Follow this link to find an interface to the lecture notes from Wednesday. Notes like this can be found under the Notes category.
(If you’re confused about the interface, play around a little bit.)
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Follow this link to find an interface to the lecture notes from Wednesday. Notes like this can be found under the Notes category. (If you’re confused about the interface, play around a little bit.) The following video is a simulation of Bush’s memex built by Dynamic Diagrams in 1995: Spring 2010 course information for the new semester is going up, including updates to the Student Portfolio page, syllabus and calendar, and a new Assessments page. We have all kinds of links to assist students with their ePortfolios, also, including a model to follow. Zymic offers free web hosting. Something to look into. Today we will finish our work with Nine Points and then spend some time with The Legend of Grammy’s Apples. This will establish our foundation for playing works of IF and then begin discussing how we will be creating a work of IF. Then we will discuss the basics: creating the world of the story (rooms, pathways, and descriptions) and then basic objects (things and their respective descriptions.) The assignment for everyone will be to create a map of their world that includes rooms (or spaces), how they interconnect, and any things that will occupy those rooms. Then, create concise descriptions of all these object as well as a prologue that sets up the story (and later, the goals.) The result being a world that tells a story to the player just by moving through the world and examining everything. On Wednesday (10/28) everyone will begin building their works of IF. So come prepared to work. We will be starting the interactive fiction project on Wednesday (10/21) and there are several things you will need in order to get ready:
Today we discussed Roland Barthes and his concepts of readerly and writerly and how the concept of a writerly text have important connections with our study and discussion of new media. Then we covered our definition of narrative which will play an important role for the rest of the semester. We then used the online (hypertext) novel 253 – An Interactive Novel as source to illustrate these concepts and ideas. Working our way through this text everyone was asked to plot the narrative. Plotting the narrative is a way to sequence our path and to note the different causes and effects of this path. For an example of how one of these might look, visit my own plot of 253 from February 2009. This will serve as a model for any analysis of a work of new media (hypertext, game, web site, etc.) The are two more readings assigned (check the course calendar) and an assignment (located at http://tunxis.digication.com) due for next class. Steve E gave an introduction to the online portfolio system (called Digication) today. You can login to your account by following this link and clicking on the Login link: Use the same login and password you use when you check your grades. The assignment for next Monday (9/14) is to create and edit your Welcome page.
Here’s Calais’ new media venture
But what does it all mean? Partly, it’s the fundamentals in motion: math, variability, and different forms of filtering. Covered the two basic models of communication this morning: linear and transactional models of communication. We also went over the 5 basic principles of new media:
Used audio software to help illustrate these five concepts (a first). There was one excellent question asked about “changing” elements within a new media text: “doesn’t changing one element really change everything?” Great thinking and something that we will revisit and discuss on Wednesday. See you all then and have a safe long weekend. Welcome to everyone in New Media Perspectives. Please note that the calendar had been updated. We forgot about Labor Day! So we will not have class on Monday, September 7. John Moran stumped me last night with a seemingly simply idea. To scale a circle on a button press. Basically, this is a 4 part process: 1) make the objects and add them to the stage 2) create two events: a click event and an enterframe event 3) target the to-be-scaled object 4) set some conditions for the animation to end, as we don’t want the scaled object to keep scaling and thus blow up visitors’ computers. Part three was the stumper in the lab flurry, with lots of students needing aid. Well, I don’t like to leave things hanging so after a sandwich last night I did some testing and came up with the following:
Here’s what it looks like. Click on the orange ball button: Works of IF from the 2009 New Media Perspectives and Digital Narratives classes are available to play online. A few You Tube video tutorials on instance names and frame labels by James Kyle and an additional bit on Actionscript 3 basics: Instance Names As asked for here’s the code for managing frame animations:
In addition, you might try adding a circle movieclip to the stage in the first frame of the main timeline. Give the circle an instance name of circle. Then supply some code in an actions layer on the first frame:
The above examples illustrate a mouse event and a frame event. |
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