joeldg - navigating the surface

A while back I started watching the Anime Naruto, and loved the storyline of the original part of it. It went on perfectly until about episode 140, when the television part actually ‘passed’ where the Manga (drawn comic) was at. They didn’t really know what to do, so they created all these filler episodes until #219. I couldn’t stand the pain of watching the horrible filler episodes so I

finally gave up at about episode #180.

All the while the manga continued to develop the story and is much further along now. So, they basically pretend that the last 80 or so episodes didn’t happen and that he was “training” and

we re-enter the story two and half years later, and Naruto has grown up some.

And grown up he has. He is taller, finally got a new wardrobe and we can only assume he has picked up some fancy new abilities, this episode is perhaps the most anticipated Anime release in history as people are all kinds of crazy over it and there are multiple websites that are devoted

to all things Naruto.

It is a crazy episode, and they have a lot of catching up for people on what is going on.

When I downloaded the torrent, there were about 20,000 seeders and so it literally was the fastest 250MB I have ever downloaded.

I also noted that Naruto’s headband has changed colors.

Each of the kids (including Konahamaru and his buddies) have grown up, and each has their own little explanation for the audience showing their size in comparison to how tall they were. The Sasuke storyline finally picks back up and we are teased with it in the very beginning of the episode with a glimpse at where this episode and the following ones are leading.

Anyway, if you are not familiar with Naruto, watch the eps on one of the sites (some have streaming episodes even) up to about episode ~130 to ~140 and then skip ahead to episode 220 (Shippuuden 001-002)
Pick it up at http://yhbt.mine.nu/t/ The wait is finally over.

You can also pick up Bleach there as well, if you are not familiar with Bleach, it is kids who work as Reapers, vrs the Ninja school of Naruto.

I have done a ton of research into animating sprites for a web page via javascript and am curious if I am on the right track.
Basically, I am looking at the following options:
1) SVG animated sprites, calling functions within the svg file itself from js on the page.. like walk_up(), walk_left() etc.. I have not tested this yet, but I want to generate a prototype of it to see if it would work. I know this is possible (see: this killer svg example for how JS works within an svg file in firefox.
2) DHTML with CSS cropping .. switching fast between styles to ‘animate’ the sprite.
3) Animated gifs. (this is more of a last resort)
4) Other.

What I am trying to determine is what would the best way be to animate a little walking guy on top of another image. Also, there may be multiple little walking guys.
I am going to avoid flash because I actually want to do this without flash, and to keep the file size (thus bandwidth) down.

Any ideas?
I miss anything?

powered by performancing firefox

I have had an interest in simulating weather systems for a while. And have given a lot of thought to what makes a weather system ‘random’ and how to achieve this in a programmatic way for usage in a “game-world” to have a true weather system. I have done some additions (much reprogramming actually) to a fla file that was created on another site. I woke up this morning after half-sleeping thinking about this and hacked this out, using a base from the original fla file, I played around and worked on randomization and such and wrapped this up in about an hour.

The idea being that you have two “attractors” which represent low pressure systems, and two repelling spots, which represent the high pressure systems. The little lines represent clouds or weather of some kind.
You can drag the high and low pressure systems around to see how they interact, and they also move randomly by themselves.

In a full blown system (not a flash mock up) these high and low pressure systems would have destination points randomly selected and migrate slowly towards them.

If you sit and watch this for a while you will see that just by moving the points around there are some very interesting interactions with them and you can effectively create “jet-streams” where the clouds prefer to travel, and that a move of one high or low pressure spots will change the entire way the weather system moves.

One of the things is that in games, or in any simulation, weather is never really a factor and is not accurately represented (sometimes it is randomly introduced). I think this is a huge part of a game world that is being and has always been overlooked.

For a non-mockup of this, I would/plan to, have a random number of high and low pressure systems (with at least three) and each would have a pre-defined lifetime and fluctuating strength of attract/repulse. The number of clouds/weather would also not be pre-set and would change (as per seasons) and could be modified based on speed and possibly combine in strength based on if they are pushed together, vrs these which do not combine. I would also implement curling about the systems also to better represent actual cloud systems, in this mockup the clouds do not have lifetimes either, they are permanent, each should have a randomly determined lifespan and intensity. However, this would enter into some computational complexity that would take a lot of processing power for each iteration.