Sunday, December 8, 2013

Re-writing an old gallery slide-show class

I ran into some glitches with some old code I wrote.
I am going to re-write the class.
But instead of making a version that is "hand-tweened" (which makes it easy to pause in place by simply not calling the update() method)
I am going to build it on top of GreenSock's TweenMax engine.

Here are my notes:
I had a hard time figuring out what I was going to do, so I wrote down different ideas for how to code it till I hit
something that made a lot of sense and wasn't too abstract.

I'd say a good use of my time, as I am too tired to program. Yet not tired enough to sleep.

Though I really should do this more often. Taking the time to think about what you are going to program, instead of programming
right away, can be very valuable. And this is coming from someone who is a "straight ahead" coder.
I usually code as I think.

new conveyer code design:

//Diagram of conveyer with 3 items in it that are all on screen at the same time.
//[p] stands for portal. if animating left-to-right,
// v2 will smoothly animate to [p1], then TELEPORT directly to [p0], then continue to animate to old position
// of [v0];
[p0]-----[v0]-------[v1]---------[v2]------[p1]

//how do you handle tweening it, but stitching it back together gracefully?
//idea1: Programmer "trip itineraries" for each object.
//       Problem: Seems unecessarily abstract and complex.
//idea2: Animate [p1] to [p2] travel, but make the object being animated .visible==false.
         Problem: leaves spot [v0] empty.
//idea3: Helper Object manages it's own "flight" to a destination.
         The main class it belongs to just changes the destination. But the helper is responsible for the details.
         
//idea4: Each static "check-point" has a "prev" and "next variable.
//       in addition to this, each check-point has a "youCanStayHere" variable.
//       [p0] and [p1], as points OFF the screen, have "youCanStayHere == false".
//    
//       in addition to this:
//       if(youCanStayHere==false, but .next == null,
//       then we are on [p1] moving forward. Teleport object at [p1] to [p0];
//
//       CONVERSLY:
//       if(youCanStayHere==false, but .prev == null,
//       then we are on [p0] moving BACKWARDS. Teleport to object at [p0] to [p1];

//OLD NOTES NOT PERTAINING TO idea4:
/** Value from negative INF to positive INF that represents shifting the array of points forward or backwards. **/
var _arrayShiftOffset:int; 

/** A vector of the points we are targeting. We want to CENTER display objects on these points. **/
var _staticTargetPointVector:vector.;


var _helperHolderSpriteVector:Vector.;

No comments:

Post a Comment