Jon's IDM Blog

Creative Coding Week 6

For this week in creative coding, I learned about DOMs, audio, and worked on my mid term.

I started off designing an interface for my midterm game where the player could input their name, select, a difficulty, and then press start. I decided to go ahead and experiment with some music and see how much I could control it with some of the DOM items. I grabbed some cool video game music and set my future difficulty settings to select the music. Then I set the slider to control the amplidtude of the music. For some extra fun I also added a visualizer to react based on how loud a sound is. I think in the future I'd like a way to limit how many appear, since it is a little crazy right now.

check out the code here!

For my mid term progress, I set up the main frame work for my 3D shooter game. It was pretty tricky to build my ship on the screen using just numbers and no real visualizer like most 3D programs, but I managed to get it going. Getting my ship to move in the correct wasn't too bad as well as drawing a crosshair. Where I really had to pull out all the stops was getting my ship to point at the crosshairs as I moved it with the mouse for a nice seamless rotation. I had to do so much research to finally find a formular to do such a thing.

Using something called atan2 I was able to set the rotation of the Y by doing atan2 the aim x location - ship x location, aim z location - ship z location. Then for the X location it was atan2 aim z location - ship z location, aim y location - ship y location. It's been forever since I've done trig so luckily I found the equation online (link commented in the code). What really broke my brain though was getting the bullets that shot out of my ship to travel towards the crosshair. I thought it wasn't going to be too hard since I had already found the angles but I was mistaken. Luckily the professor pointed me and my ship in the right direction. Using vectors and lerps, you take the ship location vector where the bullet spawns and interpolate it with the vector of where it is heading (towards the crosshair).

I think I'm pretty happy with where I am so far with this project. I think that I should be able to use the start menu I set up with this and maybe even drive where the enemies spawn using music or at least have cool music as the player plays. Now that the hard part is done, I think adding enemies and a score system shouldn't be too hard. I still want to do other cool things like power ups and a boss level too!

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while (!deck.isInOrder()) { print 'Iteration ' + i; deck.shuffle(); i++; } print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';