headaches

Today was a set-back. After discovering there would be no simple solution to adding text input with processor, we decided to take everything we've been working on and translate it into Flash. It is taking a lot of time we do not have, and is tedious, but it is better than trying to continue to work in a program that is going to limit us in the end. Midterms and a huge amount of work in other classes has a lot limited the amount of time we've been able to spend with the project, but we are making and honest effort to spend more time with it and push on. The stuff for the website is coming along. Still need to figure out what's going on with the web space, but it seems we've got our hands full with other things right now. More to come.

Web-hosting

So today we continued working on the organism generator, and figuring out what the website is actually going to look like. Made some icons which you will be seeing possibly soon. We are basically waiting to find out what we will be getting for this class as far as web space, but we'd like this to be something more permanent and not just for this class. Neither of us have a clue how to actually publish a website, aside from playing around with free personal websites back in the day. We have run into some problems already in regards to free-hosting and file types that can or cannot be uploaded. We don't want to get stuck hosting this website somewhere that we might regret later. That's about it. Trying to get all of the pieces we need compiled together. The sooner we can get something rolling and actually test this out, the better it will be.

Prototype Organism Generator

I've finished working on the POG (Prototype Organism Generator) v0.1b. So far, a simple organism made of polygons will travel towards your mouse. If you click, a new random organism will be generated.

Already there is a bug: sometimes the organism doesn't show up at all. Hopefully I'll be able to fix that soon.

EDIT: I fixed it. The variables were set up so that the segments could possibly be 1 sided--which doesn't work. I changed it so that the smallest amount of sides is 2. Unfortunately, Google Pages isn't letting me upload anything else for some reason, so you'll have to suffer with the buggy one for now.

EDIT: Switched to Freewebs. Unfortunately, I can only upload ONE file at a time. But I tried GeoCities, and it doesn't support uploading .pde (processing) files, so I had no choice. If anyone has a suggestion as to what free hosting site we should be using (if anyone even reads this at all) please leave a comment.

Here's the link: POG v0.1b

Jackie is currently working on a styleguide for the website. She's experimenting with icon designs. We really like this science icon set. Samples to be uploaded soon.

We outlined the project concept, goals, audience, etc. It basically consists of what's already written on this site, but we wanted one document that clearly outlined what we're setting out to accomplish.

Research

OK so today we've continued working on the programming and our goal is to create a prototype random organism generator. This will let us know if our code for the organisms DNA is actually working, and creating our organism. Actually thats more or less our goal for the week I've been reading the book "Biomedia" by Eugene Thacker as a suggestion from Amanda. We've spent some time playing with other similar games and simulations. I really enjoyed the "Evolites," and left it running on my computer for a few days altering the settings and seeing what happened. Eventually the game became so huge my computer crashed being unable to process the giant organisms I had "created." Also my niece allowed me to experience "Webkinz," which is essentially a virtual pet world much like "Neopets," which I remember growing up with (I can surprisingly still get on my old account! So can Cory, I feel like a nerd), and the Facebook application "FluffFriends." Basically you adopt a creature and play games to earn points or money to spend on food, clothing, and accessories for your creature. I've also been thinking about Pokemon, or at least the latter versions of the video game, when it was no longer "cool," which allowed the player to mate his monsters to create different monsters which were inaccessible otherwise. Cory says I need to mention "Dragon Warrior Monsters," in which it was necessary to mate your monsters to advance in the game and earn more powerful and rare monsters. It is available on the Nintendo DS as "Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker."

I also stumbled on this amazing site similar to "Second Life," a MMO community, called "Metaplace." (You can read the news article here). It has JUST come out and is still in the testing phase which means we won't be able to play it for some time, but I can't wait to see what it's all about. The basic idea is a world where you can create absolutly anything, it is based off of the book "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson which we were supposed to read in the Integrated Media Elective I took last year in the Spring. We've also added some links on the side to other interesting blogs about science and technology, as well as a video about Programming DNA which we HIGHLY recommend watching.

Knut has been showing us some interesting Bacteria games, one of which is John Conway's Game of life. Another one we found is here. The name of it is litterally just "Bacteria."

OK, OK back to work then, we'll let you know when we get something actually working :]