Google’s Text To Speech Engine in Flash

by Devon O.· May 27, 2010· in Actionscript· 21 comments tags: google, text-to-speech
I’m not sure how I managed to miss this, but I just happened to run across a ‘new’ (well, newish), albeit still unofficial, offering of Google today: text-to-speech. You can see what few details there are on this Techcrunch post. Basically, it just boils down to this though – you send your phrase to be spoken in a GET request like so ‘http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hello%20world’, and in return Google gives you an .mp3 formatted sound file of your phrase being spoken in some non-threatening female robot voice. Of course loading .mp3 files into Flash is a piece of cake, so integration with the Flash platform is nothing at all. One can even try their hands by running the trial for integration on a mock api. The one thing that may get you is that Flash doesn’t like to load .mp3’s across domains. A very basic serverside proxy script will get you around that easily enough though. Here’s a quick example. This will take a String phrase and generate the URL to the Google translator for you: [crayon-61e8f1aa0033e748935718/] And here’s an example of a bare minimum proxy in php: [crayon-61e8f1aa0034c425735410/] And put it together (using the Bit-101 MinimalComps): [crayon-61e8f1aa00350566523820/] And that will give […]
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Quick Sound Effects Generator

by Devon O.· May 12, 2010· in Flash, Life· 5 comments tags: sound effects
Need some beeps, boops, or bops, to go with your UI or games? Here’s a quickie for you. Got the idea from my Making Waves post. Just mess around with the sliders (or choose a preset), press ‘play’ to preview the sound, and ‘save’ to save the sound locally as a .wav file. There’s a bit of a strange bug though. The saved files play slower than previewed sounds. But that’s what you get in a lunch hour. If I sort that problem out (and if anyone has any ideas on what would cause that, post a comment), I may elaborate on this a bit more and create a desktop version in AIR. We’ll see.
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Quick QuickBox2D Tip II – Collision Detection

by Devon O.· May 06, 2010· in Actionscript· 5 comments tags: 2d physics, box2d, quickbox2d
Once again, I found myself playing around with the excellent QuickBox2D library the other day and whipped up something I needed but thought might help others as well. Actually this tip ain’t all that quick, but it’s not a massive undertaking and could come in quite handy. In any case, we’ll take a look at a way of detecting collisions with QuickBox2D. Now, of course as far as animations go, QB2D (or Box2D, actually) handles all the collisions for you behind the scenes so you don’t really need to think about it. But what if you wanted to create a pool game where the balls click when knocking against each other, or you wanted to remove a game object when it collides with something bad, or – well there are any number reasons you might want to check for collisions when working with a 2D physics engine. I’m going to assume that if you’re using QuickBox2D, you already have Box2D in your classpath. Now, in Box2D the item responsible for handling custom collision detection is the Box2D.Dynamics.b2ContactListener class which looks like this: [crayon-61e8f1aa06f05783741991/] We’ll be extending that class, so you won’t really need to worry anything about it (you don’t […]
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None of This Runs Eternal

by Devon O.· May 02, 2010· in Liberty, Life· 0 comments tags: current 93, nurse with wound
It’s official. My wife just confirmed the hotel reservation where we’ll be staying the night of the Current 93 show in London on May 28. For those unfamiliar with Current 93, they are a band that rose from the depths of the early 80’s British industrial scene with the likes of such greats as Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, Coil, Nurse With Wound and others. The ‘band’ officially only consists of one permanent member; singer and song writer, David Tibet (born David Michael Bunting. The name Tibet was given to him by Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV front wo/man Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and has seem to have stuck ever since). C93’s music style has ranged from full on industrial assault to almost classical style (with strings, piano, etc), to folk, to hard rock, to (most often) a beautiful mixture between any of the above. My introduction to Current 93 came around 1985 or 86 with the fantastic album Dog’s Blood Rising. I admit that what attracted me most at that time was that Tibet’s references to Christianity seemed like straight up tongue-in-cheek irony (I mean, just listen to this quick sample of “From Broken Cross, Locusts” to see what I’m talking […]
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Playing Around with the New UndoManager

by Devon O.· May 01, 2010· in Actionscript, Flash· 11 comments tags: command pattern, undomanager
Included in the Flex 4.0 SDK and the, just released, Flash Professional CS5 lies a new hidden little gem of a class: flashx.undo.UndoManager (although the Flex 4.0 SDK’s been out for awhile, I have to admit I didn’t even notice this until I installed Flash CS5 and started poking around the documentation looking for new stuff to play with). Now, actually, the UndoManager is a part of the brand new shiny TextLayout framework, but, because it follows a basic Command design pattern, it’s very easy to adopt it to other aspects of your applications and allow functionality that users expect/demand. But since an example is worth a thousand words, check out the below to get an idea of what I’m talking about. First, let’s start off by creating just a real simple drawing application. [crayon-61e8f1aa0717b277118185/] Now, if you compile that, you’ll see you can mouse down (with your ancient and anachronistic mouse that apparently no Mac users require anymore – don’t even get me started on Steve Jobs’ blatantly lying drivel) on the black area and draw white lines around (told you it was real simple). But what if you wanted to get rid of the last line you drew? […]
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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