Although the code-insight features of FlashDevelop help a lot, you can’t beat a good AS3 reference – and I use Adobe LiveDocs almost exclusively for this. Although I have a Firefox search plugin that gives me quick access to it, I have still always wanted a decent local copy that offered the same benefits my browser does, but faster.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter (cheers @kode80) today I found such a beast in the shape of an AIR app called Doc?

Doc? allows you to view, search and bookmark all your favourite ASDocs. But the biggest feature for me is that on-line docs can be downloaded and stored locally too. This means that the docs for things like Away3D, Flint, Papervision, Adobe CoreLib, TweenMax or anything else that has ASDoc documentation can be added to your local books collection.

Adding a remote ASDoc

Adding new books couldn’t be more simple. Just start-up Doc?, click the settings icon in the top-right and select “”Add Remote ASDoc”. You’ll be asked for some details. Here they are for the Stardust Particles system:

Note: when adding URLs be sure to specify a directory, and don’t have the index.html on the end.

Doc? will then download and index the files, storing them locally.

Be advised that on large sets of documentation this can take a while. Indexing the AS3 Language Reference took nearly 10 minutes, and that’s on an Intel Quad Core Q9950 @ 2.83GHz with 8GB RAM. Doc? stores the indexes in a local SQLite database.

Once downloaded and indexed the docs are available from the Books menu, ready for easy and fast local searching!

Here you can see I searched for “Radius” specifically in the Stardust book, and am viewing the CollisionRadius page. You can search across all books, highlight results in the text, include title and/or content in the search and even bookmark sections you know you return to often.

The tree view display has icons depending on the style of result – the green “C” circle icon means it’s a Class, but it also shows packages, methods, constants, interface and others.

AS3 Language Reference

One of the first things I recommend you do is download the ActionScript3 Language Reference zip from the Adobe web site (5.8MB). Unzip it somewhere and use the “Add Local Book” Settings option to add it. It will still need to be indexed (and this takes a long time), but it’s better to grab the zip as it can often have more up to date docs vs. those installed with CS4.

I’m quite sure that this app will save me a lot of time vs. digging through browser bookmarks.

Visit the Doc? web site

All I’d like to see now is this built into FlashDevelop, so F1 searched within Doc?

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.

Hit the jump to see the demo in action

(more…)

As the AS3 Soundtracker replay library Flod gains traction, so I have been receiving more emails saying “Help!”. Apparently people are having trouble dissecting just the replay sections from FlodPro (the full player interface). So to address this I have created the Beginners Guide to Flod. This download offers you source code that does nothing but replay a mod file. No file browser, no FlodPro, no UI, no hassle!

The guide includes source for both FlexSDK + FlashDevelop users, and also for Flash CS4 (if you really must code on the timeline.) I have included examples for plain vanilla replay, and also replay with the flectrum active:  the funky looking vu-meter seen in the screen shot above. Pick whichever is most useful for your production.

You can download the Beginners Guide from the updated Flod page.

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.

Click here to play (sorry no pre-loader, but it’s only 1MB in size)

Enjoy

I’m pleased to announce that Christian Corti has now released v1.0 of the FlodPro Soundtracker replay package. FlodPro extends upon the work done with Flod and adds a bunch of new features, better support for the harder to replay mods, and a brand new ProTracker style replay interface. You get the full source to this awesome player including the flectrum, so you can now learn how to sync with beat events, use stereo separation, change the volume, loop through the samples and more.

Grab the v1.0 download of FlodPro from the Flod page.

Christian Corti has been hard at work on the Flod Replay library, and Flod Pro incorporates the latest version and a whole lot more, wrapped up in a sexy ProTracker style interface! He gave me permission to show you a demo of it, so have a play with this:

Click “Browse” and select a soundtracker module (.mod file) then hit “Play“. Some features work, some don’t. The two sliders on the bottom right are for volume and stereo separation. The numbers 1-4 at the top enable/disable the channels. Clicking through the sample names often reveal hidden messages from the composers

Just check out the replay quality! It’s now playing back a lot of mods better than even ModPlug can, all from AS3 / FP10.

If you don’t have any soundtracker modules to load into it then here is a little zip (655KB) with 5 classic Amiga tunes and the FlodPro SWF. Or you can downloads thousands of tunes from sites like Amiga Music Preservation.

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.

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.

It’s just great – I urge you to try it!

http://sourcebinder.org

PixelBlitz was originally released by Norm Soule as a means to help him speed-up the process of creating a game. He graciously released it into the public domain, and shortly after I joined him in expanding and pushing the feature set upwards and onwards.

