as3gaming

Sean the Flex Guy - 36 More AS3 Tools

Sean Moore over at Sean the Flex Guy is good at rounding up a bunch of tools and posting them for all to see.  His latest version is 36 New, Cool Flex and AS3 Tools, Libraries, and Components.  Check it out.

gamepoetry.com - Scale9 That Actually Works

Another excellent article from gamepoetry.com.  This time Panayoti discusses Adobe’s oft-maligned Scale9 function/property for display objects.  From the article:

Flash 8 marked the introduction of the scale9grid. UI writing was about to become substantially easier, because you could create components that resized dynamically and maintained their artistic integrity at all sizes. This was to usher in a new era of sexy UIs that were built in less time. In theory. In practice, the implementation was, and still is, buggy. Oh, and it only works for MovieClips. You can kinda get it working in Flex using yet another embed tag you’ll forget about as soon as you’re done copy pasting it from some reference site. Here’s a scale9 implementation that actually works.

Gskinner’s New Article Series

Grant Skinner, gskinner.com, is a well known flash/actionscript guru whose notables include gProject (acquired by Adobe), and gallery incomplet. His blog is a great resource for anyone interesting in flash development.

Fortunately for all of us, he’s releasing a series of articles exploring small but useful code blocks in AS3. From his post:

I’ve decided to start a little series of articles on the blog called Core AS3 that will deal with small, simple snippets of code (<5 lines) that are very useful but not particularly self-evident. I often encounter questions at workshops and conferences about small coding constructs that I take for granted, and it occurred to me it might be helpful to document and share them with the community.

I recommend everyone stay tuned to this series. His first article, Core AS3: Modulus, shows some great examples of how to use the modulus - a very useful tool in game development.

The as3gaming Wiki is a Wiki

I realized I might not have explicitly stated this, but the as3gaming.com wiki is open for anyone and everyone to post their tutorials.  Just sign up and start creating articles.  Shoot me an email at brit {at} as3gaming.com if you write an article and I will post it here and on the as3gaming.com homepage.

Resources - 8bitrocket.com

Every once in a while I’ll do a quick review of some of the excellent resources out there for actionscript developers.

8bitrocket.com is a resource that comes highly recommended from the authors of this blog. They have a slew of blogs and games and a fairly active community with a lean towards flash gaming. The 8-bit reference is explained in their about page:

in honor of those first animations we made on the Apple II, we have decided to call this site, and our collective selves (myself Steve Fulton and my twin brother Jeff Fulton) “8-Bit Rocket”. The subtitle “Garage Launched Games” signifies where we are coming from. While we do spend much of our time at our actual jobs (to be revealed later) making web-based games and entertainment, this site is not really about those projects. While we might mention them here, the work here is separate. This site is dedicated to midnight coders, garage games, and making your ideas come alive one hour at a time, at night, while the kids are asleep

I know I can definitely relate to that.

Some recent gems from their tutorials section include, Creating an Optimized AS3 Game Timer Loop, a series of ‘Moving From Flash AS2 To Flash AS3 Articles’ like this one, and a nice 4-part series on recreating the Atari 7800 Asteroids game starting here.

Overall, the gist of the site is a bunch of coders having fun making flash games. If you have any interest at all in actionscript gaming I recommend you take a look at 8-bit Rocket.

SmallWorlds - The Everything Web 2.0 Flex Mashup

Smallworlds.com is a pretty neat concept. It’s a virtual world similar to the Sims but centered around your Web 2.0 activity - you know, stuff like Youtube videos, Flickr images, Twitter, and Last.fm music. The app was created using Flex and requires Flash 9.

From the site:

SmallWorlds is a 3D virtual world that runs inside your web browser. It enables you to build your own room, house, or even your own world, and fill it with a wide variety of items and fun activities.

With your online friends and acquaintances, you can share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to your favourite band browsing through photo galleries, and so much more

SmallWorlds will go into a public beta on June 2. See more coverage of it over on TechCrunch.

