A few days ago Twitter exploded when someone noticed in the Adobe Max 2010 schedule a session called “Flash Player 3D Future”. Today Thibault Imbert (Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player) put up this blog post, teasing more on the subject:

“Now you may wonder, what does this means, what kind of 3D are we talking about ?

What kind of API ? True textured z-buffered triangles ? GPU acceleration ? Even better ? What I can say is forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big

When this will be available ?

We will share plans with you at Max during this session, I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.”

The key part of his post is “GPU acceleration”. The software renderer inside of Flash has long been its bottleneck. It is what stops Flash being a serious contender in the desktop gaming market. It is what makes Unity developers look at AS3 3D libraries and roll their eyes. It is what makes the limit on the amount of pixels we can push around so incredibly tiny, in comparison to what even low-end GPUs can do these days. Equally screen resolutions are constantly increasing, but still we have to cram our games into small areas because performance just isn’t good enough.

Most old-time Flash developers (hey Squize) don’t expect Adobe to announce anything useful. “It’ll be some half arsed gpu acceleration, only available if you set the wmode in the html, or something equally useless”, “does anyone remember the physics demo they showed last year? that never made it either”.

Adobe have a lot to live up to from previous Max hyperbole.

I’m slightly more optimistic, but I can appreciate their scepticism. Having been playing with Chrome’s HTML5/WebGL support a lot these past few weeks, I truly believe this is Adobe’s only shot at succeeding in the 3D web space. Because time is running out for them. GPU acceleration is going to have to work across the board, and accelerate all graphical elements: bitmap, vector, 3D. A cherry on the cake? Allow PixelBender shaders to run on the GPU too.

It’s about time they truly supported Flash game developers. This would be a significant step forward. It would open the desktop games market to us, it would allow proper 3D games to be made in Flash, and it has the opportunity to give an incredible speed boost to all of graphics operations in Flash.

Don’t drop the ball on this one Adobe. I beg of you.

Read the full blog entry here: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1836

Christian threw a new beta of Flod 3 at me today, and the list of playable module formats just keeps on getting better and better! New in this beta is support for SoundFX 1 & 2 and all variants of the David Whittaker format. It brings the list of total supported formats to 18 (listed below).

He plans on adding support for Rob Hubbard, TFMX and TFMX 7 Voices formats – and I think that will complete the set for Flod 3! It will quite simply be the best mod/chip replayer in AS3. Heck, the replay quality of standard mods is already well beyond the likes of ModPlug. All it really needs is someone to wrap it up in a sexy AIR app shell, and we’ve got ourselves an incredible new multi-format mod/chip player.

Download the Beta 2 demo (550Kb) which includes 5 tunes: Another World Intro (SoundFX), Leonardo Intro (SoundFX 2), Shadow of the Beast Title, Wrath of the Demo and Xenon 2 Megablast (all DW variants). Needless to say it’s Flash Player 10 only.

The full list of formats supported by Flod 3 currently stands at:

• Delta Music 1
• Delta Music 2
• Digital Musician
• Digital Musician 7 Voices
• Future Composer 1.x
• Future Composer 1.4
• His Master’s NoiseTracker
• SidMon 1
• SidMon 2
• SoundFX 1.x
• SoundFX 2.x
• Brian Postma’s SoundMon 1.x
• Brian Postma’s SoundMon 2.x
• Ultimate SoundTracker
• Generic SoundTrackers
• NoiseTracker
• ProTracker
• David Whittaker (all)

A few weeks ago I posted my first demo of an animated 3D ninja. At the time I had high hopes of creating a primitive Virtua Fighter styled game. But there were several obstacles to overcome. The poly count was a bit too high, the scene only had one model in it, and it took Away3D a fair time to parse the MD2 data for the key frames.

So last night I decided to revisit the code and see what could be improved. Here is the result – I dropped Away3D and decided to run a test with ND3D instead. It’s a much more light-weight 3D library, and doesn’t include features like lights or shaders. But what it does do, it does very well, and very fast. The MD2 parser in particular kicked several bails out of the Away3D one.