But for various reasons (mostly to do with the geek annoyance that is Real Life™) Norm hasn’t had much chance to update the engine at all, and I was left pretty much on my own with it. Various things about the way it worked internally bugged me. I was still quite green to AS3 when I got involved, and some API design decisions really show because of this.

Now almost a year later I have a much clearer understanding of how I want it to work. How the API should be structured, how it should sit much better with the Flash IDE. And also how utterly vital documentation and examples are (hello PushButton Engine, I’m looking at you).

So it’s time for a clean break and a fresh start. I will be discontinuing my involvement with PixelBlitz as it stands today, and focusing entirely on building the new game engine from scratch. As of now I don’t know if that will mean releasing under a new name, to keep Norm’s original creation intact. Or if he agrees perhaps we will literally dump the current codebase and replace it wholesale. Right now that isn’t too important. What is important is that I start carefully planning the new API.

While I don’t expect any responses to this final part, I’ll throw this out anyway: If you want to get involved, please email me. I would love to not be the only person working on this.

Today I managed to get time to finish-off and release my new game, Kyobi, onto FlashGameLicense.com. The game is best described as a cross between Columns, Tetris and a Match-3, but with a big fat dose of physics thrown in for good measure. As the blocks drop you can grab them with the mouse, and fling them around. Match 3 or more of the same colour and they all explode in a shower of particles.

Throw them together with real force and you’ll shake the screen and score bigger points. Chain combos can be obtained by smashing lots of colours one after the other within a set time. There is something very feng shui about the game. Watching people play is fascinating; some will try to organise the blocks into different stacks of colour along the bottom. Others will just slam them around with gay abandon! Personally, I’m a “stacker”

I am really pleased with how this game plays. I spent a lot of evenings working on tweaking the difficulty, so the first 20 levels guide you through the game. The pace ebbs and flows gracefully. After a really hectic level with 6 blocks falling every couple of seconds, the next level can often be far more sedate with a slow trickle to give you a breather. Basic game AI controls level progression there-after, ensuring the game doesn’t just get faster and faster (which would be no fun for anyone). The game uses my new PixelBlitz physics classes through-out.

At the time of writing this Kyobi is up for bidding on FlashGameLicense.com. If you have a Developer account there (or are one of my FGL friends) you can play it here. Everyone else I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until it goes public, sorry!

Right now I’m waiting for SomaTone.com to finish the music and sound effects for Kyobi, but hopefully that will be done soon – this will be the first time I’ve ever used them, but I’m sure they will do an excellent job, and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they come up with! In equally exciting news for me: The Game Creators will be bringing Kyobi to the iPhone this March. Can’t wait to see what they do with it too

This evening I managed to find time to push a lot of updates through for PixelBlitz. This fixes some serious bugs that I introduced last year when trying to optimise the speed of the renderer. It also brings in new methods in the BlitzMath class (my favourite being the excellent wrapValue() function!), the new Box2D Physics classes (lots more on this to come) and the starting classes for BlitzGrid, BlitzDraw and BlitzWorld.

More importantly I’ve started putting the examples source code into Google Code, which I’ve tested and it all compiles against this latest build. So far all of my demos from last year are converted and working, including this new little Shoot-em-up Test. Use the cursor keys to move and control to fire. Firing doesn’t actually do anything, you can’t die, the aliens can’t die either, but I think it shows the potential speed a PixelBlitz game can have, and I’m not even starting to push it yet.

Get the latest release from Google Code including the rough and ready source for the demo game above, you’ll see the start of the new Collision Group system in there, which I’ll be evolving this year.

Tonight I updated the PixelBlitz Engine with a small but significant feature. I attacked the issue of redundant redrawing of elements, and updated both the PixelSprite and RenderLayer classes so they no longer refresh all of their content if nothing has actually changed since the last render call.

Sounds simple and it is, but it makes a world of difference to the speed of things.

I’ve been researching how beneficial adding a dirty rect system in the engine would be. The problem I have is that it’s all dependant on the type of game. For example a vertical shooter, with a scrolling background and bullets flying everywhere, would have no benefit at all – if anything the extra calculations may even slow it down. But in a sedate game, especially one with large (overlapping) objects, it could be a dream.

So, still in two minds really – perhaps it’s something we allow the user to disable at will.

For now I’m going to optimise the 2DRenderer further by making it only copyPixels() from the area of the RenderLayer that has changed. At the moment it grabs a full sized layer even if the layer only contains say a 64×64 sprite somewhere.

Anyway until then the new code is available in svn.