The 25-Line ActionScript Contest

Sorry I dilly dallied on this one for so long. The fact that there were only 11 entries made me wonder if I should even post them for a vote. And I decided to stop running the contest myself, so I just kind of mentally put the whole thing on hold. But the people who entered did put in the effort to do so. So I will deliver on my end. They are now up and ready for your votes.

http://www.25lines.com/?page_id=231

As I mentioned there, there are some questionable entries. Several use various tricks to string together a lot of stuff that should probably be separate lines. But because this is the last contest and the low amount of entries, you are the judges. Look at the code and vote for the best entry that you feel follows the rules and spirit of the contest.

By the way, several people have contacted me about carrying the 25 lines torch. I haven’t gotten back to anyone. Like I said, I put the whole thing in a back compartment in my brain for the last month. I will be answering those of you who expressed interest, and anyone else who might be interested, let me know. The lucky person will get the domain, any files from the site, and full rights to do whatever they want with it all. All for the low price of $0.00.

So… you’re probably wondering what happened to the February contest. Well, what happened was that we had about 12 entries total. I was sitting there thinking what to do about it and then got sick and then had to go to Amsterdam and prepare for a presentation and now am preparing for going to San Jose in 2 days.

What I will probably do is just put the 12 entries up for a public vote.

After that, I don’t think I will continue the contest personally. I think it could be really great, but it requires more attention than I have to give. Needs promotion, talking it up, creation of monthly variations, maybe a better voting system, etc. I just don’t have the time to devote to it right now.

So, if anyone wants to take the ball and run with it, and really feels they can carry forward and make something out of it, I will give you the domain and whatever else you want of the site. Just contact me at kp at bit-101 dot com.

All entries are now up for downloading at http://www.25lines.com/finalists/0901/25lines_0109.zip.

I know I said there was supposed to be a line in there to opt in / out of sharing, but it wasn’t there in the template last month. It is now. As far as I can tell, only one person opted out last month.

The February contest is on!

I’ve gone back and forth on doing a themed contest. A strong concept was a sound-visualization theme, where you could stream in an audio file / song and do something to visualize it. But I don’t want to receive hundreds of mp3s along with the entries, and then illegally distribute these. So maybe make one song available? But which song? Or make the file name a variable so you can choose your own? File chooser? Let’s discuss it this month.

Also, there is just a strong contingent of commenters that want to keep things as they are. 25 lines nothing external. So we’ll go with that again until we sort it out. The “Current Contest” link at the top of the page gives the dates for Feb.

Baroque, (entry 30) by Thomas Kräftner!

Thomas gets an Adobe CS4 Suite. Yay!

Check out all the entries here:

http://www.25lines.com/?page_id=186

Personally, one of my favorites. Here’s some insight to it by the author:

http://pixelero.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/flight-25/

So I want to mix it up a bit for February. Some variation. Here’s some ideas:

- Sound visualization. You get to stream in a single mp3 file and have 25 lines to do something with it.
- API. We specify some type of open API - flickr, twitter, whatever, and you have 25 lines to do something with it.
- Video. You can stream a video and do whatever.
- Image. You can load an image / some images and do whatever.
- PixelBender. Not sure how this would work. 25 lines of pixel bender plus 25 lines of ActionScript?
- 3rd Party Library. PaperVision, Away3D, Box2D, some tween engine, etc. We choose a library and you can code to it.
- Library. We choose some object that can be in your library. You put it in there and code it up.

Other ideas?

http://www.25lines.com/?page_id=186

Page was up earlier this morning, but a glitch in the poll scheduling made it impossible to vote. Should be all set now. We’re going with open voting again because I just didn’t figure out a better way to do it yet. Now that we have a forum, I might look into using the forum’s polls to do voting. We’ll see about that next month.

You wrote the code, you entered it, maybe you made the finalists. You most likely shared your code with the community. Would you like to talk more about how you came up with the idea, how you executed it, how you managed to get it into 25 lines? Send me your article, tutorial or whatever, and I’ll be happy to post it here.

It has been suggested we need better communication. So here is a forum. Should be a way to discuss entries, techniques, ask questions, etc. and allow more free communication. Hope you find it useful.

http://www.25lines.com/forum/