User talk:Melchman

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Hi Melchman! Welcome to the OLPC wiki. I was about to move the Melchman page to User:Melchman but I see that you've already done that. Glad to see you joining up with us. Have you explored Gnash verses Flash yet? Drop me a line if you need a hand with anything. Seth 18:30, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

2008/09/27

I've just seen the XO-1 unit from Carlos Nazareno and I think it looks impressive. I am more interested in creating interactivities and games that kids will enjoy and learn from. I hope to acquire a dev unit soon :)

2008/10/17

Received the XO-1 unit "Michelangelo" from Jerome Gotangco. I asked Jerome to install Gnash instead of the Flash Player because I wanted to somehow emulate the user's experience on the production units. Tested initial version of Silent Destiny XO from http://www.melchman.com/sd. The colors are impressively vibrant. However, there are no sounds, VERY slow animation, and the Flash 8 blur effects were removed.

For the graphics and animation, I'm going to set the frame rate to 12 fps, then convert the vector images to bitmaps instead. Welcome back to Flash Lite world, Melch.

The sounds issue seems challenging to me since I think it plays a vital role in stimulating a child's interest in a game. I remember when I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros. Mario's simple "jump" sound adds a certain feel to the game-- it somehow makes you react (and rings in your head after playing the game, hehe). Anyway, we'll see how I'll work around that issue.

2009/01/23

I'm back! It's been a long time since my last update. I've decided to push through with producing an educational game on the XO laptop, keeping in mind that I need to have all of the graphics optimized, and limit the gameplay to "Point and Click".

Truth to tell, I felt frustrated for the past couple of months trying to test my ideas on the XO-1. The unit is SLOW when running animations, so I am now forced to resort to my FlashLite 1.1 guerrilla tactics once again. The only remaining problem is the audio. As I've said in my earlier post, audible cues help stimulate a child's imagination, and apparently I don't have the luxury of using it here. Anyway, I will just have to turn-on the old creativity switch and find a way to go around this problem.

If you have access to the XO-1's browser, you can check out my tests here:

http://melchman.com/sd/games/xo/

http://melchman.com/sd/games/xo/sdxo_test.html