OMG!

Yeah…have put in another couple weeks in on the animation engine for the site and heck-in-zee-bop, was it ever worth it!! It is going to be a VERY interesting space, with text narrative, movies, and game-like interaction all sort of holding up the table evenly. And then everything is wrapped in a Web 2.0 forum by Drupal…

This is more raw coding than I have done in quite some time, and I find that I am enjoying it again. Balancing that with all the ‘R-mode’ artsy stuff makes for better life, no doubt about it. And maybe this psychically ambidextrous form of consciousness actually suits the story as well…I keep seeing the comic as an artifact of the cultures/kosmosii that it describes like an interjected time-portal. Which, besides making a little sense, is a great excuse for me to have fun making the thing just about as alien as possible. But there you go…

I have an opening scene where two micro-citizens of Soo’s mother’s womb are staring up at a fetus which is a subjective kilometer wide. They themselves have bodies modeled after the strange fish-thing we are while gestating, because in their time domain the womb-year will take millions of subjective years – so Soo is like a Sky-Goddess floating at the center of their World. The ancient movies of the zygotic contact between egg and sperm serve as a mythic story of genesis.

…and that segues to the real experiences of Soo’s parents…as they explore the possibility of eating food: a radical move indeed! Send you a link to the new home for this Blog at the end of the month…

Drupaling Along

Well, a couple hundred hours of red and blurry eyed coding later, I am 'there'. The basic mechanics of how to host an animation oriented comix-engine inside of Drupal are known to me...within a few remaining wrinkles anyway. I ended up trying a lot of blind alleys -- my lowest point being when I finally learned about the enormously subtle timing issues in javascript, when your data and your page come together at different moments and can't talk to each other at all. I was in a cafe for 8 hours coding and buying my obligatory muffin every hour and a half and my variables would print to the page...but never feed my animation beast. I went home, and fell asleep.

Waking up at one a.m., I decided to abandon the variable-timing problem and just sneak some script over to the 'other side' of the Drupal core with everything declared in a 'literal'. And that failed too. BUT, when I awoke in the morning and clicked over to my page prototype -- it worked. There was some sort of caching issue, and I was back in black.

And yet! -- my travails had just begun. I had been developing my comic with its pieces in absolute coordinates, which was hosing Drupal when it wanted to move things around. For instance, when the reader wants to write a comment about a given piece, they have this moment where they preview what they have written, and at this moment the comic needs to fly down to the bottom of the page. So...I had to shift to relativistic coordinates...and those are cross-browser badlands, nothing ever is consistent between development and posting, and all the cute thought balloons and special effects wander the page fruitlessly.

Wrestled that...90 percent. Will have to determine some kind of standard dos and don'ts for it and it will be 'relatively' well-behaved. Now I just want to stuff easing and bezier equations into the animation controls! (non-linear motion and curves...the only path to organic feeling)