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.
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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.
More funny stuff from the GTA front, check out www.videogamesareevil.com! Aah I love it when people get cynical! And if you are up to more fun in the same direction, watch the vids at www.purepwnage.com, for example Meet FPS Doug!
Cats are just cool! They are most independent from us humans but sometimes they let us get closer to them. If that is happening, it is also sometimes possible to use them as a storage space for all kinds of things from pizza boxes to babies! Yes, cats are actually more trustworthy than one might think! Here is the witness: stuffonmycat.com! It’s even better than the Infinity Cat Project, an endless loop of cats sitting in front of computer screens and seeing the photo of other owners cats who are sitting in front of the screen. It makes me want to have a cat again because cats simply rock!
From the good old days of low-res pixeling to todays high resolution blood
Videogame violence anno 1984 - Jack The Ripper (C64) ...
Sex and violence was a topic in video games since the early days of computer game history. Some people might not have realized it but there was always an urge to use forbidden topics in a virtual scenario not just since recently. Even among the first text adventures were subjects with quite a lot of (fictional) violence and blood. Remember The Lurking Horror from Infocom, a horror text adventure or Jack The Ripper which already introduced some graphical images of violence.
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Found this classified a while ago in a BBS signature …
… And damn I thought that’s the guy I saw last month when I traveled back into 1629 by modifying my microwave oven into a time machine! You can never say that there are too many boring people in the world!
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.
We’ve been to her majesty’s sisters house in Koga the last weekend which is around 1h from Tokyo and spent a lazy Saturday/Sunday there and mostly played games on the GBA and PS2 of my niece in law which convinced me enough to buy a Gameboy again and so I’ve went to buy a black GBA SP last week. A great yield!
My favorite GBA game of the moment for it is GT3 Advance Pro Concept Racing! This game means a lot of racing fun on the Gameboy! The track design isn’t really 3D but uses mode7 which means it is rather a flat plane with the track on it and several obstacle sprites on it but IMHO looks better than the clumsy graphics of Collin McRae Rally.
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More Shoot’em’up goodness can be found at Shmups!, a website dedicated to 2D Shooter games with plenty of reviews and information from Katakis on the C64 over Z-Out on Amiga up to Ketsui on Arcade machines! Z-Out wasn’t the best Shooter maybe but Chris Huelsbeck’s music on level 4 and 6 was brilliant! I still like the music of Gunbird a lot!
I’ve bought an Owltech PC-0301 today! That’s an adapter in form of a 5 1/2 inch drive bay insert which offers two ports for connecting Playstation controllers to the PC and use them for a crapload of things. They not only perform well for usual PC games but also worked great on PSX Emu’s and WinVice and WinUAE and MAME32 and… well that where the ones which I’ve tested so far. Gunbird with PSX Analogue Control rocks! Installation was super-easy with plugging to a free USB port and a 3-click-long driver installation from the included CD.
I’ve installed SuSE Linux v9.1 a couple of days ago on my now secondary PC and after 2-3 days also managed to get rid of that ugly default KDE desktop look and turned it into a somewhat bearable view.
Honestly when do the interface designers stop smoking strange things and come back to a neat and clear GUI design? The icons of the default KDE were huge (48px) and even looked way to big on my 1280×1024 resolution. The initially chosen color palette can only be described as atrocity and the default wallpaper was of minor quality! When flapping out the kicker menu (that’s basically the same as the windows start menu) again huge icons and text is thrown at you and shine in a multitude of fancy colors with soft edges as if they want to compete with the Teletubbies! Who ever had the idea to introduce 24 bit colored icons: here comes my hand and whips to your face!
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I know what you think! And you are right! I’ve been absent for a while again from here but there are reasons for it. I’m working on a bigger scale personal Flash Project since shortly. As soon as I can tell more about it I will open a Flash category here to post more of Flash things like news about the project, actionscripting tips and code snippets which might be useful!
More and more people becoming something like a Retro-game-developer which is good news! It seems recently even the now young generation loves to play videogames that have an age of 10 years and beyond. Today’s games come with high class super realtime rendered 3D graphics and cinematic atmosphere but still the games from yesterday keep their spirit. I believe the reason for this comes a lot from the fact that the simplified graphic of old games allows more room for one’s own fantasy. While today’s high class 3D games look good while you play them (a decent hardware assumed), classics from the 8 and 16bit era look always good – in a gadget-likewise way.
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We’ve been to the Star Wars Science and Art exhibition in Ueno yesterday. It was held in the Basement halls of the National Science Museum and I can tell it was worth the visit!
They had tons of models present which were used in the movies, from the Millenium Falcon and Star Destroyers to AT-AT walkers and the original sized Pod Racers. Also most of the costumes where put on dummies and it was very interesting to see how lo-fi the costumes from the ‘old’ episodes actually are but how real they look in the movies. The space ships were probably the most impressive things there! The 61x76x21 inch model of the Falcon was a good example on how to make a space ship model look authentic, it looked rusty, dirty and had details like laser shot holes in the hull.
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