Comments on: How are flash sites like Virtual Bartender and Subservient Chicken implemented?

Question: How are flash sites like Virtual Bartender and Subservient Chicken implemented?

tommasz — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 12:33:30 -0800

I am curious, blue. Or rather, I'm curious about something on the Blue, Virtual Bartender. How are toys like that and Subservient Chicken implemented?

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 12:46:45 -0800

there's a bunch of pre-recorded actions, each associated with a particular set of words. each shot starts and ends with the woman in the same place and there are several for "waiting" that are played at random. when an expression is typed into the command area, it is checked to see if it contains a word associated with a particular clip. if so, the clip is shown.
i guess.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 12:53:26 -0800

I'm impressed with the lack of obvious seams between the clips. I'm guessing all of the possible video segments are loaded at once, which would also account for the fairly low quality. Is the text recognition engine resident on the client or on the server?

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 12:56:28 -0800

i think it's all on the client, but the text is encoded (compressed i suppose) - running "strings" on the swf doesn't give you the words. it may load the "waiting" scenes first to start more quickly. the poor quality makes the joins less noticeable too.

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 13:29:44 -0800

http://www.virtualbartender.beer.com/TammyClips.xml - from the blue thread

By: tommasz

tommasz — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 13:47:18 -0800

Thanks! Of course, that takes all the fun out of the experiments, but that's science.

By: majcher

majcher — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:58:28 -0800

The flash movie itself is just a simple little shell of a subservience engine. On startup, it just loads the dictionary of associations from an XML file, and probably the three or four little waiting .fmv clips. When you type in a phrase, the client does a dead simple pattern match on it, and grabs and plays the corresponding video clip from the server.

The flash part is really easy. The hard part is picking entertaining stuff to do, and filming the chick[en].