these days I'll release my mess of source code for that, but it was probably one of the most awesome programming challenges I've ever undertaken. So, why am I waxing nostalgic about this project from nearly six years ago? (warning - there's technical programmy talk inside)

David Carson. I could begin a long diatribe about how I hate this guy and his hack methodology of design, but I will instead be mostly silent and say that I've boiled David Carson down to a 554 byte JavaScript bookmarklet:

Instant Carsonification

You can drag that to your bookmarks bar/window or you can copy and paste the URL from the link above and paste it into the title bar of your favorite website. For a more instant gratification, just click it. Any poison you pick, enjoy!