Vim Omnicompletion for ActionScript 3
Dec/081
Shortly before we received Flex IDE licenses at work, I was in the process of writing an ActionScript 3 omnicompletion plug-in for vim. The ‘flash’ package is covered for the most part while ‘mx’, ‘flashx’ and ‘air’ are still lacking.
Anyway, it’s not serving the community sitting around my hard drive so I went ahead and pushed it up to the vim script repository.
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2478
Hopefully, it will make someone happy.
New Game Security Tome on the Horizon
Dec/080
Steven Davis from PlayNoEvil just announced the completion of his new game security book, Protecting Games: A Security Handbook for Game Developers and Publishers available soon.
Congrats, Steven! Can’t wait to read it.
State Machines in ActionScript
Dec/080
I love simple solutions to complex things. Squize’s post over at Gaming Your Way on State Machines in ActionScript explains an issue game developers often face that is elegantly handled with function pointers.
It’s been months since my last post (and coincidentally changing jobs) but I’d recently dusted off a grid-less rendering engine for 2d games and was slightly disgusted with it core. It’s really not that bad. It works but the main loop gets a wee-bit lengthy and burns up cycles evaluating items that could possible be out of context at any given moment.
Using function pointers to create a state machine wraps this up nicely. Cheers, Squize!
TODO/FIXME Extension for Flex IDE
Jul/080
Two years ago, Sven Ramuschkat and Dirk Eismann announced an extremely useful Flex plug-in on their site, richinternet.blog. Guess who’s late to the party?
The Flex Task Plugin parses .mxml and .as files looks for instances of “TODO” or “FIXME” and adds the comments that follow to your Tasks view.
How freaking cool is that? Simple. Perfect. Love it.
Flex Components: MXML vs. ActionScript
Jun/081
One question that has constantly nagged me during my conversion from Flash to Flex development is, “Do I write this thingamajig in MXML or ActionScript?” The question is usually answered by the type of component that’s being written. If it’s a visual component, I’ll write MXML otherwise, I’ll write the whole thing in ActionScript.
AIR Locks flashlog.txt
Apr/081
Airlocks are cool. They save lives every day.
AIR locks suck. They make life hell when you’re debugging.
I’ve just found the hard way that an application running on AIR puts an exclusive lock on your flashlog.txt file. So if you’re a fan of FlashTracer to keep track of your trace statements and of installing and using AIR apps, you’re SOL.
In short, you can either develop AIR apps or use them, but not both.
You can check out the useless bug page, here.
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.
ActionScript 3 SGS Client Template
Feb/080
I’ve been playing with SGS lately and must admit, I freaking love it.
It’s free, GPL’d, has excellent documentation and just plain works. On top of all that, there’s even a full-fledged ActionScript 3 Client API available!
While working through the tutorials I found myself writing more than one flash client and decided I’d be better off distilling them down to a single template. I think it’s a decent starting point for those “Hello World” demos and could potentially become the base for a full-blown, multi-user client application.
You can download the files, here.
Please let me know if you’re working on a Flash client for an SGS application. I’d love to hear about it!
MMO Money
Feb/080
PlayNoEvil has a great post on how to make money running an MMO. Seven steps, easy to read and to the point. Right on.
Step 1 reflects a discussion my friend and I had recently on how Blizzard never planned on creating the behemoth that is WoW.
I highly recommend checking it out and the link to MMOGCHART is definitely worth bookmarking.
