Posts
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Comment Policy
This comes up now and then: people think I am not going to post their comment because they disagree with me, or thinking I didn’t post their comment because it didn’t show up after a certain amount of time.
So here’s the deal:
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I have the Akismet comment spam plugin on this blog. If it thinks your comment is spam, I’ll never see it. Generally I think it’s pretty spot on, and have not heard of a single instance on this blog where someone’s valid comment was incorrectly labeled as spam by Akismet, but I suppose it’s possible.
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My thoughts on Flash CS5 and iPhone
I’ve been holding my tongue on this since the announcement, and slowly putting my thoughts together in what I hope is not considered to be a knee jerk reaction.
First of all, a big dose of respect to the engineering team that made this happen. You guys are God-like. I think it’s an amazing feat of technology that you got this working to the point where apps developed in Flash not only run on an iPhone, but were submitted to and accepted by the app store. So anything negative I say is not in any way directed to you guys. Unfortunately, technical awesomeness does not always directly correlate with practical usefulness. God knows I’ve created some things that I considered pretty cool feats of technology, but that were absolutely useless in the long run.
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Component Based Game Architecture
I touched on Component Based or Entity Based Game Architecture very briefly in my FOTB talk. This video covers a bit more, but same basic principles. It then goes into some of the specifics of the Push Button Engine, but even if you don’t go with that engine, it’s a pretty good intro to the concept.
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Game Input: Polling vs. Events
As mentioned, the single “controversial” part of my talk at Flash on the Beach this year was in questioning polling for input in Flash games. In truth, it was hardly controversial. No death threats. No twitter-based lynch mobs. Just that a couple of guys came up to me and politely expressed disagreement later, and we had a conversation about it. But, as said conversations were done later in the evening at the Old Ship, I thought it might be worth discussing in a clearer state of mind.
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FOTB Slides and Asobu Game Toolkit
Now that I’ve had a chance to settle down, catch up on some email, spend some time with the family, upload my photos, and blog about Flash on the Beach 2009, I will post my slides:
As usual, seeing a bunch of bullet points and diagrams doesn’t replace the thrill of watching me babble on for an hour, but it’s the best I can do unless John releases the video taken by that camera man who was in my face the whole time. 🙂
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Flash on the Beach 2009
Well, I’ve just returned from my fourth attendance of Flash on the Beach. I think I enjoyed this one more than any others since the first one (which, in my mind, was legendary and incomparable).
Pre-Conference:
Actually, I was in England for over a week, spending three and a half days in London before going down to Brighton a couple of days before the conference started.
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Flash Player 10 3D: Beware of Nested 3D Transforms
Working on my Flash on the Beach presentation. Slightly sidetracked into fixing up some code in a game toolbox I’m creating. Doing 3D transitions.
The thing is, that applying any 3D transform turns an object into a 3D object, where cacheAsBitmap is always on. It has a serious effect on the performance of the game. A very noticeable effect. So no problem, I think. When the transform is done, I simply assign a new Matrix to the container’s transform.matrix. A display object can have either a transform.matrix or a transform.matrix3D. Assigning either one nulls out the other one. Done and verified that the matrix3D is gone. But performance still sucks. Turns out that a container within the container also suddenly has a matrix3D. But I never did that!
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Falling Balls 2.0
New features:
- Full rewrite in OpenGL for improved performance and response.
- Basic game looks and runs the same as original.
- Shiny new UI.
- New Advanced and Ninja levels!
The big feature is the multiple levels. A lot of people didn’t like sitting through the slow build up. Now if you start in advanced mode, the balls come fast and furious, right from the start. Choose Ninja Mode and they come at you from both directions. You won’t be bored. If you already have the game, just update it. If you haven’t experienced the glory that is Falling Balls, Get it here!
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Why people hate Flash.
John Dowdell recently twittered about doing a twitter search for “hate flash”. It got me thinking, having recently tried in vain to handle some protests about Flash.
My personal feeling about it is that when someone hates something – really HATES it – it has generally gone beyond a rational argument. It’s no longer about the technology or standards or accessibility or anything else. It’s more like religion. They hate it, it’s evil, it sucks, it should die in a fire, and if you disagree, you are F’ing ignorant. STFU NOOB!
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Cafe Wall Illusion
Every rectangle is the same size. All lines are parallel or perpendicular.
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=“static” fversion=“10.0.0″ movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/2003/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/CafeWallIllusion.swf” width=“600″ height=“800″ targetclass=“flashmovie”]
[/kml_flashembed]
Idea from https://mathworld.wolfram.com/CafeWallIllusion.html
I made it dynamic.
[as3]for(var i:int = 0; i < 20; i++) { var s:Sprite = new Sprite(); s.y = 760 - i * 40; s.filters = [new DropShadowFilter(4, 90, 0, 1, 4, 4, .2)]; s.graphics.lineStyle(0, 0x999999); for(var j:int = 0; j < 800; j += 120) { s.graphics.beginFill(0); s.graphics.drawRect(j, 0, 60, 40); s.graphics.endFill(); s.graphics.beginFill(0xffffff); s.graphics.drawRect(j + 60, 0, 60, 40); s.graphics.endFill(); } addChild(s); } stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, onMove); function onMove(event:Event):void { for(var i:int = 0; i < 20; i++) { var s:Sprite = getChildAt(i) as Sprite; s.x = Math.sin(i * mouseX / 600) * 60 * mouseY / 600; } }[/as3]
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