November 9, 2008 at 9:10 am · Filed under as3, i like / me gusta, toys, web cam stop motion
Ever since the crash of WCSMT, we’ve thinking about the way to bring it back out little home-brew experiment a sustainable presentation. Plans were drawn, sketches made and a new version is in full development.
So here are some announcements regarding the near future of WCSMT:
All animated .gifs will be deleted by Dec 9th, 2008
If you are fond of any particular animation you created, download it now.
It pains me to take these offline but we gotta make room for the new version to come. Of course this animations are backed up and we’ll put them back online when we find some space.
The new version should roll also in DECEMBER 9th 2008 
For the time being, we are dropping the animated gif format as our presentation format, as it is very bulky to store and transmit. Instead we are switching to PNG files, played back by a custom flash player embedded on HTML.
However it will be possible to download all animations as animated .gif for those who want to store the animations themselves.
Animations will have a 20 frame limit, instead of 10 and will have greater resolution.
Animations will have an expire date, after which they will be deleted to make room for the newer ones and keep things in a manageable size. We have yet to determine what is the best expiry time on our animations. We appreciate suggestions.
There will be some minimum ads on the site.
Animations will be moderated.
These are some screenshots of the new version:
Sorry for the delay in updates. Current Piterwilson.com projects are not abandened. Things are howeever, very busy , there is more updates to current projects coming really soon.
September 13, 2008 at 10:32 am · Filed under Something / Algo
Recently i had to partially close down WCSMT. The reason is one of those things that seem like a good thing but on which i am currently unable to capitalize. It just got too damn popular.
I run a dedicated server at Media Temple which was quite the investment for me, but i did it because WCSMT had gotten me booted out of my current shared hosting plan when it hit the homepage of digg.com and i just liked the project too much to let it die at that point. I knew that the sheer size of the generated animated .gifs would pile up and make it break down again,but i figure i would have at least a year to worry about a solution. This need for lots of storage space and bandwidth has always been the aquiles heel of WCSMT.
A couple of weeks ago i did a couple of updates that changed the dynamic of how the mini-site worked. In addition to see a grid of random animations, the site allowed to browse them freely in a time based matter, one page at a time, and it got to a point were it was been used as a kind of graphical chat system. People would “chat” with stop-motion-animation made with animated .gifs. Nice! People were having fun doing animation which was the whole point of the game. I was getting on average 100 new pages a day (sometimes more). Thats 1,600 stop motion animations per day! WOW!
However in less than 2 weeks i received an automated notice from my host telling me how at the current rate of growth i would have an outstanding bandwidth bill of over US$1000 on top of what i had already paid. This is something i cannot afford at the moment and thus i was forced to close down the animation ‘maker’ application and to revert back from the updates i had done.
This WCSMT experiment has proven very successful as a concept but a complete failure from a technical stand point. For this project to continue i must redesign the system to be lighter in disk storage and bandwidth. Most likely i will have to ditch the animated .gif format for something lighter. Most likely a combination of flash player and PNG/JPG images or maybe the animated PNG format . Ill probably have to implement a regulating policy where older animation will be deleted at set periods.
To the followers of the WCSMT , i must thank for their interest on the game and their willingness to participate and share. It has been great having you and i hope to re-open soon.
Cheers
September 4, 2008 at 6:02 am · Filed under as3, code example / ejemplos de codigo
Download source
A sample class to make a dynamic pie chart in Actionscript 3, it includes a sample Tooltip class.
