Timing is key…

I realized that I’d been putting off working on the animation because I wanted to address the issue of timing my classmates brought up last friday: namely, I restored the master tempo to its original 120 bpm, and fixed minor timings in word animations (see the current version with crappy built-in audio here, but turn your volume down—it’s loud).  The music, up until tonight, wasn’t finished.  So, I sat myself down in GarageBand and finished recording everything.  I re-recorded the melody and baseline, determined the bridge and intro, and modified and finished the descant.  All told, it’s three tracks of piano some spliced together, and it plays very loudly instead of very quietly, which I consider a moderate improvement.  I wish I could make it sound like it does in my thoughts—I hear amazing sounds in my head but can’t get them out into daylight.  I’m satisfied with it but not enchanted.  I’m not sure I have the skill with keyboard-driven software instruments to enchant myself.  Volunteers?  No, seriously, I would love a cover of this.  I’d also love a new sewing machine, digital slr camera, and a sexy red foreign sports car, for the record.  And a kitten.

Code-wise, I’m looking at ways to combine all the circles into one MovieClip object, which I can then use as a mask.  I’m also trying to make things work with classes and packages, as it’s much cleaner.  I’m not sure where I want to put the socket (in its own class, with methods to talk to other classes; or in the main class).  I’ve discovered that, no matter the screen size or the number of circles, the flash implementation of the processing app starts to slow way down.  Ugh.  Distressing, particularly as I’m not sure if I can find an alternative.  I need to find out how to make Processing and Flash talk over the web, not just over my computer’s local ports.  That could be difficult.

I’m reading “Postmodern media culture” by Jonathan Bignell, which is turning out to be an interesting and informative read.  I’m also beginning to panic about getting everything done by the end of this term, but I’ll just keep working, staying up later and forcing myself to get up earlier as the term progresses.  I keep thinking, “I can do this, I can do this, I will not melt into a puddle of ectoplasm and stain the peculiar blue tiled carpet in my room…”  I went to Fencing, but my right ankle (specifically, the muscle/tendon that runs along the outside of the shinbone and serves to lifts your foot up/flex it toward your leg) burns when I try to step forward.  Having decided that I should not keep stressing it when it hurts so much, I skipped out after footwork, showered, ate dinner, and got to work.  Whee.  People were playing video games in the lounge as I went by, and later they watched a movie (The Devil Wears Prada).  If I’m not careful, I’ll pick up another fun book, and then where will I be?

Back to Basic (not quite).

Is that joke still funny when talking about coding?  I’m in Actionscript 2.0 (because the xml socket code I’m using works in 2.0 and not 3.0 and at this point I’m not going into equine dentistry).  It’s been a little while since I wrote for-loops and traversed arrays and such, but so far, so good, in the sense that what I’m coding and what Flash is doing seem to correlate.  It doesn’t seem to like some parts of my code (most noteably the for-loops traversing the array)…

UPDATE: the loop works; it doesn’t like using an array length property as the ending condition, and I really need to down-clock all of the socket operations (maybe put them into an enterframe sort of context), as Flash crashed when I tried to make it do a loop from 0 to 1345.  :(  I’ll post my code as a text file in a bit.

UPDATE: The incoming data make sense, at least!  I’ve put a massive delay into the Processing side of things, so I can see what I’m doing in Flash, so to speak.

UPDATE: I feel like an idiot.  I’ve been trying to display things that don’t actually exist, so its no wonder that I’ve been getting “undefined” over and over!  Fixed that; and I’m getting the right data at the right speed!

UPDATE: I’m going to find a way to make Processing talk to Flash in Actionscript 3.0 if it kills me!  No way am I drawing circles in 2.0; the solutions I’ve seen for that so far are painful to behold!  I take pride in being a rather lazy person; that is, I have no desire to take the long route, even if it’s flatter.  Let me at the short, steep, prickly, difficult route!  (Random tangenital yet pertinent example: French pronouns: if asked, <<Est’ce que tu as donné les fleurs qui sont arrivées aujourd’hui à ta mère?>> “Have you given the flowers that arrived today to your mother?” I respond, <<Oui; je les lui ai donné,>> “Yes; I’ve given them to her,” not <<Oui, j’ai donné les fleurs qui sont arrivées aujourd’hui à ma mère.>> “Yes, I’ve given the flowers that arrived today to my mother.” While learning the French pronouns and their proper use was difficult at first, knowing how to use them made everything from that point on much easier.  They used to call me the Pronoun Queen in that class… a friend even made me a paper crown saying as much—in French, of course!)

UPDATE: Code as of tonight.  (Downloads as a rtf file.)