Michael Gardner, will be showing this video during his presentation at DevLearn 08 at 1:30 on Wednesday 11/12 during his Practical Principles for Effective Learning Game Design (#206) session.

SCOMaster Gameplay

I don’t plan to make them drop dead simple to use, like the old ones that were included with Flash, but I’d like to ask my (very few) readers: “What would you like me to do?” Are there interactions that you’d like to see?

I plan on making them class based, following the MVC pattern, with the data stored in an XML file. Should make it easy enough to modify, but the AS3 code would be intermediate level so it would require some effort there.

If I don’t receive any comments, I’ll just start wandering in a random direction and post what I come up with.

I’ve been playing around with using gestures with WiiFlash as an alternative input scheme. As a first step, I’ve taken the Flash Gesture recognition code from Didier Brun and modified it to work with a Wii remote instead of the mouse. It works pretty well - some of the letters aren’t easy to hit - but not bad for a first try. I’d like to modify with further have more “shapes” rather than “letters” to match. More to come on this when I get extra time.

Casey went to the hospital with chest pains - and it turned out that she was in labor! After 14 hours of labor, Gabe arrived, 3 weeks early, at 11:21am. He was pretty big at 7lbs 2oz and dispite being early, everything was OK and we went home on time.

Sophie’s getting used to him, and we’re getting used to the two of them.

After a week and a half I finally finished my first real WiiFlash game - SCOMaster. It’s a competative, 2 player learning game designed to be played in a group setting. It illustrates the concepts of assembling a course in an LMS system. Bonus points are awarded for content reuse - they are SCOs after all! Unneeded objects and faulty objects can be sent back to the development team to be reworked - but at a cost.First one to build a completed activity tree wins.

Ben Hutchens, our graphic designer, created the art work for it. It took about 60 hours to program it using the WiiFlash classes that I had developed earlier in the year.

Originally,  based all of the interaction with the cursors off of the typical mouse events (rollover, rollout, etc.), but this did allow for find out which player rollover the sprite or which player “clicked” on the sprite.

Each player’s cursor is just a sprite itself, so I switched to using the hitTestObject function against each players cursor sprite and the object sprite on a mouse event. This returns which of the cursors interacted with the object. Additionally, since the cursor sprites are big, you do have to see them from a distance, I found that I needed to add an additional sprite to the cursor - the cursor “point” - at 0,0 and use that for the hitTest rather than the actual big cursor sprite. If the “tail” of the cursor arrow is still over the object sprite, you shouldn’t count that as a roll over, since the point of the arrow is the important part.

So here are the functions for a rollover:

 private function onItemOver(e:MouseEvent):void {
var wm:Array = whichWiiMotesAreOverMe(Sprite(e.target))
for (var i:int = 0; i < wm.length; i++) {
_WiiMotes[wm[i]].doRumbleSeconds(.1);
_WiiMotes[wm[i]].cursorState = WiiCursorView.CURSOR_POINT;
}
}

// returns array of which wiimote cursors are over the sprite
private function whichWiiMotesAreOverMe(tgt:Sprite):Array {
var a:Array = new Array();
// _WiiMotes is an array of Wii controller objects
for (var i:int; i < _WiiMotes.length; i++) {
if (tgt.hitTestObject(_WiiMotes[i].cursorPoint)) {
a.push(i);
}
}
return a;
}

The functions for a mousedown are:

private function onItemDown(e:MouseEvent):void {
// gets the index of the _WiiMote object that clicked the sprite
var wm:int = whichWiiMoteClickedMe(Sprite(e.target));
}

// returns index of which wii mote cursor is over with the A button down
private function whichWiiMoteClickedMe(tgt:Sprite):int {
var wm:Array = whichWiiMotesAreOverMe(tgt);
for (var i:int = 0; i < wm.length; i++) {
if (tgt.hitTestObject(_WiiMotes[wm[i]].cursorPoint)) {
if (wm.length == 1) {
// simple test if only one cursor is over
if(_WiiMotes[wm[i]].isADown) return wm[i];
} else {
// little harder if 2+ are over, _LastClickWMIdx is the last Wii mote to have pressed a button
if(_WiiMotes[wm[i]].isADown && _LastClickWMIdx==wm[i]) return wm[i];
}
}
}
return -1;
}

This method, while probably not the best way, turned out to work really well in the game.

SCORM and Flash WBT Overview

This is an example file of a Flash WBT on the timeline, where my previous example was pure script. SCORM 1.2 compliant using my wrapper and Pipwerks SCORM API.

Timeline Based WBT Demo

This version is pretty complicated, so it’ll be a challenge to figure out how it all works. But there is value in seeing the code for the individual page interactions. It’s not SCORM or AICC compliant - but it did track as a Docent Outliner module - those files aren’t included.

The framework file is the main file for a course. It loads an structure XML file (xml\framework.xml) that defines the list of modules for the course. The blank file what each lesson is built from. It contains all of the templates and is capable of running a course from an XML document.

These are Flash 7 FLAs. The code is Flash 6/MX level Actionscript. There aren’t really many comments in the code since I coded it for myself. But I did train a few coworkers how to use it. I haven’t worked in the code for over 3 years, so if you ask a question about it, I probably won’t remember what I did.

Here’s a preview of the interactions in the blank file:

http://www.nudoru.com/assets/portfolio/experimentalflash/ft2_samp.htm

Here’s the code:

Flash Template 2 Code

I’m hoping to fill a void with this - I know that there are a lot of people trying to develop WBTs in Flash and they have no idea where to start. I’ve been doing this for 4 years, and I know that I would have loved something like this when I started.

Example Documentation

Example Source Files

Please let me know if you find a bug, have a question, or have a comment or suggestion on what to cover next or how to make this better.