Author Archive
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4k Winners Announced – Audience voting open
13th Mar 20090
The Flash 4k Competition is over and the first and second place winners have been announced (no I wasn’t one of them!) – congrats to both games, and also to the other entries, some of which were truly stunning.My personal favourite was the sky diving game, Falling with Style, which was a technical masterpiece and great fun to play. The stunt tricks you can perform in the air are stunning, and I was a bit shocked it didn’t get a better write-up than it did.
The main criticism about my game was the control system, apparently it was counter-intuitive and it’d have been easier if the ship just moved up when you pressed up and rotated to face the mouse pointer – rather than the Asteroids style motion it actually uses. Personally I loathe that style of control for arena shooters when using a keyboard vs. a joypad, but each to their own! Just a crying shame the 3 judges disagreed with me 🙂
Anyway the Audience Voting is now open, which means you get to play all the great games and then vote for your favourite. So get to it, and have fun while doing so as some of the entries are just incredible.
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Say hello to my new blog design
12th Mar 2009I’d had the “old” design for my blog since April 2008. All I had done was stick my own header onto the default theme that came with WordPress. Hardly inspiring, but it did the job.
Tonight I sat down and pixelled my little heart out. The end result is this new design which I am much happier with. It makes the place feel like it’s truly mine now 🙂 I’ve tested in FF3, Chrome and IE7, so apologies if it dies in anything else (Safari I’m looking at you).
I’ve got some plans up my sleeve to enhance the header a bit futher. I think the right-hand section is just begging for a little pong clock. Oh wait, no I mean it’s begging for a mini game. So I’ll see what I can whip-up. On the right you’ll notice I’ve added links to twitter and FlashGameLicense.com, my home from home. Anything that supports the sterling work these guys do is fine by me.
Incase you were wondering, the Predator in the header image is clutching an Atari ST computer. It was drawn by the Pompey Pirates artist Sid-B for their menu disk 95. Click here to see the full image it was taken from, and loads of other stunning 16-colour pixel work.
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Infinite Ammo 4k Source Code Released
11th Mar 2009
Well everyone else seems to be blogging about the release of their 4k games, so I’m doing so too 🙂 I managed to get mine finished and submitted on-time. I don’t expect it to win a thing (results are in 3 days time), but I had great fun participating all the same.
I have created a games page entry for it, and in a slightly unusual move for me I have released the full source code for the game too. You can get it from it’s games page. What you learn from it I have no idea. At the very least there’s a pretty explosion / particle system, and a massively optimised and compressed Tween engine! Or you could just skim down through the code, shaking your head thinking “and he ENJOYED coding this?!” 🙂
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AS3 Flash 10 Firefox Search Plugin
2nd Mar 2009
I don’t know about you, but I rely on the Search box built into Firefox a lot. I use it almost religiously and have a selection of search engines in there, one of which is of course the ActionScript 3 Reference.It was bugging me that there was no search engine plugin specifically for the Flash 10 version of the docs.
So, I created one.
If you use Firefox (or any browser that supports the OpenSearch plugin format) then you can add the Flash 10 search plugin to by simply going to this page on the MozDev site: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=flash+10 and adding the Flash 10 version I created.
I’ve already used it several times in the past hour, so figured it’d be worth posting about incase anyone else found it useful.
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How do you extract a Sprite back out of a ByteArray?
28th Feb 2009I should probably post this into some AS forums (and will do so later), but I had to get this out there quickly and it’s bugging the hell out of me:
In short, how do you extract a Sprite from a ByteArray? (or any kind of display object for that matter).
I can write the object just fine, and read it back into a variable, but I’ll be blown if I can then convert that back into what it was originally.
Here are my attempts so far:
[as]
var test:Sprite = new Sprite();
test.graphics.beginFill(0xff0000);
test.graphics.drawRect(0,0,64,64);
test.graphics.endFill();//addChild(test); // to test, works fine
var b:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
trace(b.length); // 0 bytes
b.writeObject(test);
trace(b.length); // 754 bytes, so our Sprite is definitely in there
// Reset the pointer
b.position = 0;trace(b.position); // 0 as I’d expect
var newTest:Sprite;
//newTest = b.readObject() as Sprite; // Ends up being null
//newTest = Sprite(b.readObject()); // Type Coercion failed error
//trace(newTest);
//addChild(newTest); // and kaboom, constant “Parameter child must be non-null.” errors 🙁var take2:Object = b.readObject();
trace(take2); // ok take2 contains an object, but how can I get the Sprite out of it?trace(b.position); // 754, so it has definitely read it all
[/as]Ummm someone, please help? 🙂
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