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.
Blockparty is an annual demo party held in the US, and 2010′s is about to hit in a few months time. As with all good demo parties there is usually an invitation demo to announce it, and to whet the appetite somewhat. This year EvoFlash created this little beauty, and of course it’s AS3 to the core:
I’ve not been to a demo party since 1999, but boy does this make me wish I could be there. Nice one guys, nice one.
There are some lovely effects as you’d expect. Evoflash have been at this for years now, and obviously have a highly streamlined demo pipeline going on. With impressive pre and post render effects; gorgeous blooms, radial blurs, reflections and shadowing. And what’s more – they have released it as open source, free for demo coding plebs like me to use!
Called evoTinyEngine it’s a small framework that offers you three core elements: Assets, the main Engine and Modifiers. The Modifiers can be stacked up on-top of each other. The Engine handles the construction and destruction of all the Modifiers for you, and there are some really nice things ready to use. Everything is based on 16th note beats, which allows for tight syncing with the audio in your demo.
I haven’t dug through the code much yet but I’d be willing to bet there are some insane routines in there, that would be well worth studying for game development as well as demos.
(Now let’s see if this blog post kicks off a 20+ comment flame war about “is it really a demo?” yadda yadda …
To celebrate a highly productive 2009, the chaps over at Just Add Water game studio asked me to create a Flash Christmas card for them. They provided all assets and wanted it to showcase the successes of 2009, such as the release of Gravity Crash on the PS3. But also to include a few gentle nods towards 2010.
The music is by CoLD SToRAGE (he of Wipeout fame) and is from the Gravity Crash game soundtrack, available next year. Also due out is the PSP version. If you’ve not yet had a chance to try it, then do so!
Christian has been busy! FlodPro was already the best Amiga module replay library available for AS3. But not content with that he went and added support for 3 new chip-tune formats: SidMon, Future Composer and BP SoundMod.
As a special Christmas present for those who visit this blog I whipped up this little demo, showcasing 6 tunes, 2 of each newly supported format.
Away3D is an awesome 3D library for Flash. Flod is an awesome library for replaying tracker music in Flash. Throw those two things together with my inner-geek upbringing of the 80s and you get DarkCubes. I grew up drip-fed on ST/Amiga demo effects, and this random little 3D game is what I banged out during a couple of lunch breaks and some hours last night.
I actually wrote DarkCubes back in 2000 on the PC/Windows using DarkBASIC (hence the title of the game). So I had the code and figured it would make a good first experiment for Away3D. A bit of messing around, a bit of swearing, and lots of fiddling later and this tiny puzzler was born.
The logo is from the original PC game and was made by Yann ‘Kohai‘ Parmentier. The music is by Adam Sikorski (DSX of TRSI), 505 of Checkpoint and Toodeloo of the Dead Hackers Society. The rest by yours truly.
Lots of keys do stuff in-game, so have a fiddle! (1-5 changes the music for example, D turns on Debug info, 7-9 change texture, etc. Read the scroller for the full list).
I make no apologies for this beating shitty spec Netbooks / PCs over the head with a giant CPU grinding axe. Deal with it. It’s hardly the end of the world.
EvoFlash have released the first ever 64k intro for Flash Player 10 – “Proof of Concept”. It features some new to Flash effects such as a nice looking multi-ridged fractals voxel landscape and bezier curve tweened particles, with a lovely depth of field effect. This is supported by a thumping 36-voice soundtrack. Again remember it’s a 64KB SWF with no external media.
The intro is nicely put together, harking back to the yesteryear of demo style. It’s a bit “showing off” and self congratulatory, as if they are challenging other Flash demo crews to do better (which might be hard, because there virtually are none!). You are bombarded with the technical facts during the demo, rather than left to enjoy the aesthetics of it. But still, it’s great to see and a bit of a benchmark.
The coder behind this demo (Jalava) also gave a presentation at the recent Assembly Summer 2009 Convention entitled the “Anthology of Flash Demo History”. This is fascinating viewing and you can watch it online here. That link is to the h264 QuickTime MP4 file, which is just under 630MB. Don’t let that put you off as it’s well worth the download or stream if your connection can handle it
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.
Quite out of the blue I received an invite to the SourceBinder project tonight. I honestly couldn’t even remember what it was, but after a couple of minutes playing I was hooked!