This, combined with an optimised MD2 model (many thanks to Adam Biles for help) allowed me to get two fighters in the scene, each independantly animated and textured, with a ground plane and free roaming camera. I did have a skybox in as well, but the camera perspective didn’t look right and made the fighters seem as if they were floating in space. So I’ll save that for a different project.

Feel free to have a play with the demo.

I had a desire to see if it was possible to create a simplistic “Virtua Fighter” or Tekken style game in Flash 10. The biggest initial hurdle was getting a convincing model displayed and animating it. And then seeing if the frame rate shot through the floor like a dead weight, or was actually playable.

After a lot of messing around with Milkshape, md2.qc custom files and the Away3D MD2 parser doing some really weird shit, I finally managed to assemble this tech test (click the picture to launch, FP10 required):

Ok so it’s not going to set the world on fire, but I was genuinely surprised at the speed, even when running a full animation sequence. And the model could be optimised significantly too.

More tests will follow as time permits, but this is very encouraging at least.

Today I released my FlxBitmapFont package to Google Code. This allows you to use bitmap fonts directly in your Flixel 2 games:

The bitmap fonts are just an extension of a Flixel Sprite, meaning you can throw them around, collide with them, scale them, rotate them and generally cause havoc. Or of course they could just be UI elements, proving a score/lives count. But at least the choice is yours

11 fonts are included, 2 sample programs and comprehensive documentation in the form of a PDF file. I’ve also published that here on my blog: http://www.photonstorm.com/flxbitmapfont and I will update both my blog and the Google Code archive as needed.

Anyway I hope you have fonty fun with this! Look out for a number of new Flixel classes from me in the coming months, or catch me on the flixel forums where I help moderate the place.

FlxU.overlap in Flixel 2 uses the new FlxQuadTree to handle collisions. It allows you to pass in either a single object (say an FlxSprite), a group of objects (FlxGroup), or even a group of groups! To be honest the more you give it, the more useful it proves to be.

However it’s got one annoying side-effect: if you don’t specify a custom function to deal with the collision, it will kill() your objects. This is often a far from ideal end result. For example if you had a bullet and an enemy being compared – you may want the bullet to be killed instantly, but the enemy to be only “hurt” by this, reducing it’s health.

The only way I’ve found to do this so far is to override the “kill” method of FlxSprite (in my Enemy class) and then perform the logic in there. Reduce health, update animation, health < 0, then kill it for real.

This isn’t ideal, but it certainly works – so if you’re stuck in a similar bind with FlxU.overlap, this may help.

Also it’s worth mentioning (as this caught me out too) – if you do specify a custom function for overlap, make sure it returns a Boolean. False will ignore the overlap, true will say you’ve dealt with it. If you don’t return this value it appears to default to killing your objects again.

I’ve been playing with Flixel a lot recently, and over on the forums someone was having trouble getting a “snake” game to work. I always applaud people who “start simple”, rather than diving in the deep end and sinking without trace.

So I spent lunch time today knocking together a simple snake game in Flixel 2.23.

There are no graphics (just blocks), but it shows how to use an FlxGroup to handle single to many collision checks, simple sprite controls and of course a basic snake game mechanic. The whole thing is just one single class file with no external requirements.

It’s up on my GitHub account here: http://github.com/photonstorm/FlxSnake

And if you want to join in, the forum thread is here: http://flixel.org/forums/index.php?topic=1261.0 (I’m a moderator on the Flixel forums, so drop by and say hi!)

20 man months of work.

Copious amounts of writing, editing, re-writing, re-editing and editing once more.

Stacks of demo games and hundreds of lines of quality source code.

All to make this the finest 650+ pages of AS3 game development ever commited to dead tree.

Jeff and Steve, the 8-bit Dynamic Duo have done it! Their book is finally out …

The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript

Despite having a slightly odd title (how many games have you ever played that weren’t interactive?!) this book looks awesome. I’ve pre-ordered my copy from Amazon UK and will give it a proper write-up when received. I have major respect for people who hold down full-time jobs / families, and still manage to produce such a mammoth book as this.

