Senior Project Week 11

Richard Banister
CSC 4790 Senior Projects
Work Log

Week 11: 10 November - 16 November, 2008

FTP'd software to project site. Should be easy to enough to do deployments there, so I'll try and keep it updated as work progresses. Working software will be kept at http://suteki.minimumrage.net. Currently there is only one demo that will somewhat work: the end credits to Gatchaman. Subtitle placement is not perfect and not done, however, and it currenty does not feature any interactive regions. I will also note that it is completely untested on slower machines or machines with slower connections. 0.5h

Redid action architecture. Now there is a global set of actions that interactive objects can access. This reduces XML complexity supremely. Now you specify actions once, then link them to user actions (eg, click="myAction"). Note this also allows a more arbitrary mapping of user actions to program actions. Before, actions were stored in an array, ordered left-click, shift-click, alt-click, ctrl-click. You couldn't have an alt-click without a shift-click. This new way is much better. 3h

Next I intend to write a little substitution language so you can pass in parameters to actions dynamically. This will allow one global definition of an action (say, display a kanji information page) and then pass in a variable (the kanji itself) which will be used when performing the action. This will make specifiying actions even simpler.

(this all relates to making an editor, as specification of actions will all have to be done by an editing user somehow. It will be much easier if actions only need to be specified once. Of course, making all this user-friendly in an editor will probably be a big task)

Wrote an ant script to count lines. I'm current at 33 files, 3111 lines of code (not all are quality lines, of course!). This took longer than it should have, due to obscure ant documentation and apparent lack of demand for such a function (!), making searching for same difficult. 1.5h

Added drop shadows to subtitles for visibility; increased size for same reason. Will need to be able to specify font size in XML file at some point. Finally did a quick implementation of link following; I was pretty sure this was going to be easy and luckily it was. Many defect fixes. Translating other video XMLs in old format to new format. Regular expressions are a life-saver. New format shows a roughly 30% reduction in filesize. 3h

Solidifying applications for demonstration. Various defect fixes. Created new homepage, with links to the applications on video.php. Need to refine the homepage a little, since it has non-functioning javascript links. Ran into a strange problem. Changed the name of the video page from index.php to video.php, created a new index.php. But loading index.php still loaded the application for some reason. In a panic, I switched it back, not wanting to cause any problems at the demonstration. At which point it changed instead so that video.php contained the video and index.php the index page. Man, the web is weird. 2h

Presented to the class a "sprint review," which is not exactly the third review, since that was technically a week and a half ago, but more of a presentation of where I was at with the software. Answered some questions about implementation of editing software, others.

Brainstorming. Can fix the subtitle location problem by allowing location keys at the "language" level of the XML description. Cascading key properties, like location? Place dimension information in keys and interpolate to resize interactive objects over time? 0.5h

Brainstorming editor implementation. Got an idea of control placement, page layout, technologies needed. Will try to bring information about objects and actions down into the html content area. Also should change actions a little bit again: ability to reference other actions with popup window "expand" link; ability to push actions on to wrapper page javascript links area. A general "change" action is in the works, with the ability to change properties of other objects or groups of objects at runtime. But I need to be able to specify groups first, obviously. First step in development now is going to have to be to work out a substitution language for actions; I can't see the application really working without it. But making it user-friendly is another story... 0.75h

Created string substitution language. Described in development blog. Why must all languages have different formats for regular expressions? You need to learn them all. But because they are all different you have learned nothing. The language I created is not necessarily great, as you cannot nest conditionals. This is because I could not find a way in Flex to match NOT a pattern. Probably a way around this, but it's not critical for right now. 3.5h