Author Archive
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
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 might find this tool useful!
You can generate names for planets and for characters, there are some parameters that can be choosen from before pressing the Generate button. After that it will spit out a list of more or less useful names (some of them sound very exotic). Interesting names can then be dragged and dropped onto the right side list. All names in this list are stored in local shared object on the users computer until the Clear button is pressed. The Switch button displays the saved names in a text area from where the names can be copied to the clipboard. (Small update: Works now with latest Flash Player v9).
>> Star Wars Name Generator <<
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
Flex 2 public beta3 was just released and already all formerly written Flex2 beta2 apps started to fail working in the newest Flash Player! Seems like Adobe is making critical changes to the framework faster than we can change our pants!
This somehow spoils it for me to write more stuff with Flex until the very final release is published because I’m pretty sure it will fail working in a soon cooming beta4!
Yes, there’s a big and fat beta glued on it so it’s clear that changes are ahead and former stuff might fail but it’s all public and it’s obvious that Adobe isn’t only making it a public beta for testing but also for propaganda! My written SWNameGenerator doesn’t work anymore, giving me a nicely red flooded Eclipse editor full of errors!
Filed under Dev | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
Finally I got myself up to completely overhaul this blog and after a long time of resisting I finally decided to switch to Word Press! Nucleus was a great system but the mysterious problems recently that kept my blog from appearing on newsfeed fetching sites forced me to go the radical way. After all a blog without any visiting readers is a net corpse!
There are still a couple of things I’m missing from Nucleus but Word Press seems to already have a decent palette of plug-ins and themes and I’m in love with the built-in WYSIWYG-Editor! Publishing a new items seems to be a bit slow however!
Filed under Misc | Comments Off
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
If you’re one of the users who would like to see something done about Flash’s neglected sound situation in future then I recommend you to visit the Adobe Labs forum for Flash Player 8.5! there is a thread going on about a sound object request in Flash 8.5+.
Wouldn’t it be cool to really program audio in Flash instead of just using lifeless MP3 or Wav/Aiff streams?!
Filed under Dev | Comments Off
Monday, January 9th, 2006
I am happy to announce the opening of the Flash Game Programming Wiki, a Wiki that is dedicated to the development and programming of games with Flash! The idea for it raised a while after I discovered the Game Programming Wiki, a site that is dedicated to general game programming but doesn’t mention Flash or ActionScript at all.
The FGPWiki is still brandnew and fresh and therefore needs your help with filling it with content. So if you’re one of us Flash game programmers and like to submit, feel free to do so. I will update the site more and more over the next couple of weeks. I hope this will become a huge and freely accessible pool with lots of valueful information for all (aspriring) Flash game writers!
Filed under Dev | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
A development blog about a racing game done in Flash! Some interesting posts there, one about AI for computer controlled racing cars. It seems they will update their blog as development progresses so I will put it on my watch list. I still keep the idea in the back of my mind about writing a ‘view from above’ racing game like Super Cars or Micro Machines.
Filed under Dev | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2005
As a one-man-game developer of worldclass (exaggeration intended!) it’s good to have a bunch of tools at hand that help with the tasks for creating games! In this series I will introduce helpful ‘nice to have’ or even ‘must have’ tools that make a game developers/designers day easier. In this part I will cover Alias SketchBook Pro …
I’ve bought myself a periphery some days ago about which I was pondering to buy for a long time already, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet! I choose the smallest version 4×5 since I’m not a drawing pro and have limited desktop real estate and the smallest one suffices pretty well for just some sketching.
(more…)
Filed under Design | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2005
Alcon is a lightweight external output console for Flash ActionScript that allows developers to view debugging information without relying on the Flash IDE. SWF files can be debugged and monitored no matter if they are in the web browser, Flash Player or a standalone executable. While that Alcon tries to keep inclusion into projects as simple as possible. In fact all that needs to be done is importing the Debug class into a project and you are ready to send debug information to the console with a simple Debug.trace() command.
Included into a project Alcon keeps a small footprint and takes less than a Kilobyte of filesize while still offering some other helpful features.
Filed under Dev | 4 Comments »
Monday, July 11th, 2005
Due to popular demand I’ve put these two JSFL scripts back up again. They are useful for renaming and organizing items in Flash’ Library Panel.
Library Items Renamer v1.2
With LIR you are able to rename a selection of items in the library and set other options like exporting for AS, update them etc. Here are the features …
- Can rename a selection of files in the library to have a new name and a number suffix. For example clip_1, clip_2, clip_3 …
- You are able to only use numbers as names.
- By default numbers start at zero but you can set the suffix number to any beginning value you like.
- Leading zeroes can be used. They are supported up to 4 digits long values.
- Exporting for ActionScript can be toggled on/off.
- Export into first frame can be toggled on/off.
- AS2.0 Linkage Class Name can be set (and removed).
- Renamed items can be moved to a new folder.
- Leaving the Name field empty will only change the other settings, not the Name.
- Items can be updated.
- Export- and Class-settings only affect items of the type ‘movie clip’, ‘graphic’, ‘button’, ‘font’, ’sound’ and ‘component’, while ‘bitmaps’, ‘videos’ and ‘compiled clips’ still can be renamed/moved/updated.
Download Library Items Renamer v1.2
Convert All To Clips v1.0
CATC can convert a selection of items in the library to movieclips, symbols or buttons. Helpful when many items (i.e. bitmaps) needs to be converted. The features are …
- Converts a selection of items in the library to symbols, either movie clips, buttons or graphic symbols.
- The registration point can be set.
- A name prefix can be set.
- Leading zeroes can be used to keep the correct order of the items after conversion.
- Name of the destination folder can be set.
Download Convert All To Clips v1.0
Both files come as a Macromedia MXP format and require the Macromedia Extension Manager for installing.
Filed under Dev | 3 Comments »
