Font Creation with Flex
Sunday, May 18th, 2008Fontstruct 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!
Author Archive
Jagged Alliance: Deadly Groping
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008While 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.
A Love Letter to Flash
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Not from myself but I’d like to second his words … A Love Letter to Flash
ActionScript3 Dice Class
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
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.
Container bug in Flex3 beta2
Friday, October 19th, 2007Makes 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!
FDT 3 is final!
Monday, October 15th, 2007The guys at Powerflasher done a great job! Check out their new FDT 3 at fdt.powerflasher.com. Personally this has become once again my favorite coding tool (after an over one year break with FlexBuilder’s editor). FDT has many features that one would otherwise only find in superior tools like Eclipse’s own Java Development Tool … and these are top notch! FDT is now shipped in three different versions, Basic, Professional and soon an Enterprise version which will add a Debugger, MXML Parser and advanced Refactoring.
I’m especially looking forward to the MXML Parser since in it’s current state FDT only allows for pure ActionScript projects. The MXML Parser would make it possible to add Flex and Adobe AIR projects to the roll.
Animated Bitmap Class Update
Friday, September 28th, 2007I’ve updated the AnimatedBitmap class so that it now uses an external timer object to trigger the animation. The advantage of this is that one timer can be used for many animated objects that use the same framerate. For this purpose a custom FrameRateTimer class has been added. This saves memory and CPU cycles when many animated objects are used.
I will eventually add an AnimatedDisplayObjectManager class later with that many animated objects can be controlled at once (e.g. stop/play all sprites at once) but this will probably be more intervened with the whole framework (as it might make use of custom data structures).
Animated Bitmap Class
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007The AnimatedBitmap class provides functionality for Bitmap objects that are animated by using a series of still images. When creating a new AnimatedBitmap you provide a BitmapData object that contains an image that consists of the ’single-frame’ images for the animation.
FDT 3.0 is Open Beta!
Monday, September 3rd, 2007I’ve joined the closed beta of FDT 3.0 a couple of weeks ago and saw that there was steady progress in bug fixing with around 3-4 updates every week. Now the guys at Powerflasher started the Open Beta which everybody can join by visiting the FDT Forum.
FDT 3.0 is pure coding comfort indeed! After using it you’ll agree that the Flex ActionScript editor looks like a poor excuse compared to FDT! There are all the features for ActionScript 3.0 that also were in FDT 1 and a lot of new stuff. Luxurious syntax coloring and semantic syntax highlighting, code templates,my number one favorite feature Mark Occurences, code formatter, quick fixes, Flash IDE and Flex compiler support, limited refactoring and more.
Now all I wish for is that FDT works flawlessly together with Flex/AIR projects but that will probably come at a later date since getting a stable release is more important now. It kind of feels awkward if you have to go back to the Flex AS editor once you used FDT!
Alcon
Thursday, August 30th, 2007
Alcon is a lightweight debugging tool for ActionScript developers that provides several straightforward and quickly accessible methods to debug any ActionScript 2 or ActionScript 3 application, be it from the Web Browser, the standalone Flash Player or an AIR Runtime. It offers an easy way to output debug information from anywhere, not just while in the Flash IDE or in the Flex Debugger. It comes packed with an Application Monitor that can monitor the framerate and memory consumption, an Object Inspector for viewing the properties of any Object, Array or Class and up to two File Loggers. Alcon runs on any platform that supports Adobe AIR and can be used with the Flex compiler, the Flash IDE or MTASC.
