We have decided to give our organism a short memory span of 10mins, the same as its feeding habits, this means that it can only feed off a correct email once before it forgets it. So the result would be, you enter your email and it feeds Annie, Annie will feed off that email once more if not fed for 10mins, then Annie forgets that email. 

We have found that this method enables Annie to have a more realistic lifespan and exhibits features of dependancy and infancy towards the user who we regard as its parental guardian. The user is part of the organisms life span and hopefully this will emphasize how life like our organism is, it demonstrates self sufficient abilities but not enough to fully sustain itself.

This morning I was looking through countless tutorials to get a php page to extract variables from Actionscript, finally i have found a working example which will be extremely simple to manipulate for our organism and also make it a little bit better once we have introduced an array or database of some kind.

The example code:

ActionScript:

Btn.onPress = function ()
{
 mail_lv = new LoadVars();
 mail_lv.dummy1 = “”;
 mail_lv.subject = “SSEN CLAN Membership”;
 mail_lv.message = “email_addy”;
 mail_lv.skin = “skin_result”;
 mail_lv.pw = “password”;
 mail_lv.fname = “first_name”;
 mail_lv.lname = “last_name”;
 mail_lv.dummy2 = “”;
 mail_lv.onLoad = function ()
 {
  trace(”Sent successfully…”);
  trace(”mail_lv.subject = ” + mail_lv.subject);
  trace(”mail_lv.message = ” + mail_lv.message);
 }
 mail_lv.send(”http://localhost/PHP/mail3.php“, “_blank”);
// mail_lv.send(”http://localhost/PHP/mail3.php“, mail_lv, “POST”);
// loadVariables (”mail.php3″,0,”POST”);
// gotoAndStop (”pg3″)
}

and the PHP:

<?php
 if (isset($_POST['subject']))
     $subject = $_POST['subject'];
 
 if (isset($_POST['message']))
     $message = $_POST['message'];
 
 echo(”subject = $subject<BR>”);
 echo(”message = $message<BR>”);
 mail(”dan.netherton@students.plymouth.ac.uk“, $subject, $message);
?>

Next thing to do will be to look at linking Databases (MS Access ones) with the PHP pages to retrieve and update records hopefully…..

 countdown = function(){
    timer –; 
 if(timer==0){
       timer = 300;
    happiness = happiness – 10;
 }
 trace(timer);
 trace (happiness);
}

timedate = new Date();
var clockH = timedate.getHours();
var clockM = timedate.getMinutes();

trace(clockH);

if (clockH >= 19 and clockH <= 23){
speed = 0;
happiness = 50;
_root.cell._alpha=20;
}

Above you can see how little code it is to implement the system clock time. The if statement is just a simple one that stops Annie moving and makes here more transparent between those times. When Annie wakes up its happiness level will be reset back to 50… just like when you wake up and feel normal! Annie doesnt hold daily grudges.

We’ve got the get time function working with both the hours and minutes but are currently only using the hour to influence behaviour. The minutes will be implemented later as part of the “self-feeding” function. The plan is every 10 minutes if Annie hasnt been fed it will go and look at its past food eaten and eat that again, although it wont gain any happiness it will be enough to stay alive for a short while.

Next session we are spending on this we need to get the PHP end and SQL database up and working to get the variables passing through flash to the backend. Yes this will be hard!

Below is a look at the code we have used:

else if (happiness >= 1 and happiness <= 10){
speed = 2;
_root.cell._alpha=10;
myColor.setRGB(0×333333);
}

else if (happiness >= 11 and happiness <= 20){
speed = 4
_root.cell._alpha=20;
myColor.setRGB(0×000033);
}

else if (happiness >= 21 and happiness <= 30){
speed = 6
_root.cell._alpha=30;
myColor.setRGB(0×003366);
}

This part of code is just a small bit, there are obviously else of statements for the rest of the happiness (goes up to a maximum of 100).

Depending on the happiness level of Annie determines:

• how fast it moves
• how transparent it is
• what colour it is

We have created happiness to be affected by pretty much everything the user does, so it is a very ‘sensitive’ organism. If you lie to Annie it will become unhappy…

Next we’re going to look at getting a getsystem time function.

// first we make a new loadvars object to hold the variables that are being loaded from the php file
myData = new LoadVars();
//this is the part where we execute the function that handles the loaded data
myData.onLoad = function(){
 VariableLoad();//call the function
};
//here we load in the php file, make sure you set the right path to your file
myData.load(“http://localhost/index.php”);

//this is the function that handles the data.
//the variables now sorta live in the loadVars object we set named myData
//So we can call em like myData.myVariableInthePhpPrintedString
//just look at the script and whatch carefully how its being called and it should become clear to ya. 
VariableLoad = function(){
 txtBox1.text = myData.textbData1;
 txtBox2.text = myData.textbData2;
 txtBox3.text = myData.textbData3;
};

PHP

<?php
/*Getting the variable ‘toPHP’ sent from flash using the ‘POST’ method*/
$fromFlash = $_POST['toPHP'];
/*Encrypting the $fromFlash and storing it as $encrypted*/
$encrypted = md5($fromFlash);
/*getting ready to send a variable to flash named toFlash using ‘&variableName=’*/
$toFlash = “&toFlash=”;
/*Asigning the encrypted variable to $toFlash AFTER the ‘=’*/
$toFlash .= $encrypted;
/*echoing out $toFlash so that flash can read it*/
echo $toFlash;
?>

• Moves around at a faster speed
• if it becomes happy it can duplicate

2. When unhappy:

• Doesnt sleep
• Moves around slower
• Eats other cells?
• Wont duplicate

These are additional behaviour patterns to the ones from my previous post (if your lazy click here to go to the post im talking about)

Sleeping has now been achieved!!!

We are going for a science table theme and in the petri dish is our annie organism. Obviously we will upload the swf over the center of this image (minus the petri dish) so it will look nice and flush.

Even though we are using flash for the coding, we dont want it to look like its been done in flash…

our science desk