Mochi Media Snatches MySpace Exec

From TechCrunch.  Mochi Media just announced they have hired the former head of West Coast sales for MySpace, Carol Werner.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mochi Media - they have a set of flash-centric services including flash ads for games, analytics, and javascript developer tools.

From the CrunchBase:

Mochi Media is a San Francisco, CA based company that helps game developers around the world to monetize and distribute their games. The core product, MochiAds, is a platform focused around providing independent game developers with game analytics,…

gamepoetry - An Entity Framework for Games

Panayoti over at gamepoetry.com just posted an article about Entity Frameworks for Games. From the article:

Very few games can escape the need for an Entity framework. An Entity framework defines the core pieces of interactivity for your game. Over the years, I have implemented and reimplemented Entity frameworks dozens of times. In the interests of easing the development process and providing stable libraries on which to rapidly build games (rather than simply create technology), I introduce the following Entity framework that will become the foundation of more advanced topics in game engine development.

Personally, I’m a big fan of gamepoetry.com  - some other articles I like a lot are Understanding the Game Loop and Frame Based Code Sucks!

Flash Player 10 Beta Out

Ryan Stewart, RIA evangelist for Adobe, announced on his blog that Flash Player 10 Beta is now available.  Below are some of the latest features and APIs for the player.  Most exciting to me?  Better Support for Hardware Acceleration!

We’ve also added hardware support for bitmaps, filters, video, and blend modes. You can push all of the rendering duties for those off to the video card in the users machine which should give an automatic performance boost for a lot of very graphic-heavy applications

Sounds like game developers heaven to me.  Anyways, here’s Ryan’s full list:

Rich Text Layout
With Flash Player 10 we’ve exposed new text APIs that will let you create your own text rendering controls. We’re going to be releasing a bunch but if there are things you want to do, you’ll be able to create your own as well. We’ve now got support for bi-directional text, vertical text, and complex scripts along with new layout and flow options. This should meet and exceed what you can do in HTML today and with this release text in Flash Player will no longer be behind.

3D Effects
We’ve also added new APIs to let you create 3D effects inside of the player. You’ll be able easily create very interactive experiences inside and do animation of 2D planes in the 3D world.

Custom Filters and Effects
With the new Adobe Pixel Bender you’ll be able to create your own filters and effects to use and share with other Flashers. You can do all kinds of visual transformations and bring those into your Flash and Flex apps. It’s going to make for some very impressive interfaces.

Dynamic Streaming
We’ve now got the ability in the Flash Player to dynamically change the video quality depending on the bandwidth that you’ve got when you’re watching it. That means we can make sure that you’re getting the best quality possible on the fly. This is probably one of my favorite features in the new Flash Player.

More Hardware Acceleration
We’ve also added hardware support for bitmaps, filters, video, and blend modes. You can push all of the rendering duties for those off to the video card in the users machine which should give an automatic performance boost for a lot of very graphic-heavy applications. We also have an option that will let you specify an HTML attribute when you embed SWFs in the browser to “paint” that SWF using the video card on the machine. This means you’ll get a similar boost to the one you get when you go full screen for video.

File Access
Justin reminded me of the new File APIs which let you prompt the user with a File Dialog box and instead of uploading it to a server you can take that file and load it directly into the Flash Player. You’ll also be able to save content from Flash Player directly to the File system which opens up some cool possibilities.

There’s a ton of stuff in the Flash Player 10 and I’m excited to see what you think. The player team keeps packing a ton of stuff in. If you’ve got suggestions for Flash Player 11, let us know. And thanks for giving Flash Player 10 an early spin.

Flex Builder 3 and Subversion

Are you using Flex Builder 3 from adobe but want to integrate Subversion? Check out the latest article on as3gaming.com, helpfully titled Flex Builder 3 And Subversion.

From the Article:

Setting up Flex Builder 3 with a Subversion client, like Subversive or Subeclipse is easy. Since Flex Builder 3 is built on Eclipse, it comes with built-in support for just about any plugin that works with Eclipse which makes Adobe’s move to go to with an Eclipse based IDE a smart one.

This tutorial assumes that you already have subversion installed on a server somewhere, or on your local machine.