DB 3.2 process

DB 3.2

My starting point for DB 3.2 was physics behaviors in flash.

The first thing I made was a very simple elastic behavior. I then made a small, vaguely interactive, toy which would basically make a particle with a textfield in it for each keystroke, and make the contents of that textfield the character typed. I animated the particles with the Elastic class I had made, and that was it.



this is all I had in class last week. Class as well as discussion with people in the class got me thinking about content as well as ways to make things more interactive as opposed to reactive.

I went through a lot of different ideas about how to integrate these two concerns, and eventually settled on the idea of making new words out of the user's input words. The nonsensical always appeals to me, so I settled on the idea of generating imaginary words. I did this by making a list of greek and latin morphemes used in english; prefixes, suffixes and roots; and put them into an XML file. Flash creates words by picking a prefix, root and suffix at random and then assembling them into a word. This worked better than I thought it would, but it still has some bugs. The biggest problem is that of the occasional unpronouncable double or triple vowel, and the limited amount of prefixes and especially suffixes that have been added.





with the content generation aspect mostly working I started working again on the interactive part. I used the little elasticity thing I made earlier as a jumping - off point. I liked the idea of it, but ultimately I don't think it really looked all that good. I decided to move from treating words as particles, to using individual letters, and finally to animating individual 'pixels' within the letters. I created an XML containing the x and y coords of the pixels within each letter (lowercase only so far). Each keystroke adds all the pixels for its corresponding letter to the stage, at a random position, elastically bound to its position within its parent letter. I also added more friction to the movement of the particles, which now drift into place quickly at first, but settle more slowly. I was quite happy with this effect on completion of inputting the coords for all the letters.



this also offered the opportunity for a little foray into the world of (extremely basic) font design

here is how the whole alphabet look right after being created




and here is the second version after some extensive XML tweeking


at this point I am basically happy with these two textual behaviours. They both need some polishing, but I think they're about 90% done.

from here I would like to start combining these two basic functions I have created in a more interactive way. My first idea was to have the user enter some text, and then when they hit enter for the text to morph into a non-nonsensical anagram of itself.

I like this idea, but I am thinking of expanding upon it. It could be interesting for example, if flash looked for possible anagrams on each keystroke, and morphed the input text at the first one found, without warning, and without the user's control.

Ultimately I would also like to add more complicated, and more interactive physical behaviours to my particles as well, which I think I will do using one of the many opensource AS 3.0 physics engines available online.