Phone Story: A Web Standard version in Processing.js

Posted by Mondonerd

I started the development of a Processing.js porting (from ActionScript) of PhoneStory that is “an educational game about the dark side of your favorite smart phone. Follow your phone’s journey around the world and fight the market forces in a spiral of planned obsolescence”. Molleindustria designed a iPhone version that was banned by the Apple Store so they developed an Android version. Now I’m developing, with the support of Molleindustria, a version suitable for HTML 5 and Javascript enabled browser.

It’s my first experiment with Processing.JS and I’m using the Processing IDE in its 2.0alpha version. I’m pretty surprised of the results and development is flowing smoothly!

Here you can see a proof of concept of Phone Story Web Standard Libre Edition and if you want to see the technologies behind this experiment you can visit Phone Story development documentation and sources.

Everything is GPLed and the resources are Creative Commons BY-NC-SA!

Happy hacking!

Installing Ubuntu 10.04 for Processing and Java Development using Eclipse

Posted by Mondonerd

How to have a fully multimedia capable and webcam working PC

Our suggestion to have all codecs and multimedia features needed by digital artists, game developers and web content creator in a GNU/Linux environment:

Download and Install Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
Update your installation using the Ubuntu Update Manager
Add Medibuntu repository in order to have latest version of multimedia codecs
Install ffmpeg and some proprietary codecs with this Terminal command:
```
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52
```

How to install Java, Eclipse and Processing on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

We will install Java Development Kit using the Ubuntu package system and the rest of tools inside the /opt/ folder in order to have them system wide available. You may put everything in your HOME folder but in this way only your user will be able to access these tools.

If you change the /opt permission to 777 you’ll have it done but it’s the “dirty way”. In order to grant permissions to just a group you have to understand the *nix File System Permission mechanism…

We will install the OpenJDK using the Terminal:
```
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
```
Now we download from the Official Processing.org website the latest version for Linux
Uncompress Processing .tar.gz file into your /opt/
Set execution permission on the processing binary file:
```
chmod 755 /opt/processing/processing
```
Now download your favorite version of Eclipse: Processing team suggest to use the Java version
Uncompress Eclipse into your /opt/
Don’t forget to add a Applications menu entry manually (right click on the Applications menu and “Edit Menus”…) or learn something about xdg-desktop-menu and hack your own .desktop file for future installations!

Advanced Topics and Suggested readings

HOWTO: Easily enable MP3, MPEG4, AAC, and other restricted encoding in FFmpeg
How to setup the webcam with Processing
Fully understand and play with some cool ffmpeg “pipes” just modifying, for example, this interesting Capture2File GSVideo Library sketch (if you install the Processing gsvideo library correctly you can find inside the Processing IDE itself!!!)
How to install Processing libraries
How to develop Processing libraries using Eclipse IDE
Overview of File System Hierarchy Standard (FHS)

Problems with my webcam using Processing with Windows

Posted by flo

“No Capture could be found or the VDIG is not installed correctly”

You have to install quicktime and a compatible video digitizer. Here are the links to download the last version of quicktime, and the WinVDIG 1.0.1 (recommended). Restart your computer after installation process and the webcam should work.