Since registration is required to take a look at it, I have instead some screen capture. This is not quite the final version but enough to show how it works. The soundtrack is by my good friend Jay White.

MCFC Seat Selector from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

Because we wanted the stadium to look like the actual real world layout, the first challenge was to obtain the seating layout information. Then we had to get it into a format that flash could use, i.e. xml and also ensure that it matched the ticketing data as provided by the 3rd-party ticket-vendor. It was an involved process, some of which I captured along the way:

1. Here is a Omnigraffle representation of the existing xml feed from the online ticket vendor. The seat locations are conformed to a left aligned grid which bears little resemblance to the real world layout.

2. After pestering the architects, we managed to get our hands on Autocad files of the stadium, which included fairly accurate seating layouts. We were lucky that the stadium was not very old, and such files actually existed. We didn’t have Autocad software, but were able to open the files with Illustrator. Plenty of time to make a cup of tea while these suckers were opening.

3. It was fairly easy to get rid of much of the unwanted information, by deleting unwanted layers. We still had no idea how we were going to make xml from this. We found out that the individual seats were not stored as individual objects with position & rotation, but as broken-apart line information. There was also a lot of junk information overlaid on the seats themselves. Although this could be removed manually for each seat, I wasn’t very excited by the prospect of cleaning more than 45 thousand seats.

4. To clean up the seats, I wrote some routines in ExtendScript. ExtendScript is what Adobe call their scripting language for their CS suite. It’s essentially JavaScript which in this case I used on Illustrator. For the most part, learning it just involves finding out how objects are represented in the Illustrator DOM. After some trial and error I was able to drill down to the seat objects themselves, where simple tests on the length of the lines could identified outlines from the other unwanted data. I added a loop to iterate over all objects in the selection and hey presto, could delete the unwanted data for thousands of seats in one hit. Here is the same layout as above seats after running the script:

5. The next step I can’t speak much about, as it was done by a colleague Martin. I saved the cleaned seats as svg files, which he then analyzed with some Perl scripts. He determined the position and orientation of the seats is determined with fairly straightforward trigonometry and saved out each block as an xml file, which was loaded into Flash and the basis for positioning seat objects. Big thanks to Michael Baczynski for an article on object pooling which significantly improved the performance of adding and removing large numbers of seats. The last shot is of the entire stadium with all seats cleaned. The designers that worked on this project (Will Cookson, Vasco Alves) have added the pitch and surrounds to the finished piece.

Finally a big thanks to the developers of the Lowra IOC framework which I used on this project.

Like many others who have WordPress running on MediaTemple I got stung by the JohnnyA malware exploit.  Bastards! I had to take the blog down until I could fix it.

I have been busy behind the scenes applying the Nicky and Cookie’s lovely custom theme to a newer installation of WordPress. If there’s been a silver lining to all of this, it’s been that I’ve learned quite a lot about CSS and WordPress.

Where’s the content?

I’m in the process of cleaning and migrating the old data. So should be fully restored soon.

Fiji 2010 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

You are also spared the 3 hours of time-share presentation that we foolishly agreed to sit through in return for three cheap tickets to the Chris Angel ‘Believe’ show. Both were on a par entertainment-wise.

Las Vegas 2010 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

New York 2010 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

The camper was great. We did about 7000 miles over 6 months and visited 8 countries. We sold it soon after getting back to the UK, for not a lot less than we bought it for.

So now it’s back to Sydney, via NY, Las Vegas and Fiji, and NZ. Yes we are having another holiday. I think it’s about time we got a rest after all that holidaying

We had a great time. Thanks for watching.

Motorhome holiday 2009/10 – Episode 17 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

Motorhome holiday 2009/10 – Episode 16 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

This episode covers our trip to Sicily which was one of the highlights of our trip.

Motorhome holiday 2009/10 – Episode 15 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

Motorhome holiday 2009/10 – Episode 14 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.

Motorhome holiday 2009/10 – Episode 13 from Derek McKenna on Vimeo.