Where's the pretty graphics?

I have seen no posts from people who are coding for the 'graphics' prize. Did anyone focus on the look this time?

Give us a taste; I would hate to see ascii output win the prize.

xs0, your graphics output is darn fine. I like the shadows when a peg jumps. I don't know how it can possibly look much better...

Holy mother of pearl!

Yup, that was my original idea (a Flash movie with leet 3D effects to connect with the PHP script), but I just didn't feel like doing it during the final 48 hours

I think XS0 wins the graphics portion! Hm... I think in a year, he'll have about 9 copies of Dreamweaver MX!

Congrats!

and he already won a couple of them ;)

i think matt will have to change the rules that you can't win the same prize twice (what's the point ;)

just one small thing that could make it a little better. i have no idea how flash is made, but if you could put the "light source" for that pegs at a little smaller angle (it looks like it is strait above the board) the 3d effect could be more noticable when pegs jumped (light reflection would "slide" across the surface of the peg)..

anyway, it is great, but i didn't expect anything less from xs0

"i think matt will have to change the rules that you can't win the same prize twice (what's the point"

or, better, he can change prizes ;)

better for who?

your idea is better for xs0.

my idea is better of everyone else

I am looking forward to walk everyones code, but especially xs0's script as I'd like to know how he interacts with flash: by "coding flash" inside of PHP or by providing an extra input file for an external flash object.

Well, I don't think he did this inside of PHP, because it seems to be flash 6 in the end, but who knows ;)

No, it wasn't build from PHP, just a normal .swf. Interfacing, BTW, is easy:

pegs.swf?board=010011...&moves=1,2,4;5,3,1;...

This sets variables "board" and "moves" inside the .swf, so you can parse them or whatnot.

Then how do you get the "thinking..." part if you can't load the SWF until the PHP's done thinking?

Well, I guess the pegs.php opens the placeholder animation, computes the board to solve and then finally opens the displaying swf with the results. At least, that's the way that seems to be the most intuitive and simple.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here... If you mean the "Calculating... please wait" message that is displayed before animation, that's just the Flash file computing all the frames to be displayed; it has nothing to do with actually solving the board. The board and the solution come via URL parameters to .swf...

Ah...

Okay, I usually interface Flash w/ PHP by using loadvariables() within Flash.