Polygon Collision and the Separating Axis Theorem in ActionScript
Jun/105
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on my latest game project which, like many other games, requires collision detection. Knowing that using brute force for broad-phase detection wasn’t an option, I implemented a spatial hash to partition the world’s game objects into manageable groups. At this point, I was ready to tackle the narrow-phase portion and immediately sought to use a form of pixel-perfect collision I’ve grown to understand and use fairly well. Unfortunately, this type of detection is inappropriate for a lot of things and an avatar moving along a tile-based set is one of them. It can be fairly costly and is better suited for boolean-based tests. After trying to force this algorithm to do something it shouldn’t, I finally settled down and visited a form of collision I had known about for a while but had not the need to implement…until now.
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.
Review: Protecting Games
Apr/090
With the arrival of online gambling, massively multiplayer games and services like XBox Live come a much larger audience and a widening demographic scope. These players have helped turn the game industry into a money-making behemoth. As large and popular as this industry has become it has done a surprisingly poor job of addressing the darker side of gaming. Protecting Games by Steven Davis of IT GlobalSecure attempts to solve this problem by shining a light on piracy, cheating, account theft, privacy, protecting children online and more.
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!
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.