There is a bit of blurb on the Friends of Ed web site about it, although not as much as I would have liked. For example no contents listing, no sample chapter, a poor quality cover image and no index even. Given how many books on web development FoEd produce it begs the question why their own site is so shit. But I digress (and hopefully they will update this page over time). So for now the best place to learn about the contents is from the horses mouth so to speak, here on the 8-bit Rocket.

Congrats Jeff and Steve – I wish you all the best with sales. All you have to do now is stop calling my games advergames and the world will be perfect

A couple of guys on Twitter asked me if I would write-up how I generate PNG files from MovieClips in my SWF, at run-time. So I put this example together and am sharing it here.

We use this technique in our virtual world WebbliWorld to save a PNG version of the users avatars after they have customised them. But there are all kinds of other reasons you may need this. My example includes two methods: Saving the PNG locally using the local file system, and Saving the PNG to a web server using AMFPHP.

This technique requires Flash Player 10 and the Adobe AS3 Core Lib.

Here's a very simple example (included in the zip download below):

Tags: amfphp, example, png
Posted in Code, Tutorials | 3 Comments »

Well this is just too much fun! Grootlicht have just released ActionScript Painter 2.0. I wasted a whole hour this evening creating images in this wonderful package. Remember Painter? This is similar. But automated. And made in AS3. It's a piece of FP10 wizardary and some of the results are beautiful. Here are a few of my creations:

This is a sweet piece of work indeed! Using the power of the gnuboy Gameboy Emulator combined with Alchemy, fishf has created a fully playable Gameboy Color emulator in Flash.

While my initial tests don't show it to be as fast as the real thing (or the gnuboy emulator it is derived from) it's still a mighty fine piece of work indeed!

So here is Contra: Alien Wars (Gameboy classic version) fully playable in your browser:

Download fgnuboy from here.

I use an excellent service called Xmarks which allows me to sync my bookmarks between my home and work copies of Firefox. I can also access them via mobile and a special web page. Part of the service allows me to share my bookmarks out - so I have decided to share my AS3 folder. There are hundreds of bookmarks in here covering everything from physics to PixelBender.

You can access my bookmarks here: http://bookmarks.photonstorm.com

Whenever I add or edit bookmarks this page will update automatically. You can even subscribe to it via RSS if you feel so inclined.

I know it's not as pretty or social as Delicious, but I've never really got on with Deli, Xmarks suits me far better.

In the immortal words of the BudBrains: Check dis out:

Now Amiga mod replay has been done in AS3 before, most famously by Joa and Andre in the 8BitBoy Popforge library. And more recently in Flash Mod Player by Badsectoracula (although that is written in haXe it still compiles to AS3). But today I was blown away to receive a tiny zip package from the talented Christian Corti, lead developer at TrinityEffects. It contained a little test swf and a few class files named "flod".

Flod is his native AS3/FP10 Amiga Module playing library. And as you can hear, it plays very well!

It has full support for 15/31 instruments and all the effects up to Protracker 2.3 including Inverse Loop (latest version, not the Funky Repeat), it also supports both Amiga A500 and A1200 filters. It adds less than 10Kb to your SWF file size (excluding the mod itself of course), but more importantly the CPU impact is minimal.

Christian has released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3 (Unsupported) License, which basically means you are pretty much free to use it however you want, for whatever you want. It requires Flash Player 10, which at it's current adoption rate of 76% and growing, shouldn't be a big issue for anyone these days.

I fully intend to integrate this with the FP10 branch of PixelBlitz. He also has a set of SoundSpectrum classes for generating beautiful VU meters (and also extremely useful if you wish to link the music to in-game events or effects). They are being tidied up at the moment, so hopefully they'll be released soon. I'll post about it here when they are.

Feel free to download the zip file and have a play!

Please comment here to let us both know what you create with it.