Bsc Digital Arts and Technology

We got out last assignment for Flash last week. We knew roughly what it”ll be as we’ve been doing some code for it over the past few weeks in the tutorals (just getting the basics so we can use it for this assingment)

We have to make an astorids game, with a score and lives etc, with the space ship moving around the “stage” and the astorids splitting in two when hit, and the smaller ones disappea if hit again.

The code we’ve done so far is just getting the angle done for the cannon, having the missliles shooting out, and the aliens being shot, and coming down randomly from the top of the screen. The code for this is very similar for the code we’ll need for the assignment but will of course needed to be altered to fit the brief.

While working on this assignment, a few problems occurred. The major problem that I had was when I needed to reboot my computer and so lost all my work (the computer had wiped my memory stick clean too (don’t know how but it did) so I lost my backup too). It wouldn’t have been too bad if this hadn’t happened a few days before the deadline date, as I had lost pretty much all my work I had to start all over again.  That is why I spent the day before it had to be in working my ass off to get a least part of the specification done, the html side of it wasn’t too bad to do as it was just the basic html needed to make the website. Doing the JavaScript that was my biggest obstacle.  I ended up working till 3am the following morning (the day it had to be in) to complete most of the JavaScript and as usual it didn’t go smoothly. I kept having errors appear and even with the debugger on Mozzilla FireFox I couldn’t locate the problem (as my eyes had begun to get tired). Luckily however I did end up finishing it and having done everything included in the specification!

Our first assignment for IDAT 102 was to build a travel website, which included basic travel information for travelling abroad.
 We had to include the following:-1.      Five countries each from a different continent.2.      Useful tips to remember while abroad3.      A feedback form of the website.4.      A pop up calculator included a memory function, calling function and cleared function.5.      Also an interactive map. 

Information on the five countries needed to be included on the map, to do this we had to put everything into its own DHTML layer, so when the user rolled over the separate countries this layer would pop up showing the population, climate, and any other useful information.

I know I was supposed to have started this blog back in Septemeber but eh…I never got round to it. So now I’m going to be filling in the last 5 months work in this one blog!
 We started IDAT 102 doing basic HTML pages linking them together, making lists, changing the fonts, adding external css styles etc. then we got onto a bit more of the “harder” stuff.
 This wasn’t “hard” because it was difficult just a bit annoying as it was JavaScript so more programming was being done which meant erroros occured and thus reading through the code to find the error to edit it.
 Like with other programming languages such as VB this is a dedious task to do as it involves going through the lines of code with a fine comb…and when you’re not very experienced with the language can take you forever to locate the error and all it ever seems to be is a ‘{‘ not included in the code. But with practise this did become easier to look for without causing too many problems. 
 Obviously we started off with the basic things and changing JavaScript in the lecture slides to the excerises we had to do. Normally these excersises included using the code to do a rollover on an image, or have an input box pop up for the user to type words into which will then be placed in a paragraph at certain points to make a MadLib.