This is my first post in a series about building an off-grid house in eastern Ontario.
For now this will be brief, but, Heather and I are going to build a kit home on our property just outside Merrickville. We have approx. 25 acres of rural land, but, it came with no hydro access.
We decided to take this negative (no power lines at the lot) and turn it into a positive by setting up an off-grid solar system.
More to come!
I always find it a little unsettling when I open my site and realize how long it has been since I last made an update.
Looks like another long spell has gone by without updates – which means, I have been busy!
I have been working on an online multiplayer trivia game for the past few months and it has turned out really well.
I’ve also ordered a Google Nexus One developer handset now that Android 2.2 is available and the device can run Flash (and AIR).
Hopefully won’t be so long between updates this time!
At long last, I have posted version 1.0 of my DAECleaner Adobe AIR application, expressly designed to help you strip out the extraneous XML from within your Collada/DAE files.
It also has the ability to save your DAE within a zip file, you can then use my DAEz class to provide transparent loading of the zipped DAE models.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
In my on-going quest to improve load times when dealing with Collada (DAE) models in Papervision3D, I decided to write a DAE file cleaner (or optimizer) in Adobe AIR that will remove extraneous information from the DAE file that Papervision3D ignores anyway.
I do all my modelling in 3DS Max 2010 and it exports lights and so forth that are unused in pv3d and might as well be removed to save on filesize.
Additionally, and more to the point of what this post is all about, I have written a new class for Papervision3D which extends the DAE class and provides for loading zipped DAE files – this *really* crunches down the file size.
See example usage here and download a copy below!
[as3]import org.therossman.pv3d.DAEz;
var autoPlayAnimation:Boolean = false;
var DAEName:String = "MyColladaModel";
var loopAnimation:Boolean = false;
var myDAE:DAEz = new DAEz( autoPlayAnimation, DAEName, loopAnimation );
myDAE.addEventListener( FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE, onModelLoaded );
var zipFilename:String = "mymodel.zip";
var asyncParsing:Boolean = false;
var myMaterialsList:MaterialsList = new MaterialsList();
myDAE.loadZippedDAE( zipFilename, myMaterialsList, asyncParsing );[/as3]
Download the DAEz class here!
And check back real soon for the DAE Cleaner utility!
Just got around to checking out the new Adobe Social beta, and it’s a pretty neat service. It will be interesting to see what they charge for it when it’s released.
Here’s a quick test I did with it, click the Connect button and you can log in using any of the social services listed, and it will retrieve your nickname, thumbnail image, and friends list.
No data is saved or anything like that, this is just a test!
I’m pretty excited, I was going through some old folders on my computer last night, organizing things, and I found these pictures from when Heather and I drove to Nova Scotia in July 2007.
I had thought these photos had been lost last time I upgrade my computer but it appears not!
I’ll update this post later with some further notes/thoughts.
I put together a quick test of Andy Zupko’s Papervision3D Shadowcaster class, seems to work pretty good, nice and fast at least in this trivial test.
Heather and I just got back from a week in Europe, we went to Amsterdam, checked some stuff out there, then went down to Belgium on a EuRail train to visit a friend.
I’ve set up all our pictures in a series of slideshows on Flickr, you can view the collection here or just check out the related content below!
We encountered all sorts of strange oddities while we were over there, but I’m still a little jet-lagged so will write about them later!
Amsterdam: Getting There
Amsterdam: Settling In
Around Amsterdam
Heading to Belgium
In Bruges
Heading Home
For my day job at CTV, we recently had a Holiday Rewind promotion, where we brought back old episodes of popular shows to our video player.
I got the opportunity to put together a fancy ad unit that we’ve taken to calling an “ExtendAD”.
Check out this page to view it, roll over and click the bigbox ad to view the enhanced experience!
Was messing around with Papervision3D and JiglibFlash, and managed to build out this simple Formula 1 Racing game prototype.
It’s a little taxing on the ole CPU but if you have a reasonably new system it should run fairly well.
Still lots to do to convert it into a full game experience, but still, a fun exercise!