Where’s caustik?

Geesh haven’t updated this blog in a while. I’ll do this mini update at least..

Took a new job at opencandy (some really cool stuff in the pipeline there!), still pushing out DJ mixes here and there over at my soundcloud page (caustik’s sound cloud). Create a soundcloud account if you haven’t got one already and make sure to add me =)

Every once in a while I’ve been working a bit on this app that lets you create sprites that can walk around your desktop and interact with your windows and each other. Here’s a little screenshot. It’d be cool to talk with some of the guys who run sprite repository web sites and get a bunch of characters created =)

Here’s the latest build. Just drag and drop an .spr file or any image file on the executable and it should drop on your desktop. You can drag and throw them around, and you can click the sprite/image and press left/right/up/down/space to move it around. It’s fairly basic right now, but the plan is to make them able to walk around by themselves and interact more, etc.

sprites

oh, and double click to exit. if you drag and drop a bunch of them, they all open in one instance and double clicking on one will close them all. have fun =)

9 thoughts on “Where’s caustik?”

Woah, that is really cool! Only problem I noticed is when the sprite bounces off the task bar, it loses all of its horizontal velocity.

LikeLike

Thanks Ian — I can’t seem to make that bug happen on my machine. Anything non-standard about your taskbar or otherwise?

LikeLike

Hm, actually this happens for every window (not sure why I only noticed it when throwing it on the taskbar). Anyway, when the launch angle is somewhere around 45-90 degrees it follows a normal trajectory in the air. When it hits the ground, it bounces again but it barely moves forward. When the launch angle is less than 45 is sort of glides along the ground and looks more natural.

LikeLike

It’s using “Box2D” for physics simulation, must just need to tweak the friction and/or mass values to get it looking a bit smoother.

LikeLike

How can I make my own sprites (combining 2 .gifs so it will show both sides)?

LikeLike

Dave: Sorry, there isn’t currently a way to have a single animation come from multiple gifs (you can have separate animations for different states, though, like in sonic.spr)

LikeLike