May 7
Software
The awesome nerd over at Geoff’s Boring Programming Stuff gave me the biggest compliment a programmer could recieve. He wrote a program to use my program! As he points out in his post, it seems pretty clear that he is not the only one. If there is anything more rewarding than that, I can’t think what it would be. Thanks Geoff.
Edit: (May 18th, 2009)
Apparently my brother’s room mate took at shot a writting a bot of his own. You can see his progress here and his wins here.
Software
My simple Refresh Cannon game got picked up by several high traffic websites. Unfortunately the large volume of traffic brought my simple server to it’s knees, so I had to take the link to the image down. Now that the bulk of the traffic seems to have passed, I am reposting the link. You can find it at the original post.
May 5
Avatar
EDIT: Due to an excess of traffic, I have had to take Refresh Cannon off of this page. Please try again later. I am so sorry folks. Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. I will post it again when things cool down.
And… were back.
Inspired by the popularity of Refresh Hero, I am continuing in my exploration of the limits of avatar images. Of course the main challenge is developing ways for the user to have meaningful interaction with only their refresh button. The previous game used the element of time in binary fashion: either you got it right, or not. This new game uses time to allow you to adjust two different variables.
Avatar Cannon is the basic trajectory game of angle and velocity. The amount of time you wait before refreshing allows you to adjust these variable and attempt to hit the target. Each time you hit the target a new terrain is generated. The avatar also displays your standing against all other users. A full live high score list is also available.
Finally, if you would prefer to have your score listed next to your nick name, instead of your IP address, you can register here.
Apr 30
Software
For a while now I have been interested in trying to create games that can be played in avatar images. People generally think of images as either static or animated, and I enjoy opening peoples eyes to the fact that images can be dynamically generated based on your interactions with it.
Refresh Hero is a play on Guitar Hero. You are asked to refresh the image after a specific number of seconds. The more accurate your timing, the more points you collect. If you miss the time mark wildly, you lose all your point. However, if you need to take a break, gaps longer than 20 seconds between refreshes will be interpreted as pausing the game. Hitting more than one in a row builds your chain, and you can collect chain bonuses for large chains.
To add to the fun, a high score leader-board is displayed at the bottom of the image so you can see your competition. If you want your name to be displayed on the leader-board instead of your ip address, you can simply enter your name (or nick) at the registration page.
So go ahead, refresh the page and clime the high score list!
Edit: I have added a top 50 high score list.
Nov 12
Software
Since my previous avatar DDOSed my router, today I wrote a less popular avatar game. The only game I could think of that has no need for actual user input was the card game war. So I implemented it in my avatar. You can play too, by simply refreshing this image:
Features:
- Proper handeling of running out of cards during a “war”
- War cards are show (with appropriate cards face up or down)
- Independent games for each ip address playing
- Deck state stored in database between refreshes
- Special WIN/LOSE screens
Software
Building on my previous avatar hack, I set out to design an avatar that was also an interactive game. The game I eventually settled on was one where you compete with the other users to see who can load the avatar the most times. The image you are served shows your ranking as compared to the other users. It looked like this:
And true to its word, every time you refreshed it, your number went up, and you could climb to the top. I thought it would be fun, and a person or two might even refresh it a few times to get to the top. So, before I went to bed, I set it as my avatar on a forum I frequent. When I woke up the next morning More
Oct 9
Software
I am a member of a web forum which allows you to use an Avatar image of your choice. You simply give them the url of the image. The ability of php to generate images lead me to try to come up with ways to take advantage of this system.
My first attempt at a dynamically generated avatar was thwarted by the sites form verification. It rejected my avatar because it pointed to a .php file instead of an image file. To get around this, I created a directory called:
/avatar.jpg
that contained an index.php file. Therefore when a user requests:
http://www.classicalcode.com/avatar.jpg
the server resolves that to:
http://www.classicalcode.com/avatar.jpg/index.php
and that script generates an image which it then returns with .jpg headers.
Now that the image is dynamically generated, the question is: what can the script do? Currently it logs ip addresses, browsers and operating systems, does a google image search, finds a random image for a search term, and displays that image along with the users ip and the total times that the avatar has been requested. The source code can be found here: avatar_source.txt
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