Proof of Concepts - BETA Content
Over the last few weeks I've been working quite a bit on new content for the website. There's a lot of work put into it and not all ideas end up making it to a final production stage. Some ideas are better than others, but not all of them can be worked into the site. Most of this is flash related but not all of it will be. I'll be updating this page with all the site related projects I stir up so you can at least see the work being done to make this site the best it can be.
Progression Cloud
My initial goal with the Progression Cloud wasn't too clear. The only thing I knew for sure when I began was that I wanted bosses to walk in and out at the users control and have information about that boss displayed on thier respective pages. Kill date, achievements, number of attempts, etc. I spent around 16 hours working on this, getting the code right, the animations smoothed out but what ended up putting this project on the shelf was the realization of the amount of work it would take to keep this updated. Not only that, I'm a perfectionist at heart and I could not for the life of me fix the achievement roll-in/out animations to be completely fluid. If you mess around with them enough you'll see what I'm talking about.
Overall, a great idea that I might pick up later once I figure out a more realistic way to approach it. Current thoughts are towards running in some XML to bring in fresh data straight from the armory on every load of Cloud, but that's just an idea; and an extremely complicated one at that. At least I have it in concept if I ever decide to hop back in.
5.23.09 Update
I've redone the achievement animations so that they are moved by code, and not manually created motion tweens. It'll make my life easier if I decide to go further with this as I will only need to toss in the achievement and be done with it. The grey achievements don't fully extend because I haven't fully optimized the code yet but it's still getting there.
Guild Listing
This wasn't an idea that I planned ahead of time, it just sort of happened. It was initially just a way for me to link the characters I had brought together in WoWModelViewer to guys to make sure thier characters looked correct. Eyes, Face, Skin, facial features, etc. Once I finished putting all the characters in the image, it looked sorta cool. So I tossed the PGN logo on it, moved around the characters a bit and here it is. The real use of all the work with the characters will be seen at a later date.
Guild Scroller
Stuck on how randomly great the Guild List came out, I wanted to use it but the list was just too large. The image is over 5000 pixels wide! So, I coded a scroll feature in flash to move through all the characters, controlled by the users mouse. Just to make sure I could get it working I used the first 5 characters and worked that way. After about 2 hours getting the scrolling working I decided to toss in the information HUD when you click on a character. After that was finished, I opted to try to animate one of the characters to make it that much cooler. It all worked, but I just can't figure out how I could fit it into the site. It was suggested that I toss it onto our guild history page when I type it up. Which seems like the best move if I want to fit it in.
Concept worked, so all in all I'm happy. If I decide to pick it up it wouldn't take but a couple hours to bring in everyone's character and thier respective information.
Innovating the typical Boss Kill Video
Controlled View Boss Kill is a new way of viewing boss videos. At any point you can change the viewing angle of the movie to one that suits your interests better at that given time.
This is going to be the standard for our boss kill videos. Everything is in fully working order minus a control bar and higher quality video. My current idea is to try to load the videos from individual video files but we'll see how that pans out.
The size of the CVBK is too big for this page so click the image below for the full version.
A Guild Alone
This is the reason I recreated all the major players in the guild in WoWModelViewer. I wanted something that was subtle, but epic. I think this hit it quite well.
