There weren’t many web designers at that time and you’d repeatedly stumble upon websites praising the awards they got. Gold Award in Something or some Special Platinum Award of Whatever. Large rectangular JPEGs with golden typo, praising the winner’s achievement. Of course none of those had any relevance at all, especially not at that time – it was just some people like you and me, giving out awards as a means to generate traffic for themselves.

Things aren’t necessarily like that anymore. There’s a lot of stuff to gather and all of it carries some worth and prestige, but the importance of an award is obviously based on the amount of people knowing about it and in the internet that’s easy to measure: by the amount of visitors they have and consequently the amount of traffic they generate.

Now that I’ve more or less collected all of the smaller awards, excluding TheFWA (my heart is bleeding) and the CSS awards, here’s a short overview. The means was Google Analytics, measuring the first 10 days after the award was received to get the peak as well as following traffic.

1. DesignCharts: 82%
2. Design Licks: 8%
3. Dope Awards: 5%
4. Irie.be: 3%
5. BestWebDesignAward: 2%

Most interesting is that DesignCharts generated most of the visits. Their algorithm is supposed be based on the traffic of their affiliate network, but in my case it seems to be based on Design Licks alone, because that was the only site I’ve been featured on, at that time – which amounted to a mere tenth of what came from the DesignCharts afterwards. Funny.

Didn’t expect to get this one, because I uploaded a bit of a bogus when applying for it, haha. I was reaaally sure I messed up. Lucky me, I’m happy.

Well, that’s the third and last of the more or less relevant, yet mostly unknown achievements, I suppose. There’s of course one missing, the big one, the only one I’ve ever truly been anxious to get but I suppose I botched it. At first I was actually a bit disappointed, but having seen people who don’t play games fiddle with the not-as-intuitive-as-i-thought controls, I’m not exactly surprised either. I may revamp the website with fancier technology (now that Flash’s Stage3D a.k.a. Molehill is out) and better controls (namely a better tutorial) within a year or so, but for the time being I’ll stick to my other big adventure of becoming a proper freelancer :)

Update: Uhm, I got featured on irie.be, too. I had to look it up and some mention Irie as an award in their portfolio, but srsly: neither have I ever heard of it nor did I apply for it. But, truth to be told: No one has ever heard of any of those awards anyway, so whatevs! Cool stuff, thanks.

Update 2: And also the BestWebDesignAward Award. I thiiink I’ve seen that site before (maybe through google). I noticed a minuscule amount of traffic being generated from them but didn’t find myself there, so I applied and later noticed that I have already won it. Like weeks ago…Speaking of traffic, it might be interesting to compare those sites, because the traffic they generate should more or less speaks volumes about their importance and reach. Now that will be interesting.

My portfolio became #1 on DesignCharts.com and I didn’t even apply. I almost would have missed it, if the traffic on my site didn’t explode from one day to the other. Cool stuff, I’m seriously happy.

Congratulations!

Your site has received a web award from by Design Licks. It´s been designated as “Site of the day” and will be displayed on 12 September 2011. (…) The following link is the proof that your site has been awarded by Design Licks: www.designlicks.com/web-awards/2538-the-cubical-me

Kind regards,
The Design Licks Team

I’m happy.

I guess I’ll start over again make it easier, more usable. The dirty code and example for free for anyone who dares to use it.

It always surprises me how PV3D, despite seemingly not being developed any further, consistently provides solutions for everything I stumble upon

1. dobj3d.autoCalcScreenCoords has to be set to true – some pages in the web tend to ignore that and people’ll always get (0,0,0).

2. You can only get the 2D coordinates after the object rendred, because the calcultion of the 2D point seems to use the previous render. I tried instantiating a new DisplayObject3D for testing and trace the screen coordinates right after that, and it didn’t work. Bummer. The correct way to get it should be:

myObject.autoCalcScreenCoords = true;
trace(dae.screen.x + viewport.viewportWidth / 2 + viewport.x);
trace(dae.screen.y + viewport.viewportHeight / 2 + viewport.y);

<library_materials>
   <material id="_1_-_Default-material" name="_1_-_Default">
     <instance_effect url="#_1_-_Default"/>
   </material>
 </library_materials>

It’s the id, not the name. You can also trace it from AS3 with:

trace(dae.materials);

, which is surprisingly simple. Replacing it works the same way as with a cube:

dae.replaceMaterialByName(material, "_1_-_Default-material");

I suppose this was especially easy because I used a UV-Mapped model with only one material, but it should work the same for models with multiple materials.

var ray:Number3D = camera.unproject(viewport.containerSprite.mouseX,viewport.containerSprite.mouseY);
var cameraPosition:Number3D = new Number3D(camera.x,camera.y,camera.z);
ray = Number3D.add(ray,cameraPosition);
var p:Plane3D = new Plane3D();
p.setNormalAndPoint(new Number3D(0, 1, 0), new Number3D(0, 0, 0));
var intersect:Number3D = p.getIntersectionLineNumbers(cameraPosition,ray);

Basically you shoot a ray from your camera to the position where the mouse-cursor is and check where it intersects with an imaginary plane p. That’s where you’ve clicked.

Nice and all, but I personally can’t use it on tcm, because navigation by clicking is far slower and less intuitive than moving with arrow- or wasd-keys. D’oh. This is basic stuff though, so it might come in handy one day or the other.