Neha gives me too much credit for the “totally new” comment in her post over at Narratives. The overall work is really no big deal; the interesting thing for me has been the “making.” Nevertheless, the meat of Stoning Field is basically completed, all the media content in the right place, and now comes the online test on the server for media quality et cetera. The biggest headache I’ve had is with organizing lots of things into multiple files and worrying about size and how to load things up on the reader’s end. The files range in size from small to bigger, the biggest about 7 megs because of video but overall I’m averaging about 5 to 600 kb, which is no sweat for broadband. Most of the video is set for streaming but the files need to go up for test.

Then it’s off to figure what to do with the project once tested.

Overall, the only thing that really interest me about Flash is ActionScript. For example, the following code generates an interesting animation that came about through trail and error and luck. Note the formatting isn’t true in this example:

function gameani() {
this._y += this.speedy;
if(this._y > 100) {
games.g._rotation += 5;
games.g._xscale += 3;
games.g._height += 5;
}
if(this._y > 200) {
for(var i = 0; i < 5; i++) { games.duplicateMovieClip("games" + i, i); games._x = Math.random() * 500; games._y = Math.random() * 500; games._xscale = Math.random() * 100; games._yscale = Math.random() * 100; games._alpha = Math.random() * 100; } } updateAfterEvent(); } function warani() { this._y += this.speedy - 1; if(this._y > 100) {
war.w._rotation += 5;
war.a01._rotation -= 5;
war.a01._xscale += 2;
war.a01._height += 5;
war.r._rotation += 75;
war.r._height += 5;
}
if(this._y > 150) {
for(var k = 0; k < 6; k++) { war.duplicateMovieClip("war" + k, k); war._x = Math.random() * 500; war._y = Math.random() * 500; war._alpha = Math.random() * 100; war._xscale = Math.random() * 100; war._yscale = Math.random() * 100; } } updateAfterEvent(); } games.onEnterFrame = gameani; war.onEnterFrame = warani; games.speedy = 2; war.speedy = 2;

The effect moves then toys with two movie clips, games and war, “tweening” then breaking apart text for a random effect that would be impossible to duplicate on the Flash timeline using the design tools. After duplicating the clips, though, I didn’t necessarily know what exactly would happen. The important part here is working with clips within clips and teasing each nested letter by tracing its “path.” I “know” what the code is doing but I didn’t know what the code would look like on the stage when the animation kicked in. The functions are basic, but even with basic code interesting and unforseen things can happen. Like writing a story, therefore, the code behind the behavior can often lead to things unknown and unseen.