Let's nuke the planet and fix some problems

Published

Alex Nino

My bio... hmmm... what to say... I arrived on this crazy world clearly by mistake on March 81, in a far, far forgotten small town with more problems than a whole nation, close to the pacific ocean in the Colombian territory, it is called Cali. Early I began playing with some gadgets like "telebolito", "intellivision", "Atari", and it was here when I started feeling interested in games and how they are being done but before start programming I've learned to play piano a guitar (I love music, can't live without it). Then I learned some programming languages such pascal with Borland Delphi, and C++ but I have to confess that it was Macromedia Flash who changed my life once we met each other in 98. I'm working with it since it didn't have support of mp3 audio format files, yes the version 3. And then together (Flash and I) started travelling around south america looking for a better job opportunity and professional development than my hometown could offer us at that moment. Special thanks to: Brazil, Costa Rica and Colombia for being a great school. At this moment I'm happily living and paying taxes in London, UK but like a salmon fish one day I will be back to procreate :)

It has been a while since I've published my last post. To be honest I just been unbelievable busy and I didn't have much spare time for making new experiments; those I do for fun with no pressure, no rush.

Couple of weeks ago, by chance I read some articles (from different sources) about global warming, overpopulation, worldwide resources, world's education and that entire thing you might have heard already about humans destroying the planet slowly. I know that you may be feeling a bit tired about this subject but I was actually thinking what if you have a real chance of making instant-huge changes on earth, what would you do?

So, in one afternoon during my coffee break, I wrote down an email with some specific key questions and I sent it to some friends around the world (thanks everybody for the well detailed answers), these answers gave me a good idea about what kind of resources-tools we could use for making quick-drastic changes on Earth so I built up a Flash interface with the idea. I have published the whole thing on facebook but it is also available here (both use same database)

http://www.yoambulante.com/en/labs/FixPlanetEarth/

The technical part

Well, it is all about Flash and using some resources only available on Flash player 10 like its drawing API; copyPixels, drawTriangles, blending modes, etc. It is a bit interesting, this app didn't take me long, I did the whole thing from scratch in just few days. It took me exactly 9 days working at nights, it definitely looks more complicated of what it actually is. I think it could be a good practice for the people who are interested to know how it was made. This is a very simple program, it is pure actionscript without using extra libraries or extra resources (I am not using any 3D Engine), it is just actionscript with some good magic bits of bitmap data manipulation (the performance of the app when rollover the countries on a 3d projections was a good challenge).

I am currently thinking in writing an article explaining it step by step divided by days. You might wonder where I got all the data from, textures, countries data, filters, etc, and the answer is simple; Wikipedia. Did you know that Wikipedia has an API which you can use from Flash and extract any kind of data you want?

I have extracted automatically all data I needed in my app from Wikipedia, including the countries coordinates, capital, globe coordinates in degrees (latitude and longitude), mouse rollover sectors, highlights; i.e. this piece of code extracts from Wikipedia the string where the capital name of a country localized:

var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onCountryData);
var country:String = "France";
loader.load(new URLRequest("http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=" + country + "&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvlimit=1"));

function onCountryData(e:Event):void {
var data:String = loader.data;
var found:int = data.indexOf("|capital");
if (found > 0){
//shows the string where the capital is
trace(data.substring(found+9,data.indexOf("\n",found)));
} else {
trace("capital not found :(");
}
}

Unfortunately, I ran out of time, this is all what I can say so far, I will write down an article explaining it bit by bit (I soon as I have the chance) it was a very interesting practice for me.

Cheers guys!

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12 Responses to "Let's nuke the planet and fix some problems"

Brandon Bugger

said this on 28 Jun 2011 5:08:20 PM CDT

This is a cool interactive animation. I love it. It is quit interesting to see what people choose to do as well. This could be some great statistics the more this gets used.

(Reply to this comment)

Potemkyn

said this on 29 Mar 2011 11:49:29 AM CDT

Nice animations and graphics. Will you be able to make a tutorial for making this?

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Starr

said this on 23 Apr 2011 5:02:17 PM CDT

That's not just the best ansewr. It's the bestest answer!

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andy carol

said this on 04 May 2011 4:50:25 AM CDT

Thank you really for helping make the post give light to many problems we have had before now.

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said this on 11 Jul 2011 10:47:58 PM CDT

global warming, overpopulation, worldwide resources, world's education ？？An eternal topic

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said this on 29 Jul 2011 10:40:15 AM CDT

Well, that is definitely one approach. I would not necessarily go this far. I do think we still have some opportunities of turning things around. You would be surprised at how quickly things can be fixed if we all banned together.

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