Ozan Yıldız's Dev Blog

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Tweevio - Last YouTube videos shared on Twitter

Some of you may know that I was working on a project called Tweevio. Tweevio is a website that shows last YouTube videos that are shared on Twitter. My goal was both develop my web programming skills and provide a website which people can discover new videos.

I couldn't work on this project for a long time. But I had completed the Javascript and jQuery part but it was aesthetically poor. I was free lately and I said to myself "It's time to go back and finish what you started". After this motivational moment, I decided to learn HTML and CSS. I was going to need those to make the web page beautiful. Before, my relationship with HTML and CSS was literally like this. I couldn't do I wanted to do. For that reason, I was getting bored quickly and unfortunately this was resulted in giving up. But this time I was determined. And here is the result:

Tweevio

Tweevio*

* Dropbox mirror. It may not work on every browser.

It's not a final version. It's very minimalist now and I want to add some colors to it. And there is a huge empty space on left-side. I don't know how to use the page efficiently for a website like this. Sometimes, page is not acting right because of the Japanese and Chinese tweets, I guess they occupy more space. Other than those, I think it is not a bad beginning for the web programming.

I had made a list of what I am supposed to do for this project. And it turns out that it was a very bad idea. Planning on the things that you don't know really good is not working as expected. It gives general idea but it can be misguiding at the same time. For example, I didn't know that every link in Twitter is converted to a short url which is start with t.co and for that reason I needed another plug-in to lengthen that t.co url.

While I was making this, these stackoverflow questions helped me a lot while I was working on this project.

PS: David Bowie rocks!
UPDATE (13.06.2013) Twitter upgraded its API to the new version. That's why currently Tweevio is not working.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

AI in Computer Games Project

Hey everybody, this is the video of the AI project that I wrote about on previous post. The video says a little bit about what we've done. I hope you like it.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

I survived!

In my last post, I mentioned how busy I am and how busy I will be. Today, I've completed all of the things that I mentioned in that post. And I feel very relaxed. I'm planning to write about this period and also I want to share my experiences about the projects I've made. But first, let me enjoy being free.

By the way, tomorrow will be the last day of my entire university life. I still can't figure out is it a good or bad thing.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Long Time No See - Part II

Generally this time of the semesters, I cannot update my blog. There are always documents to write and projects to finish. In this semester, I am very busy with senior project. I also have to make a project for AI in Computer Games class. I did a little bit progress on that but need to do more. There are five weeks to the end of the semester and I have to finish all of the assignments/projects/documentations.

And this means that there are few weeks for my graduation. This is kind of stressful because in the meantime, I need to find a job. I even got rejected from one of the companies that I applied. I really thought that I would be hired but after the phone conversation I feel that I'll be rejected. But anyway this is not the first, won't be the last. That was my first phone interview and I was so excited. Actually, this was a nice experience.

As I said there are tons of things to do and not many weeks. I believe that I'll pull it off. By the way the idea of graduation is so EXCITED, WOOHOO!!!

Sorry, in this post there won't be any images.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Screenshot Saturday - Fresh as Fish

GangFight is a side-scrolling shooter game that I started to make a few days ago. It will be like old school arcade games. Also, I'm planing to add melee combat.

I will report weekly the development process and share images, videos, experiences. All these will be under the title of Screenshot Saturday. This week I will be presenting the images for characters and backgrounds. Of course, they're placeholder and as you can guess I draw them all by myself. It is better to use these kind of place holder images rather then one-color squares or circles. It's all about motivation I think.

Let's see the first drawings for the game.

The main character. The coolest bad-ass gang member ever. And he never gives up smoking even in a fight.

A member of Gang-H. Obviously, this gang have some fashion problems. And they're one of our enemies.

The only road that you can see Ceasers Palace, El Capitan and Palms Casino side by side. This is also first scene of the game.

I'm making this game by using Java and Slick. And on the programming side, so far I made the followings:

Movement of player
Shooting towards the direction between player and mouse.
Basic enemy spawner
Main menu

So many things about the game is uncertain. There are a lot of things that I haven't started to think about. In this time, I want to be spontaneous and unorganized. For that reason, the game may be changed entirely in future.

[UPDATE] Now code for this project is on my Github. Fork me!

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Visualization of A* Algorithm - Final Version

Actually, I finished this project nearly a month ago but since I'm so lazy lately, I can write a post and put the program here at this moment. You can find more information about this project here my previous blog post.

Since then, all of the improvements were about GUI, adding load maze property and fixing bugs. As a GUI, I added radio button set which is used to replace starting and destination nodes and put obstacles.

After making some tests on the map, I encountered a problem. Since the algorithm can spread on every direction, the scenarios like in the image can create unwanted situations. Technically speaking, this is caused by diagonal search of neighbor nodes.

To avoid that, I added a radio button which enables and disables diagonal movement. Here is the new result of the same scenario. In this case, neighbor search is done only horizontal and vertical directions.

Other than these, I wanted to add an extra property which is loading maze to the map. With it, users can choose predefined mazes according to their difficulties. These are easy maze, medium maze, hard maze and dead-end maze. To do this, I used the idea of tile maps. I created txt files which includes numbers which are 0, 1, 2 and 3. Each of the numbers has its own node type. 0's are the normal nodes, 1 is the starting node, 2 is the destination node and 3's are the obstacle nodes.

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 2 0

0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0

This is an example of a txt file that includes nodes' information.

On the Java side, I'm going through all numbers in the file with two for loops and prepare the new state of the nodes according to the number that is read from the file.

In the class that I made this project for, as a difference, our professor wanted us to write software design document before starting project. Also at the end of the project, we wrote unit tests and user manual. I have to admit that I really didn't like writing these documents. Also, writing tests for the code that I wrote didn't sound meaningful to me. Maybe the idea for writing tests for others' code would be more meaningful. But, in a very limited time that couldn't be possible.

And of course images of the program:

You can download the executable jar here. Loading maze is not working in this version. Because it is using another folder which has maze files.

Before finishing the post I would like to share the links that gave me idea about how I should set up the GUI and choose colors.
http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/people/j.macgill/xaStar/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNRfSQDF7TA