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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.

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Update: This bug has long been fixed by Adobe. Please ignore this post, Flex 3 is wonderful!

Makes 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!

The 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.

I’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).

The 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.

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I’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!

I finally came to play a bit more with AIR and it’s specific features and wrote a small tool that is helpful for freelancers like you and me to make pricing estimation calculations. With FEAT you can calculate your hourly rate based on your expenses and some other factors and it provides a wizard to calculate project pricing estimates (another thing that is hard to get used to for many freelancing starters). It also stores all your values and changes its color if you want and can cook coffee and wash vegetables and …. ok wait, the last part is not true but still, this is a nifty little tool! Find more info and download at this LINK!

Normally when Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) asks the user for a consent when launching an application that is deemed insecure, the desktop will fade dark while the consent window is shown. While I recommend to always leave UAC turned on, this desktop dimming can get annoying very quickly.
Fortunately this behavior can be disabled so that the consent window is still shown without dimming the whole desktop. To turn this off follow these steps …

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By default Vista adds installed games to the Vista Games Folder when they are started for the first time. However there are many games that are not added automatically. It is possible to drag and drop a shortcut icon of a game onto the Game Window but only the icon is displayed then without any box art or additional information.
There is a workaround to add your own games to the Game Window completely with box art and other infos. This is more of a hack since it is not officially supported and since you have to tamper around in the Registry you should know what you are doing. Also you have to repeat the following steps for every game that you want to add which can be tiresome if you want to add many. Here’s the step-by-step guide to add your games …

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Despite there seems to be no visible option to turn Autologin on in Vista it is still possible to activate it. The feature is a bit hidden and not directly accessible through the Control Panel. If you ever are the only person using your computer there is no purpose in always having to log into your account. Here are the steps to turn on Autologin …

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Some people found that the link to rate the Vista Experience Index was gone on their system so they weren’t able to re-measure the Experience Index again after for example hardware changes were made. The following steps show how to repair this. Note that this requires making modifications to the system registry! I recommend to always make a backup of the registry (with regedit) before making any changes to it!

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Why this is turned off by default is beyond me but Microsoft must be thinking this is useful to users. It is not! There are still people who actually don’t know how make the file extensions visible and there are people who don’t even know that filenames normally have an extension. Displaying file extensions has the advantage that you know immediately with what file type you are dealing (that is unless the file extension was set wrong). But if you can see an .exe extension on an unknown file it is a lot more helpful than just counting on the file’s icon. To turn on ‘show file extensions’ follow these simple steps:

1. Go to Start Menu/Control Panel and double click the Folder Options icon
2. Click the View tab and in the Advanced Settings list uncheck the item called Hide extensions for known file types
3. Click Ok and you are finished