Windy Leaves

Todd and I are competing once again - this time the topic was "wind". I haven't seen Todd's entry yet, but I'm fairly certain mine is much windier than his. If not, hopefully at least my blog post will be.

For "wind", I had trouble coming up with an idea, but finally settled on an online app that showed leaves blowing in the wind. Leaves are a really easy way to show "wind". I played with a few mathematical formulas using cosine and varying constant values until it started looking correct. Once I had the leaves floating convincingly across the screen, I added a barren tree and some background noise to lend a windier atmosphere. The end result seems a bit like a frame from a comic strip.

So, try catching some leaves:


I will also note that, unlike all my other JavaScript apps, I tried adding a little sound to this one and, thanks to Scott Schiller's Sound Manager, implementing sound was rather straightforward.

Seasonal Colors

For "Seasonal", I decided to try a bit of ASP generated CSS. I created a script that, when fed a specially designed CSS file, spits out that same file modified with "seasonal" colors. Depending on the month, it generates certain color sets. I tried using PSP's colors, but my wife said January shouldn't be orange, so between her and I we created this:

Now the Image Game, sociate.us, and this blog all use the new seasonal color set.

Trading in Umbrare

So I didn't quite accomplish what I set out to do on "hidden". I started trying to copy some NetHack code to Javascript to implement my idea, but that didn't get very far. So I started another idea. I completed part of it, involving allowing folks in Umbrare to trade, but I didn't get to implementing the "hidden" part of it, so this is the result.



If you walk up to someone in Umbrare and run into them, it opens a private conversation dialog (they must also run into you, or you will be ignored). Once you start a conversation with them, you can click the "<-- -->" button to start trading items in your bag. It should be straight-forward, but if you run into any bugs, let me know.