mdm is working on a new tool named Rebus that can turn AS3 (and Flex2) files into .NET2 executables. It’s still in beta but registered users can download and test it. I’ve did a quick test and compiled my SWNameGen with Rebus and it went surprisingly smooth and flawless. It will offer some new and interesting extensions, to quote from the mdm support forums …
Mike Morearty of Adobe wrote in his blog how to change the syntax colors in Flex Builder 2.0. This is useful stuff since I loathe the default blue and green colors of Flex’s syntax colors. Think about it! If you code the whole day long you have to look at your source all day long and you will look all the time at these colors! Sooner or later you start wearing blue shirts and green pants with pink socks! 
To know this is even more important since Mike states in one of the comments that Flex 2.0 will not have any preferences to change these colors and that such a feature might be part of a later version. Another thing about the default syntax style that confuses me is that strings in quotes are in bold while keywords are not. I usually have it vice versa.
Short answer: no! Full answer here. However when I had Flex2 beta2 installed, I deleted the JRE that installed with Flex because I already had the JRE 5.0 installed and it caused no problems at all. I don’t really like the idea that every application installs it’s own JRE on my harddisk (Maya is such another app). Not that the ~50Mb are wasting too much space but its getting confusing if there are many JRE’s installed and Windows doesn’t make this fact easier with it’s obscure environment variables configuration.
Everybody has probably by now blogged about this but Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall are writing a Commodore C64 emulator in ActionScript 3.0! It is still to early to tell how this will take shape but things are looking good so far and by the current state the basic ROM works already. Try it and type the following listing in …
10 POKE 646,1
20 PRINT "C64 IN FLASH!"
30 POKE 53281,2::::::::::::::::::::POKE 53281,10
40 GOTO 30
Note that you need the latest Flash Player PlugIn (9.0) to see this. Either way this is exciting stuff and shows how powerful AS 3.0 and Flash Player 9 are going to be. Additionally the current beta player is a debug-only version that throttles the speed down several times. The final Player might be quite a bit faster.
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 chosen 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).
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!
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?!
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!
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.
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.
Recent Comments