A web designer & developer's blog

Didn’t expect to get this one, because I uploaded a bit of a bogus when applying for it, haha. I was reaaally sure I messed up. Lucky me, I’m happy.

Well, that’s the third and last of the more or less relevant, yet mostly unknown achievements, I suppose. There’s of course one missing, the big one, the only one I’ve ever truly been anxious to get but I suppose I botched it. At first I was actually a bit disappointed, but having seen people who don’t play games fiddle with the not-as-intuitive-as-i-thought controls, I’m not exactly surprised either. I may revamp the website with fancier technology (now that Flash’s Stage3D a.k.a. Molehill is out) and better controls (namely a better tutorial) within a year or so, but for the time being I’ll stick to my other big adventure of becoming a proper freelancer :)

Update: Uhm, I got featured on irie.be, too. I had to look it up and some mention Irie as an award in their portfolio, but srsly: neither have I ever heard of it nor did I apply for it. But, truth to be told: No one has ever heard of any of those awards anyway, so whatevs! Cool stuff, thanks.

Update 2: And also the BestWebDesignAward Award. I thiiink I’ve seen that site before (maybe through google). I noticed a minuscule amount of traffic being generated from them but didn’t find myself there, so I applied and later noticed that I have already won it. Like weeks ago…Speaking of traffic, it might be interesting to compare those sites, because the traffic they generate should more or less speaks volumes about their importance and reach. Now that will be interesting.

This morning, there was quite the pleasant surprise in my inbox :)

Congratulations!

Your site has received a web award from by Design Licks. It´s been designated as “Site of the day” and will be displayed on 12 September 2011. (…) The following link is the proof that your site has been awarded by Design Licks: www.designlicks.com/web-awards/2538-the-cubical-me

Kind regards,
The Design Licks Team

I’m happy.

Damn, wasted eternal amounts of time developing rotators for references and stuff. But I’m not happy with it, because, well, it’s too cumbersome to use (me being unhappy was the only reason it took forever).

I guess I’ll start over again make it easier, more usable. The dirty code and example for free for anyone who dares to use it.

I’ve written about how to get the 3D coordinates of a 2D point on your screen, this time I needed to do it the other way round. Here’s a nice post about both of it, but it doesn’t exactly work with the current version of Papervision3D. This one, using the DisplayObject3D.screen property, is much better, though there’s some minor things to notice:

1. dobj3d.autoCalcScreenCoords has to be set to true – some pages in the web tend to ignore that and people’ll always get (0,0,0).

2. You can only get the 2D coordinates after the object rendred, because the calcultion of the 2D point seems to use the previous render. I tried instantiating a new DisplayObject3D for testing and trace the screen coordinates right after that, and it didn’t work. Bummer. The correct way to get it should be:

myObject.autoCalcScreenCoords = true;
trace(dae.screen.x + viewport.viewportWidth / 2 + viewport.x);
trace(dae.screen.y + viewport.viewportHeight / 2 + viewport.y);

This is something important for game development (or whatever else you may want to do with 3D worlds). The problem: You have a 3D world (e.g. a 3D-map) and click with your 2D-Mouse Cursor somewhere on your screen (e.g. to place a flag at that point) – to do that, you need to project the position of your 3D-mouse into the 3D world. This is how to do it in Papervision 3D:

var ray:Number3D = camera.unproject(viewport.containerSprite.mouseX,viewport.containerSprite.mouseY);
var cameraPosition:Number3D = new Number3D(camera.x,camera.y,camera.z);
ray = Number3D.add(ray,cameraPosition);
var p:Plane3D = new Plane3D();
p.setNormalAndPoint(new Number3D(0, 1, 0), new Number3D(0, 0, 0));
var intersect:Number3D = p.getIntersectionLineNumbers(cameraPosition,ray);

Basically you shoot a ray from your camera to the position where the mouse-cursor is and check where it intersects with an imaginary plane p. That’s where you’ve clicked.

Nice and all, but I personally can’t use it on tcm, because navigation by clicking is far slower and less intuitive than moving with arrow- or wasd-keys. D’oh. This is basic stuff though, so it might come in handy one day or the other.