STARNUT.com

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Thibault Imbert’s Banana Slice Component and since I’m always on the lookout for new techniques to improve the performance of my upcoming games (somewhen at the end of march) it immediately caught my attention.

Thibault is currently working on a book on ActionScript development, so, he didn’t have time to publish neither the component nor the class it is based on, so far. So, I started pondering on a concept of my own, experimented a little and finally got totally caught up in the challenge of creating a component that highly improves vector based animations by rasterizing them. So far, I was able to make some tests that affirm my basic concepts but there still is a lot to be done. Plus, I have several approaches in mind that can be derived from this concept. I want to evaluate which of them make most sense in the different use cases before publishing any details.

Thibault, thanks for this fruity inspiration! I’m so excited about this :)

Sometimes it seems unbelievable how time flies. It’s been a week already since we had to call off our second devjam, since Wolli caught the flews. So we’ll have to delay the work on our new game.

But my own game, that I decided to call “BubbleMath”, advanced pretty well during the last weeks and I put some extra attention to the engine that’s behind the game: I added a ScreenController and AbstractScreens, which allow building static menus easily. I hope to be able to post a first screenshot soon. Right now, I’ll have to work on a quick slideshow player for my parents big birthday this weekend. Pew!

In other news… I got an invitation to the Adobe AIRcamp, Switzerland, which takes place in Zurich on 28th and 29th of February, and signed up right away. Besides a six hour AIR workshop the free event includes a 24 hour contest in developing an AIR application. The best program does not only win a Macbook but will also be promoted at this year’s best of swiss web awards in March. Only one thing left to say: Wheeee! :)

So, time to practice my Flex skills, which reminds me: my Liip colleague Sandro and I will be giving speeches about two ActionScript 3 workflow approaches at the Swiss Flash user group meeting in Zurich next Monday. One will consider the basic workflow setup with FDT and one will be about our recently evolved Flex template approach. So if you’re around and interested, sign up today! :)

The day I found out that it is possible to define code snippets within the FDT plugin my productivity went up about 20%. I wasn’t actually aware of the feature until I stumbled upon it by chance so I venture there are more people out there that are missing out on this unique chance to boost their productivity. What is this all about?

FDT lets you define templates for frequently used code snippets that you can call via a key word you define.

For example: when you type “fori” and hit CTRL+Space FDT will suggest to write a regular for-loop for you and guide you from one crucial element of the loop to the other e.g. to change the suggested index or array the loop is performed on. Isn’t that great?
And it gets even better: you can create new templates and call them via the keyword you choose. Never want to write a singleton from scratch again? Here is how it goes:

(more…)

Initiated by our Christmas Devjam I am currently developing a small game engine in ActionScript 3 in my spare time. The aim is to create a setup that allows quick and easy development of casual games in Flash. The animation system, that I just successfully debugged, is based on the idea of checking the current frame label of the animated MovieClip as described by Jens Franke in this post (make sure to read the comments, too).

This technique completely separates code from design, allowing the designer to delimit animations without writing a single line of code, but by simply placing one label (e.g. “jump”) at the beginning of the animation and one at the end of it ( e.g. “done_jump” ).

So on each frame that starts with “done_”, the engine triggers a method that decides what to do next: play another animation? Loop this animation a certain amount of times? Jump to another animation? Destroy the object? … So, all the programmer has to do is override the function that makes these decisions and implement the coherent animation functions. Easy, isn’t it?

Right now, I’m planning to somewhat opensource the engine, once it’s done - and it doesn’t turn out to be a heap of useless code. As soon as I make progress in this, I’ll let you know.

For those of you who’ve been looking for a quick introduction on how to setup FDT 3.0 with Eclipse 3.3.x in German this article by Jens Franke (if you havn’t bookmarked his blog, yet, now is the time!) may provide the end of your troubles. It is part of a collection of articles on how he arranges his AS3.0 workflow. Worth a glimpse for any flash developer working with AS3.0 since he shads some light on best practices in programmer-designer collaboration, as well.