Archive for the “Games” Category

When I am writing a flash app or game which uses the keyboard to control a character's movement, there is a situation that becomes annoying while controlling the character. I do not know the proper term for it ("sticky keys"?) but I will describe it...keyboard

When an app or game is written we "expect" the user to precisely press the proper key or key combination at a time to execute programmatic actions. However, most of us have ten fingers and we use more than one finger to press more than one button on the keyboard. The expected program reaction from multiple fingered keyboard input might not occur because you have another function executing when you expect just one at a time.
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This post might seem of little importance to some but today I was thinking back to my high school days and (vaguely) remember the 4 quadrants of a Cartesian coordinate plane discussed in class. Depending on the positive or negative sign of a Point's X and Y value, that point in the Cartesian coordinate plane will be located in one of these 4 quadrants.

Quadrant 1 = (+,+)
Quadrant 2 = (-,+)
Quadrant 3 = (-,-)
Quadrant 4 = (-,+)

My interest in this post is about the positive or negative sign of what the Cosine, Sine, and Tangent functions return for the same angle...the angle from one Point to another Point. The sign of these 3 Math functions are different also whenever a Point is located in one of the 4 quadrants.

Quadrant 1 = +Sine,+Cosine,+Tangent
Quadrant 2 = +Sine,-Cosine,-Tangent
Quadrant 3 = -Sine,-Cosine,+Tangent
Quadrant 4 = -Sine,+Cosine,-Tangent

Personally I don't think the order or name of the quadrants are important, as long as you keep them consistent with the coordinate system. For my usage, I order my quadrants "1,2,3,4" clockwise since ActionScript's radians values go clockwise.

I feel this will become useful sometime in the future for me when dealing with angles of Points and determining their positions relative to each other.
In a future situation I might not be given X and Y information, but may only have angle data instead. Seeing the difference of signs from the Cosign, Sine, Tangent output of the angle value will be helpful clues.

So some things come back to haunt you, if they are the ghosts of my math teachers, I will surely pay attention in class this time :) .

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I played some Half-Life 2 today, there's a lot of creativity that went into this game. As I played it again today it gave me a few laughs.

If you played the first installment of Half-Life 2, you may remember the NPC characters frequently shouting "Follow Freeman".
As the NPC characters stood around idle, they would make comments that sound as if they where on Twitter. LOL

Follow Freeman!

Way back when the original Half-Life game came out and I played it on my ancient 3Dfx Voodoo card, the graphics blew me away. I've been loving the whole Half Life series and wait in anticipation for the next episode.
I was disappointed that there was not much news of Half-Life 2 Episode 3 this year, so lately I been going back into time to enjoy the beginning of Half Life 2. I thought Half-Life 1 set the bar.
This game set the bar again, the experience is so well done, that the replay value is good even for single player mode. I have lots PC games, once I finish one, I uninstall it. This is one of the few games I have worthy of staying installed for years.

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