Colin Holgate of Funny Garbage weighs in with what he describes as one of his smallest Shockwave movies ever: a stereoscopic (red/blue anaglyph) image of a star field that you can maneuver through and around. Use the arrow, U, D, Z, and X keys, and wear your 3D glasses. Reload to get a different star field.
One Man’s Atrocity
Thank God Kathleen Parker can restrain herself. In a syndicated column this week, the Orlando Sentinel writer is just so mad about the “zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them” that she could just “nuke the Sunni Triangle”. Given the adjectives used in most of the non-opinion press coverage, it’d be a safe bet to say that Parker’s feelings are shared by a lot of people in the U.S.
The deaths of the four civilian contractors were an atrocity. It would be preferable to find and prevent the perpetrators from attacking again. That the crowd took the men’s bodies and desecrated them is appalling. Though, if that was sufficient grounds for nuclear retaliation, and given different circumstances 80 years ago, Ms. Parker might be living in a different portion of this country, given that a big swath of central Florida might have been somewhat less hospitable due to its penchant for lynching, arson, and burning at the stake.
What boggles my mind about most of the reactions I’ve seen to this incident is that the very same people seem wholly indifferent to civilian casualties in Iraq. Thousands of people have died. The Associated Press’ intentionally conservative count, which excluded military casualties and only included victims who had been brought to hospitals, was 3,240 just for the period of March 20 to April 20 of last year. Many of those early deaths were to bombs, building collapse, and fire. The bodies of many of those casualties were just as gruesome as the scenes from Fallujah; the main difference was that they weren’t seen on U.S. TV. The relatives and neighbors who had to bury them saw the bodies, though, and in some cases so did much of the rest of the world. It didn’t suit the tenor of the U.S. media at the height of the invasion to do so, however. CNN called the Fallujah attack “horrific”. Yeah, it is. So is having your neigborhood bombed because someone “thought” Saddam Hussein was there, and having your family die when the apartment you lived in is destroyed. It’s all people doing the dying, whoever’s doing the killing, with whatever weapons they’re using, and from whatever distance it’s being done.
Bézier Curve Reference
So I’m idly flipping through a print issue of MX Developer’s Journal (that I’m not sure why they’re still sending to me), reading through Ron Rockwell‘s article “Are Your Brain Cells Colliding?”, about how Flash and Freehand treat Bézier curves in different ways. There’s a sidebar on the difference between quadratic (Flash’s one control point/segment) Béziers and cubic (Freehand’s two control point/segment) Béziers, and in the second paragraph I see the words “ you can read all about Bézier curves at www.moshplant.com/direct-or/bezier/“. That stuff’s been up now for so long (since 1996) that it’s the top item on a Google search for “Bezier curve”. Gotta update that set of pages one of these days.
Cinema 4D Got Bones!
In a dirgames discussion about whether the Maxon Cinema 4D, a cross-platform modeling and animation tool, could export animations to the Shockwave 3D format, Mark McCoy of ezupa.com pointed out a brief tutorial by Gary Ingle on how to rig and export bone animations, which have apparently been supported since version 8 was released last spring.
Atlantic Tunnel
Gamedev Opinion on Shockwave 3D
Perennial Dir3D list poster noisecrime mentioned on Tuesday that one of John Hattan’s reports for gamedev.net from the 2004 Game Developers Conference last week had a couple of things to say about Shockwave 3D versus other Web-based 3D tech. This is not a joke.
Harry the Head Is Dead
On Friday, I heard through Roger Jones of Throbbing Media that one of the biggest names from the early days of Director development, Jim Ludtke, had died.
Ludtke was a pioneer in many ways. His work was not only rich and complex, but it was incredibly strange, as well. His association with the band The Residents led to one of the most memorable CD-ROM projects ever, the 1992 3D environment/art gallery/avant-garde rock experience called “Freak Show”. For a couple of years, it was difficult to pick up an issue of “WIRED” or any other multimedia-oriented publication without running into a reference to Jim Ludtke.
He did amazing things with 3D back when that was a far more complex task than it is now. I’m sorry to see him go.
Scripting Xtras Updates
Developer Valentin Schmidt has freeware scripting Xtras for Windows that do things like create PDF files, manipulate MP3s, and more. He announced on DIRECT-L that he’s made some modifications to them for DMX2004 compatibility and they’re available for download.
Recommendations
I’ve always been a fan of the homage — or parody.
Listening to the bumpers between stories on NPR can often be enlightening. I just about burst out laughing when I heard the Youngblood Brass Band’s “Pastime Paradise”, a horn piece incorporating the theme of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” (I hope he doesn’t get as mad at them as he did at Wierd Al for “Amish Paradise”). You’ll hear the chorus come up about a minute in. They’re going to be in Europe most of April and May.
For the eyes, check out “Good bye, Lenin”, a rather touching yet pretty funny film about a son’s dedication to his mother. The trailer tells you pretty much what you need to know. There are a couple of Kubrick references, some Fellini, and other stuff I don’t know, I’m sure.
Flash Lockdown
In a DIRECT-L post Tuesday (titled “FlashMX2004 List + DMX2004 = FREEZE”), John Mathis of Inplicity documents 11 steps to lock up Director on Windows:
- Open Flash MX2004, create a new flash document.
- Drag a List component out a List component.
- Populate the List component manually with 5-6 items.
- Adjust the size of the List box. Just make it a bit bigger.
- Export a SWF file.
- Open Director MX2004…create a new movie.
- Import the test swf file & place it on the stage.
- Play the movie. Click line items & observe that it works fine.
- Stop the movie, and set the sprite to Background Transparent.
- Play the movie.
- Click line items and the system becomes unresponsive.
John’s results were on a Windows XP system. I was able to reproduce on Windows 2000 Server in both authoring and in a projector. Bizarrely — considering the Flash playback issues on the Mac in general — OS X seems unaffected.