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)

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.

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

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.

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!)

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?

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

What’s more, we’ve also got a zip download of the new FlodEx library for you. This isn’t the complete Flod 3.0 (which will merge all the sound processors back together) but it will let you replay any of the new formats in AS3 should you so wish.

Download FlodEx 1.01 (43kb)

Nice Thanks to Allen Chou for the Pyronova lib that let me put this demo together really fast.

If you’d like to read more about “synthetic” Amiga music then check out the ChipFlip blog or the Blibb Blobb podcast.

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.

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

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