View the Design Your Jaguar Application
This was an existing application that a colleague, James built back in 2004 and I was tasked with adding an accessories and bodykit layer to it.
It’s a common enough occurrence that, in dev work, you’ll have to pick up the threads of someone else’s application and modify it. It’s just a bit of a nightmare when it’s a large, complicated application.
DYJ (Design Your Jaguar) is exactly that. Originally designed to work in two completely separate browser windows, the majority of communications between the individual modules, the main controller and the presentation layer is all done using a hybrid of EventDispatcher and LocalConnection. In this way,events are dispatched as per normal, but if the localconnection method is being used, then they are broadcast across the localConnection. Pretty clever stuff, but it adds a yet another layer of complexity to the app when things start going wrong. 
Anyway, once you actually get your hands dirty, and start connecting up all those little wires in your head, you tend to start enjoying it… apart from the bugs… 
One fun aspect of this app was that some of the accessories had dependencies - some couldn’t exist without others and some couldn’t co-exist with others. We had to add to the database schema in order to handle these conficting accessories.
e.g. A roof box cannot exist without roof bars and a black mesh grille cannot be put on a car with a bright mesh grille.
As the car is currently rendered in three layers (wheels,body and derivative features) to limit the amount of loading to the parts of the car that are actually changing, when we added the accessories, we realised a couple of things: The number of combinations of accessories possible was immense, so pre-rendering all the files would have been impractical and server storage on would have been costly. The end solution was to write a .NET compositor in C# that combined the accessories from individual PNGs and served back a flattened, masked SWF.
| Bandwidth Selection (18 or 36 frame spin) |
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| Wheel Selection |
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| Body Colour Selection |
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| Interior Selection |
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| Accessories Selection |
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| Bodykit Selection |
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 14:30 and is filed under Client Projects, Flash.
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