turn-based glory and pixel pleasure

I’ve been designing on a rather ambitious Role-Playing game project since a while now (in fact quite a long while but I’m not in hurry to finish it anytime soon) and while I’m in the process of working out the story, technical details like the combat mechanics, skill system etc. and creating interesting characters I still haven’t made a decision on the type of graphical projection for the game so far. I’ve been thinking about five kinds of projection from the most basic one (2D orthographic) up to full dynamic 3D which would be quite an effort. As my development platform of choice happens to be Flash, the resources in terms of 3D are limited.

So with that in mind I thought it would be good opportunity to introduce some of the most-used projections in computer and video role-playing games to get to know them a little better. This is by no means a complete list of all sorts of projection used in games but I believe these the ones most commonly used for role-playing games.

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Recently there has been a lot of uproar about ActionScript from some of the more nominated ActionScript developers. People like Joa Ebert, Nicolas Canasse, Andre Michelle and Peter Elst spoke off their dissatisfaction about the current state of ActionScript, that’s it’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, that Adobe isn’t open enough about their plans with the Flash platform, that ActionScript has become too OOP, etc. etc. And though all this bashing hurts, they all got a point about their complaints.

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Let’s burrow some in my FDT templates crate … how often do you have to add a child display object to another display object? If the answer is ‘very often’ then this small FDT template might save you some time.

${property} = new ${cursor};
addChild(${property});

It’s very simple but effective. Usage: Let’s for example name this template “newDisplayObject” and after invoking it with CTRL+SPACE you start typing the name of the display object property that you defined as a class property before which then should be auto-completed, then you hit TAB and then CTRL+SPACE to quick-insert the type after the ‘new’ operator (FDT is finding the correct type for you) and Voila, you’re finished, no need to add that extra ‘addChild’ manually.

Imagine you’re writing an AIR-based game that uses fullscreen at a rather high resolution and a full-frame rendering engine like, say, PV3D and you find out that AIR can’t really handle this.

After a lot of research it turns out that there seems to be no way in an AIR app to use the GPU mode that is otherwise supported by Flash embedded in HTML via wmodes parameter. In fact the docs state it’s not even supported by AIR …

… Flash Player 10 introduces two window modes, direct and GPU compositing, which you can enable through the publish settings in the Flash authoring tool. These modes are not supported in AIR …

While this is a definitive must for a hopefully soon appearing update there’s another issue with fullscreen modes … AIR doesn’t really feature any decent solution for fullscreen! You can have your app to be either in fullscreen OR in windowed mode but trying to be able to switch between both looks very ugly because the system chrome isn’t being disabled automatically when switching to fullscreen which results in that the window size will simply get maximized. So creating applications where you could let the user switch between fullscreen and windowed mode seems to be impossible at the moment with AIR 1.5.

I can understand that the Flash player on the web needs it’s security restrictions in this regard but AIR should definitely not be touched by this! I hope Adobe will improve this for a future update, AIR is a great platform for (complex) game development but these two issues are serious limitations to that!

Probably old news but I’ve just found some time to read about the recently released pushbutton engine, a modular ActionScript 3 engine tailored especially for game development. It seems that Jeff Tunnel & Co (of Garage Games fame) were sitting down and wrote some serious ActionScript library overnight.

“…and a component system which lets you easily package game functionality into reusable modules. The component system draws on nearly a decade of game development history…”

This looks very promising indeed and the component structure makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been working on the hexagonLib on and off but time is sparse currently and so it seems I would never get it into a decent release state. I Might as well see how the pb engine works out for me. Let’s see how this engine fits for my current role-playing game project!

I’ve been using Eclipse and FDT for several years now to develop Flash (and Flex) applications but I never really managed to set up Eclipse to exactly fit my needs. Either some desired tools were missing or I installed plug-ins that slowed down Eclipse with a truck load of stuff that I never need.

So today I finally figured out how to install the plug-ins that I really need and nothing else (well … almost nothing else). The following guide describes how you can set up your own custom Eclipse tailored for Flash/Flex development which features FDT plus Subclipse, a HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML Editor and then some. The CSS Editor becomes especially useful for Flex Stylesheets.

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Although Alcon version 4 is currently under development I’ve decided to release a small update for Alcon 3, version 3.1 since I’ve received a code signing certificate from Adobe and wanted to keep up with re-releasing the now-signed application on the AIR Market Place.

Besides that Alcon is now code-signed there is exactly one new feature in v3.1 which I called Key Tracer. You can toggle Key Tracing Mode from the Log menu. If you enable it you are able to press any keys and their key code (and if available character code) will be listed in Alcon’s output window which is a useful feature if you want to know the codes for some specific keys quickly.

More features where planned (and already started) like a Search function, Log Level Filtering and even a Calculator but these haven’t made it finished yet into v3 so most of them will come with version 4, which is – yet again – a complete re-write (I do loathe my source code that is over one year old ).

The newest version can as always be found here.

Apple, you really know how to piss off developers! First you want me to pay 99$ just to be able to actually test my iPhone apps on the device then your Shop Order Form does not allow me to set it to English if I’m not living in the US/UK and to top it all your Order system is broken and thanks to that I’m now stuck at a “Thank you for your enrollment!” page without ever having enrolled into anything nor having bought the membership. Worse, you don’t allow me to re-apply the product to the shopping basket so that I might actually be able to buy it!

That’s right, I cannot buy the dev membership now because Apple’s site is obviously broken and thinks I’ve already bought the membership. An advice: DON’T leave the address fill-out page or empty your shopping cart! You will not have a chance later to come back and reach the page that puts the product into your cart.

But enough rant for today! I think I go and write some ActionScript … which is much more fun … and it’s FREE!

I often browse through code libraries written by others and can’t deny noticing that so many developers are making exaggerated use of the ‘this’ keyword in their code. Today I came across CASAlib an otherwise very neat and certainly helpful library and after roaming through some of the code base it turns out that in most classes they’ve put ‘this’ in front of every single class property.

It seems that many newcomers to ActionScript still don’t understand the use of ‘this’ and that it’s only really necessary in rare cases, for example if a method parameter has the same name like it’s relative class property or in a few scope-related situations. It’s also good to have ‘this’ at hand if a dynamic property of a class needs to be accessed (this["foo"]) but other than that please do all a favor and throw out those unnecessary ‘this’! Ban it, lock it in your basement and don’t let it out unless there’s really a need for it!

… until the president election! Do the world a favor and vote for the right guys. And by that I mean not for THEM! People with at least a tad of intelligence now that Barack dances better anyway.