Anyways, it's still early days in terms of content but it's getting there. Comments, flames, crits... all welcome. http://www.whatever.net.au/~cameron/KMB626/ -- Macromedia Shockwave (director stuff, not flash) Plugin Required.
Oh and I haven't had time to add anything to the front of the site explaining what it's all about (this theard topic should suffice foe now though) nor have I properly coded the containing HTML page, it't just the automagically generated html page that director creates when you publish a project.
Another thing, it should be fairly bandwidth friendly although the inital load is about 215k, but I'll be adding in distrations for that later on.
Edit: Crap!... The font embeding seems to have gone out the window. I'll have to look into that. Edit2: Yay!... I fixed it...
[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 06-09-2003).]
Using a slightly more readable font, added in some mouse over status text.
Would appreciate a little more feedback though. I assume by the lack there of that this isn't terribly interestig to most people? Or maybe a lot of people don't have the shockwave plugin or something? Takes to long too load on 56k Dial-Up connections?
I guess I didn't really specify what areas I wanted feedback on but any suggestion, gripe, complaint or idle comment would be nice.
[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 06-11-2003).]
OK, I haven't been around here that much lately, but I'm back in action! I always love looking at Drac's stuff, 'cause it's just so purty. You want gripes and complaints, though? OK...
First off, the rotating cursor arrow drives me batty. I found myself focusing on clickable items just to get the blasted thing to stop spinning. I really don't see how it adds anything to the site. If anything it takes away from the beauty and simplicity of the design with its incessant spinning. It's very difficult to concentrate on enjoying the sublimity of the site.
OK, now that we've got that out of the way, I like the interface: clean and easy to use. The site is also very beautiful both visually and aurally.
The typography, however, is not working (and when I say "not working," I mean that I'm assuming what I'm seeing is not intentional, at least partly). The font used for the directions in Storm Scape is so small that I can barely read the text. Also it appears to be a different font face entirely. The font appears fine (both size and font face) in the Engine Sim, though.
So I'm going to assume that the font in Storm Scape is somehow broken, and what I see in Engine Sim is what you intended. I have to say, though, while I think the font you have chosen is OK for titles, I really don't like it as a body text font. It is not the easiest font to read, and it is difficult to distinguish certain letters, especially "a" and "o" (I first thought that "Storm Scape" was "Storm Scope"). I would personally go with a sans serif body font for the text instructions.
Also, you have committed one of Suho's Seven Sins (I'll tell you what the other six are when I figure them out): no encoding. I have actually seen this a lot in Shockwave sites, so maybe it is Macromedia that has committed the sin and not you (I have no idea how Shockwave works). At any rate, in the Engine Sim text, where it reads "bee's wings," I see a funky Korean symbol instead of the apostrophe s. I know most people will not have this problem, but it happens to be one of my pet peeves (ahem).
One more thing: I'm not sure how you would work this in, but it might be nice to be able to distinguish the dots from each other--that is, be able to tell which one if the storm, rain, stream, etc. It's not vital, I don't think, but it would be a nice addition.
So, have I rambled on enough? I really liked this one, and while the Engine Sim sound pretty much drove me nuts, the Storm Scape is very relaxing. In fact, I still have that one running. Nice work.
I thought the cursor might annoy some people. There is a reason for it though, it's simply to help indicate what's clickable and what isn't, but you're right, it is distracting. I guess I went a little over the top. I could have used the default hand cursor when the mouse is over an element but to be honest, I hate that hand cursor. Maybe just having the cursor slightly blurred when it's not over a clickable element (as opposed to blurred and spinning) would be better yes?
You're also right about there being problems with the type. The font for the storm scape section is wrong, it should be the same as the engine sim section. As for the font n the ending sim section, well, it was better than what it was but I know it's still not that good. I've been having a hard time trying to find a font which is small enough to not look out of place in such a small content area but still very readable. The font I'm currently using is about the only non all caps pixel font I could find with a decent x height, making it semi readable at that size.
However, I am in the middle of creating my own font just for this section so that will soon change. The wacky biz with you seeing a strange character in there isn't actually an encoding problem, it's because that font doesn't have any (') character. I checked it on my system and all I get is a box. My bad, I should have checked that before I uploaded it. I'll have to hurry up and finish the font I'm working on.
About having a visual link between each blip and the sound it's creating...
The thought did cross my mind and I've tossed around a few ideas for it but later decided it was too much work for too little effort at the moment. Although, after I finish the font I'll defiantly have time to re-visit that idea. Any suggestions as to how I'd go about creating that extra visual link would be appreciated. =)
I?ll try and update this as soon as I can but I?m in the middle of editing a short film for yet another one of my assignments. Thanks for the comments and I?m glad you liked it (at least some parts) =)
I like the cursor myself but the blurred not spinning is probably going to enrage less people in the end
I dropped in to say that whenever you install the Shockwave player (didn't have the latest at the office), it closes ALL your open browser windows, then when it's done it pops open the one that needed the plugin only, lost all my open browsers man. I hate that.
As for the font issue, I didn't even notice that they sucked honestly, but yeah =o I wouldn't mind seeing some lovely scripty type thing in place of the thechno, that might work, so many script fonts suck though.
It's really nice. The only things that I don't like are:
- The spinning cursor, as others have said
- The small font is unreadable.
- The sounds need to be smoother. You need to fade into them and out of them very briefly (like, over a few milliseconds) to avoid the tiny "clicking" noise that you hear when they start and stop. I'm talking about the interface sounds, like the beeps and the volume control noise and stuff like that. Also, when the velocity of the enginges are changed, the sound could be smoother (change the velocity over a short period of time rather than immediately).
I love the images and the look of it. How did you get the flower blur to look so nice?
?as are the fonts, as soon as I finish making a better one.
