Feeling Lucky?

Yesterday, I saw several posts on good ol’ Twitter pointing out this Frederick McSwain portrait of Tobias Wong created in dice. While not meaning to detract from the personal sentiments and hard work of this intriguing piece of art, I just thought that using dice would be an interesting way to create some ascii images.

So, I found this free dice font and sat down and created the simple class below.

/** * Copyright (c) 2011 Devon O. Wolfgang * * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy * of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal * in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights * to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell * copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is * furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: * * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in * all copies or substantial portions of the Software. * * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR * IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE * AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER * LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, * OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN * THE SOFTWARE. */ package com.onebyonedesign.extras { import flash.display.BitmapData; import flash.geom.Matrix; import flash.text.TextFormat; /** * Convert image to a string of dice * @author Devon O. */ public class AsciiDice { // very nice dice font found here: http://www.ambor.com/public/dice/dice.html [Embed(source = "assets/fonts/dice.ttf", fontFamily = "dice", mimeType = "application/x-font", unicodeRange="U+0031-U+0036", embedAsCFF = "false")] private static const DICE_FONT:Class; private static const FONT_SIZE:int = 12; private static const DIVSOR:Number = 0xFF / 6; public static const DICE_FORMAT:TextFormat = new TextFormat(new DICE_FONT().fontName, FONT_SIZE, 0x000000); /** * @private */ public function AsciiDice(){ // use static renderImage() method and TEXT_FORMAT } /** * Call this static method to get back an ascii String * @param image BitmapData of image to convert to Dice Ascii * @param maxWidth Largest width of converted image * @param maxHeight Largest height of converted image * @return String of ascii text */ public static function renderImage(image:BitmapData, maxWidth:int = 800, maxHeight:int = 800):String { // make a copy of the image var newImage:BitmapData; var scale:Matrix; // first resize image to fit given bounds if (image.width > maxWidth || image.height > maxHeight) { scale = new Matrix(); var ratio:Number; // if portrait if (image.height > image.width) { ratio = maxHeight / image.height; scale.scale(ratio, ratio); newImage = new BitmapData(image.width * ratio, maxHeight, false, 0x000000); newImage.draw(image, scale); // if landscape } else { ratio = maxWidth / image.width; scale.scale(ratio, ratio); newImage = new BitmapData(maxWidth, image.height * ratio, false, 0x000000); newImage.draw(image, scale); } } if (!newImage) newImage = image.clone(); // now scale by fontsize var imgWidth:int = newImage.width / FONT_SIZE; var imgHeight:int = newImage.height / FONT_SIZE; scale = new Matrix(); scale.scale(1 / FONT_SIZE, 1 / FONT_SIZE); var imgData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(imgWidth, imgHeight, false, 0x000000); imgData.draw(newImage, scale); var pixels:Vector. = imgData.getVector(imgData.rect); newImage.dispose(); // create string var i:int = 0; var j:int = 0; var len:int = pixels.length; var imgString:String = ""; while (i < len) { for (j = 0; j < imgWidth; j++) { var avg:uint = getPixelAverage(pixels[i]); var v:Number = (avg / DIVSOR); v = v == 0 ? 1 : v; v = 7 - (v == int(v) ? v : int(v + 1)); imgString += String(v); i++; } imgString += "\n"; } imgData.dispose(); return imgString; } private static function getPixelAverage(pix:uint):uint { var r:uint = pix >> 16 & 0xFF; var g:uint = pix >> 8 & 0xFF; var b:uint = pix & 0xFF; return (r + g + b) / 3; } } }

To use it (which you’re free to do), you’ll need the font mentioned above in a directory named ‘fonts’ within a directory named ‘assets’ in the same directory as the AsciiDice.as class file (com.onebyonedesign.extras). Create a TextField instance and set its defaultTextFormat property to AsciiDice.DICE_FORMAT. Also be sure to let it autosize and set its embedFonts and multiline properties to true.

Finally, just use the static renderImage() method to set the text property of your textfield (passing it the bitmapdata of the image you’d like to render as dice and a maximum width and height if you’d like).

Here’s a quick example (incidentally, if you choose to upload an image, I set the maximum filesize to 500k and I didn’t bother with error messages. So if you try to upload something and nothing happens, try using an image with a smaller filesize).

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”10.0.0″ movie=”http://blog.onebyonedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/dicecii.swf” width=”800″ height=”800″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

[/kml_flashembed]

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