Alcon 3 is in the works! The new version is being written for Adobe AIR and that means no more hackish OS integration! Thanks to AIR the debugging tool will run nice and smooth on any supported OS and it will restore your windows size and position where you last left it, Stay On Top works properly, auto-update etc. etc. etc.
Some of the new features besides the already existing Trace Command and File Loggers are a Memory Consumption and Frames-Per-Second Monitor, a completely new and improved Object Inspector that is finally useful for Debugging, an Options dialog to comfortably configure Alcon, proper AS2 support and a couple of other minorities here and there.
The progress moves on quick enough that I dare to say that the release date is only a few weeks away from now so sit tight, it’ll be there in a heartbeat.
In case you’re wondering what happened on this site besides that it has been visually overhauled … two of my older blogs have now been merged with Hidden Resource. One, Dataleak, was my very first blog that I used for mainly writing about computer games, especially old ones. However Dataleak turned more and more into a abandoned net corpse and because there were quite some articles on it which I found have nostalgic value I decided to take them over to HDRS. Then there was Vista Tweaking, a blog I’ve started to post tweaks for Windows Vista. The few postings from that site have been consolidated into HDRS as well. I also had the idea on the back burner about starting an audio blog since audio production is one of my many interests. But a man has only so much time and maintaining three or four blogs is clearly a chore. Just think about all the updates, handling Spam etc.
In this tutorial I will explain how to create a relatively realistic looking galaxy with Photoshop. I was searching the web up- and downwards to find any tutorials that could tell me how to get a similar fantastic result. There are like 100.000 planet tutorials out there and the few tutorials which were about creating a galaxy where either very basic or the result looked like everything but a realistic galaxy. The galaxy I wanted should have looked massive and intricate … just like the real ones but with a slightly more artistic touch. I’ve needed a galaxy that I could use as a star map for a space-themed roleplaying game design and the image you see above is a part of the result. Let’s go try to do such one …
Kore 2 from Native Instruments is probably every sound organizer’s wet dream with sugar on top. Not only can it control a multitude of Softsynths but it’s database makes it easy to organize sounds and find them quickly when needed. I’ve purchased this nice tool last December and what’s better than telling a few details on how I put it’s features to good use?!
Download: dark & modern looking UI skin for Ableton Live 6/7.
A while back I’ve created a custom skin for Ableton Live with this handy freeware skin editor. The editor dates back to Live 6 but it seems that skins made with it work just fine in Live 7. Live’s approach to UI design is very minimalistic which I think is a step into the right direction but the default color palettes are not everyone’s taste. I’ve been using this skin since a couple of months and it works nicely so here is Dark2008, a dark - but readable - theme for Ableton Live 6 and 7.
Fontstruct is an online font creator whose editor has been obviously developed with Flex. Users can register and design their own fonts which are made available for download. Looks slick!
While Jagged Alliance is without discussion one of the finest squat squad-based strategy games ever made that has seen the daylight, I especially enjoy the ‘personal’ characteristics that the mercenaries bring with them and the frivolous Butt Groping demonstrated in this clip shows this side of JADG nicely. The map seen in this video is one of the scenarios that can be found here.
In game development randomness is often necessary for certain tasks, be it the random distribution of graphic tiles, a random factor in NPC AI or random stats in a roleplaying game. Especially for the latter purpose the static Dice class provides a set of methods to roll dice as it is common in a Role-playing game, to be exact four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, twenty-sided and percentile dice.
Update: This bug has long been fixed by Adobe. Please ignore this post, Flex 3 is wonderful!
Makes me wonder why nobody else has yet written anything about this bug … when using any container component like for example a Panel or TitleWindow with a different borderStyle than the default, e.g. borderStyle: solid all your contents of that container reach into the the chrome of the Panel/Window/etc. pretty much messing up your layout. How could this escape the eyes of Adobe’s Flex devs? Here’s the thread at Adobe’s Flex forum. This is bad because it sort of prevents me from writing any Flex/AIR applications until this issue has been fixed, I’m using a custom theme for all my projects that use a solid borderStyle (similar to the one used in the Flex Style Explorer). The marvels of open beta software pushed by corporations for mere publicity purpose!
These are the adventures of a random guy trying to be an independant game developer, utilizing ActionScript for programming and talking abouting gaming and nonsense in general.
I finally spend some time to make myself more familiar with the Flex 2 Beta and this is what came out as a result: Star Wars Name Generator! It’s a small and modest tool to generate random names (obviously). If you’re a fan of the Star Wars Pen & Paper Role-playing game (like me) you...
