Basically, my thought process was: "what the? why is he for-each’ing an array created on the spot? –oh, that’s pretty elegant, I should share that."

So basically I just wanted to post to say "hey, check out this for loop." :)

(and go read Tom Carden’s blog! :)

Appreciating the little things,
~Danny

Also, the muscles from the upper and lower arms interlock like links in a chain.

Here’s a thought: don’t clean up your hobby –or whatever it is you’d like to get done but keep putting off.

Why is it that so many people come home from work and waste away watching tv? I have this theroey that it’s because tv is so easy. There’s no obsticals to overcome, no work to do –it’s already hooked up! If you had to hook up your tv every time you wanted to use it, and then disconnect it and put it away when you were done watching it, no one would bother! :) it wouldn’t be relaxing, it would be work.

So why do we even consider “putting things away”? (especially our favorite things) The act of setting up and putting away can turn something you want to do into something that’s too much trouble to do. (seriously, would you watch tv if you had to set it up and dismantle it when you were done?).

I realized that, after a long day at work, I often just take the path of least resistence, which is tv. This also means a week will go by and I’ll ask myself, “why haven’t I done any of the stuff I wanted to do ( like sketch or paint )?”

All of this clicked in my head for me after I tried out a suggestion from some one in my painting class. “the trick is, you’ve got to set everthing up and then leave it out. Don’t clean anything up and you’ll alway be able to paint on a moments notice.”

And It worked! I’d find myself wandering past my ready-to-go painting desk and spotting something I wanted to try out. I’d make a few brush strokes while standing and find myself sitting down. Then, next I realized, it’s two hours later. Much of the time I’d normally find myself in front of the tv, I now found myself painting. :)

It worked so well that I went out and bought a bigger desk. :)

]]> http://www.dannyburbol.com/2009/10/idea-dont-put-your-toys-away/feed/ 0 http://www.dannyburbol.com/2009/10/look-ma-no-lines/ http://www.dannyburbol.com/2009/10/look-ma-no-lines/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:06:02 +0000 Danny http://www.dannyburbol.com/?p=534 I’ve been tring to make time to sketch more and I’ve been trying to experiment with approaches I don’t normally use.   

Normally I start with a gesture and start marking landmarks to keep my proportions in check before I start, then I move on to making contour lines.  After all that, I’d normally start shading.  But this always leaves me with these sketches that have hard outlines around everything.  Like a cartoon that’s trying to look real by having a lot of shading work inside the lines.

So, just for a change, I was trying to capture as much as possible without making lines.  I was blocking in big areas with the side of the charcoal.  Which means you’re laying down information to define the forms outline show volume at the same time.  It’s pretty interesting.  Here’s a couple 10 minute poses to illustrate.

In the first one you can see how quickly the form takes shape and "lines" start to form –but not as "lines", instead they are "edges".  For example, where the front leg overlaps the back leg.  It feels like there’s a line there, but there’s not.  In fact if you trying to draw a line there it will never be as thin as this "line" created by to edges meeting.

One other thing I’ll just throw out there while we’re looking at the legs.  Note the vertical strips of value I made with the side of the charcoal.  I was trying to fill in large blocks of space all at once… so a vertical line seemed like a nice idea, even though it goes against the curve of the form.  I figured I just try it out to see what it looked like in the end.  Basically, I feel like these legs look like the belong to a robot.  They’re not round, they’re angular and blocky.  Just and interesting observation.  If I had moved the charcoal from left to right along the curve of the legs they would have, no-doubt, looked much rounder.
 

In the second image, I was continuing with the "don’t draw lines" experiment.  I tried to draw as little as possible.  I have some dark spots, some medium tone and I tried to leave all highlights blank white.  Again I made a lot of long lines that following the arms and legs down.  for example, the back arm is not finished so you can see it’s just one long stroke with the charcoal.  But even though I didn’t have time to give it much more attention, it still look like it’s there (your mind kind of fills in the rest)

As I got a little more creative with those "edges instead of lines".  the heads are not outlined at all but you still get the feeling that the fingers are there.  Also note that the back was done in the direction it should be when you’re trying to make thing look round.  So you can compare the back’s shading to the legs and arms and see how the direction of the stroke make a difference.

