Computational Media Final: ALPHABET SOUP!
Talk about a labor of love. I think out of all the projects I did over the course of this semester, this one was my favorite. It turned out to be the closest to my original conception. Admittedly, I put a decent amount of work into it, perhaps not as much as I would have liked to but, considering the amount of time physical computation takes up, I’d say I did an ok job.
As the title says, I was working on a fun emulation of alphabet soup. I thought of the idea for my midterm. I wanted something I could play with, that would be modular, additive, and equally trying for my coding level. For the midterm, I was not happy at all at the way I executed the sketch. I knew, from the get go, that I would probably have to turn the letters into a particle array out of a particle system. However, I did not want to jump into that so fast. So I figured that I would cheat it, as we always do, and use characters from a font and initialize an array out of those. I didn’t realize how ornery letters created in this way could be. There was a lot of jittering in movement and poor rendering. I could not make the letters move freely, nor could I program interactivity with them. So I decided to make them move within their own spheres. It still didn’t look great but I had a midterm at least.
Pretty ugly. So with the final, I kept the same idea. Only this time I devoted a lot more time to creating the particle system I so desired. I admit that I scouted around for some example code and took little snippets from a few places. One problem with that is making everything fluid and referential. It took me a good while to map out all of the steps in pseudo-code, mark it up, annotate, and try, debug, try, debug. I consulted with residents a few times who taught me how to cheat with success. I met with Shiffman when I really needed some help, who also taught me to cheat, for now. And surprisingly, I came up with solutions of my own, which was one of the more amazing feelings. This is the fruit of those labors and I am damn proud!
The applet is a bit squirrelly, and I think it’s messing up some of the interactivity (Yes! You can play with the letters and move them around and shoot them across the screen!). But if you keep pressing around, you’ll eventually pick up a letter. I will try and diagnose and fix it, but for now, deal with the annoyance.