If you are experienced with node based creation tools, like FilterForge for example, then you’ll have a good idea what this is about. Basically it’s an FP10 visual creation tool – you can create your own nodes (or use many of the public ones up there) and chain them together to create stunning visual effects. Loads of libraries are built in already like JigFlashLib, Tweener, Flint and PV3d, so nodes can be created using these.
Nodes can perform tasks such as colour changing, mouse input, sound handling, PV3D creation and loads more. They are simple AS3 classes (which you can edit live online). You chain them together using a neat drag and drop interface, the final “display renderer” node being responsible for the output.
I was messing around tonight with the explosion code I wrote for Infinite Ammo, with a squiggly “worm like” behaviour and created the following weirdness. Click anywhere to set off an explosion. Click as much as you like to create total mayhem!
I came across a great site called Flashtro. It’s a collection of classic demo scene / warez scene intros and cracktros, recreated in Flash. There are 21 different intros on offer ranging from cracktros such as the Mandala Studio crack by Scoopex, to the “beauty” (*cough*) that is the Pang 100% Trainer by PROJ Inc (coder colours FTW!).
New intros seem to be released on a semi-regular basis, so I’ll definitely keep this one in my bookmarks and check it out now and again. Perhaps they may even accept some “guest tro’s” from me? (although I’d rather redo Atari ST demos!)
Here’s a shot from the Scoopex one:
C64 SID Music from AS3 / Alchemy
On a similar retro scene theme I found a brand new C64 SID Chip player written in AS3 by the always inspirational UnitZeroOne. It’s a port of the Linux TinySID library (which is where Alchemy came in) with a minimal front-end interface to show it off. Flash Player 10 is required. Replay quality is great and it weighs in at around 150KB. Sadly the source is not yet released, the usual “it’s a mess, I only threw it together in a few hours” excuse is given but I can appreciate that, although I’d still probably sell my Mother for it.
Now if only I could find the time (and skill) to try and do something similar for an SNDH YM2149 replayer!
squize and ngfx of Gaming Your Way infamy have released a lovely little Flash demo called 651: Announce. It’s a typically old-school demo but with a lovely modern feel to it. squize pumps out the polys with some smooth PV3D sections (you ought to try Away3D mate!) and while the different parts feel slightly disjointed (few transitions from one to the other) they each stand up well in their own right. From pretty rotating plasma, to gunmetal spheres and the neat voxel landscape trip right at the end, this is well worth watching.
Oh and squize: Thanks for the greets and I was glad to see you got this released! Surprised you managed it so quickly given how you admitted you like to procrastinate about these things rather than do them
I’m ashamed I didn’t pick this up since now as it happened back in August, but evoflash released their 99er demo at Assembly 2008 into the browser contest there and won. When you watch it, you’ll understand why! A truly amazing example of what can be done with Flash (and the Away3D engine). Click the picture to watch the demo.
Somewhat inspired by my previous vectorball tests, and also from unearthing a load of my old demo source code, I decided to start porting some of the effects to AS3 into a single easy-to-use library, Demo FX Lib. Today I coded a nice image “drop down” effect, and a comprehensive 3D starfield routine. I’m very pleased with the starfield as it’s both smooth and versatile, you can literally tweak every value as it’s running, for some nice real-time effects.
The object of these effects is that you can literally pull them into your game as needed. None of them mess with the stage, all of them return (and work on) either a single bitmap or sprite, so can slot-in easily to an existing system. I want to add a classic scroll-text system, plasma and some other traditional effects before I release the library.
I was messing around with a little of my old DarkBASIC code last Friday, and figured it would be fun to port it to AS3. I threw in some extra effects and a new shiny ball graphic and here is the end result of an hours work. Adding scaling and z-depth sorting was pretty easy. You do get quite a bit of “popping” because I only z-depth once per loop, but I can live with that
Adding a depth blur or hue shift is next on the list if I feel like it. There are 18 different wave forms in total. The SWF is 640×480 and published at 60fps (really meant for running on the desktop, but there we go)
squize and ngfx of Gaming Your Way infamy have released a lovely little Flash demo called 651: Announce. It’s a typically old-school demo but with a lovely modern feel to it. squize pumps out the polys with some smooth PV3D sections (you ought to try Away3D mate!) and while the different parts feel slightly disjointed (few transitions from one to the other) they each stand up well in their own right. From pretty rotating plasma, to gunmetal spheres and the neat voxel landscape trip right at the end, this is well worth watching.