No lines.  Give it a try some times. :)

~Danny

Okay, no beating around the bush. Do this code once a frame (or more!) and you’re flash game will grind to a halt.

mySprite.graphics.beginFill( 0xFFFFFF );
mySprite.graphics.drawRect( vPos.x, vPox.y, vSize.x, vSize.y );
mySprite.graphics.endFill();

This was my “DrawBlock” function for my falling blocks game. I see these three lines posted all over the web in tutorial and in forums. –Worse, I often only see the first two lines and no endFill(). The above code eats memory.

This code will NOT eat memory:
mySprite.graphics.clear(); // <— required.
mySprite.graphics.beginFill( 0xFFFFFF );
mySprite.graphics.drawRect( vPos.x, vPox.y, vSize.x, vSize.y );
mySprite.graphics.endFill();

Okay, now I’ll begin my rant / explanation of the problem and solution.

In 8 years of making professional console games I’ve never seen a drawRect function eat memory. I’m talking, SNES, Playstation, PS2, Xbox, PS3, Xbox360 –none of them had any reason to use more memory to fill some offscreen pixels with color. So I found this result in Flash, not only unexpected, but jaw-dropping.

“drawRect” should do exactly what it says it does. In a console game engine, we would create a new sprite (or something of that effect) and the engine would grab a piece of memory for that sprite. This would happen once. After the sprite has some memory to draw on, there’s no need to ever get more.

Imagine if you will, a simple square piece of paper –like one of those note pads you most likely have on your desk. Saying “create a new sprite” is like pulling off the top sheet of paper and putting it on the desk in front of you so you can use it.

After that, you can scribble on that piece of paper as much as you want and as often as you want. You can draw a rectangle as many times as you want in as many colors as you want but you only ever use ONE piece of paper. And if the paper is too full, you can always erase it or cover the thing with white out or something that allows you to continue to use ONE piece of paper.

In computer terms, that piece of paper is a piece of memory, and drawing on it is *ultimately* like changing the color of pixels. It doesn’t matter how many times you draw and change the color of the pixels, you’ll always have the same number of pixels in your sprite. The idea of a “drawRect” function taking more memory with each call is a big giant “WTF!” because there’s no need for it.

Now, here’s my hypothesis on why flash’s drawRect function is eating up memory. (notice I said “hypothesis”) I believe that flash’s “drawRect” function is really an “addDrawRect” function for one simple reason: Flash obviously capitalizes on vector graphics.

I believe “drawRect” doesn’t draw a rect at all, I think it just adds a rectangle shape to a list of things to draw when this sprite is told to draw to the screen (later in the frame). Basically, every time you call drawRect, imagine pulling another sheet of paper off your notepad and placing it on top of what you already have in front of you. Each one on of these pieces of paper would have one shape drawn on it. Before long you will have a stack of paper in front of you because, however thin paper is, it adds up.

And that’s it. In console games, drawing a sprite is usually as simple as copying the sprite’s pixels to the screen (aka screen buffer), while drawing a sprite in flash basically runs through a list of every shape in a list and then draws it to the screen based on what the vector math for that shape tells it to do.

So in console games, rather than calling a clearRect or clearSprite function every frame, we literally just drop a new color right on top of the old. If a block in my tetris board is red and should be changed to blue, then we just draw blue over the red data because clearing the data and then drawing it blue takes twice as long.

With flash, if I used my little draw block function to change the color of a block every frame, the first frame Flash would draw 1 rect (say, red), the second frame Flash would draw 2 rects directly on top of each other (red and then the second color, like blue), on the third frame Flash would draw 3 times (red, blue, and 3rd color), forth frame -4 rects, etc…

Here’s the catch –drawing (aka copying or writing to memory) is the SLOWEST part of a game. It’s the reason we have expensive graphics chips that bench-test based on how many polys they can draw in a frame.

So, in the end, Flash is quite the opposite of what I’ve seen in the past. Rather than finding tricky ways to skip the “clear” function, I should use it every chance I get.

so… the next time you use “drawRect” in Flash, think of it as “addDrawRect”.