As for the sounds being smoother... That's partly my problem for not enveloping them correctly for use as spot effects and partly a Director problem I can't really fix. Director has a maximum of 8 sound channels from which to mix sound. If you play a sound in a channel that is currently being used it will kill the currently playing sound. At the moment I have most of the interface sounds playing in channels 1 to 3, which means that if you roll over to interface elements too quickly it will end up cutting several of those effects quite short, causing that popping sound.
I'm still experimenting with different ways of doing this; hopefully I'll find a solution soon. The engine pitch sounds I can't fix because I can't alter the pitch/rate of a sound whilst it's being played. At the moment I'm recording how much of the sound has elapsed, stoping the sound, applying the new pitch setting then playing the sound again from the time the last one was stopped. When you try and do this around 50 times in a second (that slider puts out 100 different pitch settings) you can really notice it. Applying the change at fewer intervals is also extremely noticeable. Even a shift of one cent (10 cents to a semitone, one semitone is the difference between C and C-Sharp) is extremely noticeable and I?m shifting through a range of +/- six semitones. A change in pitch is a million times more noticeable than a change in volume or panning.
The only possible solution I've thought of to this problem is to use several pre-processed samples and of same sounds at different pitches and to dynamically mix the volume levels to give a similar effect. That's going to bloat the required bandwidth somewhat and I don't know how it'll work but I'll certainly give it a try.
As for the director plug-in installation closing all your browser windows, that I have zero control of -- Macromedia?s the culprit there. It does that because the plug-in won't work unless the browser is completely unloaded from memory and restarted thus they have to close all your windows. It's a real shame they don't re-open every single one but it's a security risk letting one website know what other browser windows are open and which sites they are viewing. I've had similar annoying experiences before with installing various plug-ins. I guess that's just the price I have to pay for making web content that requires a plug-in. Although, once I get around to making a proper HTML page and Shockwave detection/installation section (as opposed to letting the browser decide what needs to be done when it can't find a plug-in) I'll be sure to warn people about this before they install the plug-in.
Actually, do you think it's a good idea to try and detect the plug-in using browser scripting then serving up the content accordingly or is it best to leave those processes up to the web browser? Many users may get scared off with the dialogues that pop-up saying they need a plug-in, other more savvy users may be use to or expecting those dialogues. I'll have to ponder that a little.
Slime, the flower blurring is actually done using 5 bitmaps at different gaussian blur levels. The fully blurred and non-blurred images are saved at a Jpeg quality of 70, the rest are at about 35 to 50 quality with a little blur (the blur compression setting) making all five images total about 70k. The border around the outside is a 3 colour transparent GIF (2k), which meant I didn't need to worry about that crisp line when compressing the transition images. Then getting the blur to transition was as simple as layering each image on top of each other then animating the opacity from one layer to the next.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I really appreciate it and I'll put it to good use as soon as I can. =)
Font for text on #1 is messy as stated before.
I've been playing with sound longer than I've been a photoshop junkie, and then I've been a shockwave lover for longer than I've been a flash junkie, so this takes me way back. It's great to see a cool site again that isn't Flash-based. You gave me a warm fuzzie feeling. Where did you learn your lingo? I was never very good at it.
[edit] Now that reminds me that I was going to persue a similar project with more abstract controls. I might finish that and show you Dracuis. Thanks for that spark of inspiration. Oh, and I'm serious! I need a good lingo reference. O'Reilly perhaps?? DUH *hits self* [/edit]
Well, I can't really comment much on your sound ideas, since I have about zero knowledge of that area, but I will say that I didn't notice any clicking when I was playing around. I just loaded it up again and turned the sound up, and the only click I heard was when I first changed the pitch (velocity) on one of the engine sounds, but that was it. So it doesn't really seem to be a problem for me.
The cursor: I like the idea of a blurred cursor (slightly blurred, of course). I think it would be a great improvement over the spinning one.
As for visual links between the blips and the sounds, I do have one idea: You could make the central dot of each blip slightly bigger and differentiate the shapes (square, diamond, circle), and then change the bullets next to the titles to reflect these shapes. The only other thing I can think of would be using different colors, but you have a pretty nice monochromatic scheme going there that you probably don't want to mess up.
And yes, I did like it, despite my criticisms. I just figured the criticisms would be more helpful.
Bmud, thanks for the kind words man, I'd love to see your project when (if) you finish it.
Where'd I learn Lingo?... Can't rightly remember the name of the book that kicked started it all for me (was a random director 8 book I borrowed from the school library), but once I got a firm grasp as to how the language worked, the built in help files (lingo dictionary) was all I really needed.
Suho, I'm really liking that idea of styling the check boxes to match the blips -- very intuitave. In fact, I like the idea so much that I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it before you did! Heh. =)
Anyways, I'm on holidays now *yay* and this will be my first order of business on my list of things to play with.
That is some sick sh**!! I swear I don't know where some of you get these ideas, but everytime I get stuck in a rut I know I can always come here for inspiration... (with a little frustration as I wonder where the hell your ideas come from)....
Heh, thanks Rob. I think the same thing when I see other inmates work around here. Although, the idea actually came from a discussion a friends and I had in class one day.
He beat me to making the first example which is in flash floating around on his website somwehere and I did a similar thing earlier with DHTML and Quicktime Sounds with a train theme. Although, I took that offline as it was too complicated to make sure the user had quicktime installed and set as the default audio plugin for their browser. This is more of a continuation of an idea than anything else. Although, since I've started thinking about how sound can be played with in these forms I've had a whole slew of ideas for stuff to do.
Anyways, I've been slack... Well, kind of. No update yet, I want to finish something else before I go back to working on this. I'll be dropping a new site in here some time soon.
[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 06-19-2003).]
posted 06-09-2003 08:38
