Freelance job available.

[Icehawg]

Hello any and all. I am the CTO of an online wrestling game site that has been around for 5 years now(www.wrassle.net) however all my programming skills are of the text based kind. I have absolutely no artistic skills and have never used Flash for more than 10 minutes without confusion sinking in.

We are in the transition of creating engine version 5 which is a massive overhaul of the current engine. For the last 5 years we have always had generic, or user-created and uploaded, avatars that our users have used to identify themselves on the site. With the new engine, I would like to move away from that method and allow out users to create their own avatars "on the fly".

I have held many discussions with the other programmers and they all seem to agree that Flash is the best way to accomplish this task. Unfortunately our resident flash guru has taken some needed time off when he introduced his motorcycle to a brick wall at 60km/hs.

So....to that end I would am requesting proposals from talented ActionScript developers to create the needed avatar-generator.

Avatar Generator Requirements
Starting from a number of generic "head and shoulders" templates(male, female, skinny, etc....) - users would be able to add/remove objects(ie.. hair, eyes, nose, mouth, etc...). Users should also be able to change the colours of each "object" independently. Freehand drawing, text, and background coloring should also be available to users.

Users would then "create" their avatar(150x150pixels image -> .jpg or .gif or .png or .whichever-is-best images) and it would be saved on our server under the specific images folder. Users should be able to call up their stored image and be able to re-edit that image again - but I understand that aspect is the most complex so I can agree to "must start from scratch" everytime.

BackEnd Requirements
Well documented code
Portable (ie..using standard folders to house templates so my artists can add/remove templates as necessary without recompiling code or I can change the folder structure without wondering if the app will still work)
Minimized Size for low end users

Other
We would like to be able to pass in at least two, but more if possible, variables to the script. 1 - username to store the file with and 2 - userlevel to dictate which templates are shown. Our paying customers would have more "templates" available to them then the free customers.

Proposals (Serious Inquiries Only)
If you feel that you can create the needed application - please send an email to [email protected] with

start date estimate
end date estimate
cost estimate
requirements
questions about specifics
foreseeable problems/other solutions


Thanks very much for your time.

[Cyanide]

That's a pretty tall order there. I don't think I've ever seen anything Flash based that can save or export a .jpg, .png, or .gif. I know there's no way to export an image dynamicly with FlashMX. Maybe you can pass an array of points and some other info to PHP and it can create the graphic. I don't know about that though, I'm not too familiar with PHP.

The best way I can think of to deliver something close to what you're looking for in Flash would be to store an array of points and some other formating variables in a database using PHP and mySQL. Then you could recall that data when the user wants to edit their avatar. Since you wouldn't be having a .jpg to work with you would have to make something to display the Flash avatars (just strip the editor of its editing capabilities and there you have it). Another problem I see is the freehand drawing. That could cause some problems. I think a more efficient way to provide functionality similar to that would be to have some basic shape making tools like elipse, rectangle, arc, and line. Then from those 4 tools you could create complex shapes. That would make it easier to create nice looking avatars (drawing with a normal mouse is hard) and it would also be easier to convert into data that can be stored in a database and redrawn later when the avatar is recalled either for display or to be edited.

Either way, that certainly is a big probject. You'll have to develope the drawing tools, a PHP back-end, and a parser to create and interperate those arrays of points and other formating information that make up vector graphics.

If you really want to go the .jpg route you should look into Java. It's probably more likely to be able to handle that in a web-based setting than Flash.

I'd love to work on a project like this but I'm a university student with 19 credits this semester so I don't think I'd have the time. :( Anyway, good luck with it. Sounds very interesting, I'd like to see it when it's done.