Thanks for reading,
~Danny

PS: my Falling Blocks flash game.

if you have a domain name you’re thinking about getting NEVER search for it using NetworkSolutions.com!! they will lock the domain as if a customer is buying it (ie, you) and then try to charge you $35 for it! when the going rate on other sites, like godaddy, is $9 or $10.

but since I searched with NetworkSolutions first, now GoDaddy can’t register it because NetworkSolutions put a lock on the domain… all GoDaddy can do is offer to “buy on back order” for $20.

NEVER USE Network Solutions. They will Screw You instantly.

Can you tell, I’m furious!? I just had to pay the $35 and now I know I’m going to have to pay another $12 to transfer the domain name to the host I normally use simply because I thought it would be easy to do a quick search on domain names at Network Solutions (rather than log into my account with my current host.)

instead of paying $9, I’ll be paying $48 ($35+$12)!

I repeat, NEVER USE Network Solutions. When I called in and asked WTF!!? the woman said “it’s standard, $35 PER YEAR for a domain name with network solutions.” I said “why? other sites charge $9. What is Network Solutions going to give me that’s worth $35?”, she said “well you get access to the network solutions account manager.” –are you kidding me!? You get nothing. zero. they just screw you and try to screw you again EVERY YEAR.

NEVER USE Network Solutions.

Ever.

~Danny

Oh and BTW, their account manager is a frigging joke! It’s a million buttons and ads for upgrading and buying more domain names/upgrades, and one button up in the corner that actually lets you see your account and do anything useful. I didn’t even have to blur out any info on the images below because it’s actually that hard to tell if you’re actually logged into your account… there’s not “account like” infomation like, oh I don’t know, the domain I just paid $35 to register.

I love that “Hurry, before they’re GONE!”, which probably means they’ve already locked them so you can’t registar them for $9 elsewhere.

Serously, pass this post on to everyone you know. I’m furious because I know the just screwed me. but the average person who’s never bought a domain name before won’t know the difference. I HATE seeing companies screw people just because they know they can get away with it.

I’ve been making a comic journal and a vacation comic journal (as you can tell by the links at the top of the page). In both cases I knew I had a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time. I needed a style that would get the point of the content across to the viewer but also something that was moderately fast to crank out. So I went with a loosely drawn Sunday comic strip style. It worked great. The looseness of the lines kept me moving and discouraged me from getting bogged down and spending 3 hours adding excessive detail to an otherwise lighthearted story.

However, one day I went back and cleaned up one of the pages and realized that it looked better. Not night and day, but definitely better. Here’s an example:

I thought loose drawing *had* to look sloppy. I thought having lines meet in overlapping intersections was what made it classified as “loose drawing.” However, now I realize you can still have a loose drawing with clean lines and corners. And I think it looks better. So, yes, I went back and cleaned up every page.

It’s really surprising how fast a few clicks of the eraser tool can really cleanup a sketch. I’ll definitely be setting aside more time to cleanup my work more often.

Well, I’ve finally arrived. I had my first piece of art ripped off yesterday. It was an accident really, the person meant well, but none the less, they took an image I spent hours making and pasted it right into their own work.

I always knew these things happen to artists, but it’s pretty unsettling when it happens to you. Thankfully, it was exactly what I thought, just someone who meant well, but didn’t realize they were crossing a line when they used it without asking permission first.

This is the reply I sent to him. Please, educate your friends and family about Creative Commons so we can all be creative together without stepping on each other’s toes.

Hey man, thanks for taking it down. but I just want to make sure you know I’m not angry or mad at you. I had a feeling it was an accident, but it was a very unsettling feeling to see how easily things can get ripped off (even with the best of intentions).

believe it or not, I was more worried about you than my image. I’m not too broken-up about it, but I was worried you might accidentally tick someone off someday if I didn’t speak up. (as in, tick off someone with lawyers or something)

the good news is, it’s really easy to tell when artists do and don’t want others to edit their work.

Just look for: “Creative Commons” here’s a link to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons

Flickr has Creative Common options and I noticed that DeviantArt is doing it now too. So just look for that and you should be all set to have fun with an image.

Here’s an example: http://lukeroberts.deviantart.com/art/Creative-Block-43033454

notice the (CC) instead of (C)?

Pass on the word. The more people who know about these things, the better.

Best of Luck to You,
~Danny