The Genesis of S’troidz!
Jun/093
To really kick off My Game Experiment it’s probably a good idea to come clean with what the heck I’m really building. Saying it’s “an Asteroids-style shooter with a few tweaks” isn’t saying much at all so let me to present some details.
Starting Up PushButton Engine
May/092
PushButton Engine is an open-source Flash game engine from PushButton Labs, a group led by two of the Garage Games co-founders.
The plan behind PBE is to give away the engine source, sell a visual editor to help rapidly create games, offer a storefront for developers to sell their own PBE components and finally, make games themselves. Currently, the only thing available is the engine source and the ability to create (but not yet sell) PBE components.
C/C++ to ActionScript Cross-Compiler
Feb/080
Last year, at MAX 2007 Scott Peterson showed everyone a demo of various C apps running in the Flash Player. It was pretty radical stuff. I recall seeing the demo and feeling absolutely speechless.
Well, I totally forgot about this (too good to be true?) until today, when Ted Patrick announced that indeed, development is still moving forward in this area.
I’ve been chewing on the thought of creating P2P clients in AIR but couldn’t figure out an elegant approach to packaging a client module (written in ActionScript) and a server module (written in C/C++, Java or Python) in a single AIR installer…
Could this be it?
Flash is SO Next-Gen
Feb/080
Raph Koster (think, Ultima) was quoted at this year’s GDC:
“I actually think Flash is the next-gen console in a lot of ways,” said Koster. “It’s pointing the way to the future more-so than the current generations of hardware, precisely because it is well on its way to becoming completely ubiquitous.”
He just made an entire community of Flash game developers feel very warm and fuzzy.
Check out the rest of the article here.
Away3D, Strata Partnership
Feb/080
With all the coverage Papervision3D gets, it’s easy to forget there’s another option out there for Flash Developers and Designers interested in incorporating 3D into their projects. Fortunately, this could all change with the recent announcement of a partnership between Away3D and Strata.
Away3d will be providing an updated Flash export option for 3d content that displays in realtime, with navigation and animation options built in. The new export format will provide designers with an easy one-click solution for publishing 3d content, using the Flash Player to maintain a high level of compatibility with web browsers.
The full announcement can be found here.
How Many Times Can You Slice a Pixel?
Jul/070
Twenty.
And what do you call that tiny slice of pixel-pie? A twip.
Internally, Flash calculates anything that uses pixels with twips. Good to know when you’re doing ActionScript-based animations and you’re wondering why objects move in multiples of 0.05 pixels.
Thanks, Keith!
