Year / 2005

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

by Grant Skinner

GLIC: WTF?

The question everyone (or at least someone) is asking: Where The Fudgesicles is GLIC? Well, it hasn’t died an untimely death, but it obviously hasn’t been released yet either.

It is getting closer. The papers are all at the lawyer, and we’re doing the final review on it. I’m not going to give a date that it will be released though, because we’ve missed a few approximate timelines by a wide margin already and I don’t want to disappoint anyone further.

The business side of things is obviously taking way longer than I expected, and I apologize to anyone who has been waiting for the components. Believe me, it’s been quite frustrating for me to have a functionally complete set of components, and not be able to sell them, but hopefully it will all work soon. These components really are awesome, and I can’t wait to see what people do with them.

More news soon (I hope!).

And no, this is not an April fools joke. 🙂

by Grant Skinner

New 3D Flash Game: Puki, The Swarm

The Puki have landed! My latest “experimental” venture was into the land of 3D, which is an area I haven’t explored much in the past. What started with an abstract concept to create a set of 3d classes, and render a view of a tunnel, has blossomed into a full featured 3d game, the first of its kind (first person shooter) that I am aware of in Flash. With help from my team (lots of beta testing, especially since the highscores went in), I have pretty much finished the game, and am releasing it now as a beta. Click any of the screenshots below to play it, and please leave any feedback or bugs in the comments below. This is the first full game we’ve built purely for the fun of it (ie. non-commercial) at gskinner.com, and we’re all excited to hear what you think.

Be sure to read the tips at the beginning of each level, they have some good info. And keep your eyes peeled for easter eggs (a few days late for easter, but there nonetheless).

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by Grant Skinner

New 3d Flash Game: Coming Soon

I thought I’d give this a quick blog, as it’s now exposed via the FitC awards page anyway. In my spare time over the past little while I’ve been working on a first person shooter in Flash (perhaps the first Flash fps?) using our new set of 3d classes. Considering it started mainly as a technical experiment, it’s looking pretty good, and is actually fun to play (though maybe not as instantly addicting as the 1kb asteroids game). I’m just putting on the finishing touches now, and should be releasing it sometime late next week.

Here’s a screenshot in the interim (scaled down to fit in the blog).

And before anyone asks… glic news coming next week, I promise.

by Grant Skinner

FitC Awards: 2X Finalist

The FitC award finalists have been posted, and I’m happy to see that I made the list for Best Canadian Developer and Experimental. Pretty cool to be listed with all those other smart folk. Click on over and check out all the great work. Also, be sure to check out fellow Canuck Craig Swann, who’s on the list three times this year, including Best Canadian Studio – nice work Craig.

I’ll be speaking at FitC this year and hope to see some of you there.

by Grant Skinner

Getting Married in June

I don’t usually post about my personal life, but I think that the news is relevant, both because I’m marrying the wonderful woman who has made my professional life possible, and because a large number of fellow Flashers have gotten to know Bobi as she accompanied me to conferences worldwide. She has loved and supported me through thick and thin – encouraging me when things were bad, keeping me sane and focused when things were good. Perhaps most amazingly, she’s put up with me, and my rather nerdy obsessions for almost 9 years – in the first few years of our relationship she would even sit on the phone and listen to me mumble while I coded. I’m excited to be marrying such a beautiful person (inside and out), and am looking forwards to many more years of laughing, loving and sharing.

by Grant Skinner

Gesture Recognition in Flash

This is an older experiment, but I think it’s still fairly interesting, and I wanted to post it to the blog so that it has a home on my site. This system demonstrates converting user gestures into machine readable information – in this case, it simulates Palm graffiti recognition. Click and drag to write graffiti characters on the input pad, and the system will convert them into characters on screen. Supports almost the full range of graffiti inputs including letters, numbers, uppercase, backspace and punctuation.

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by Grant Skinner

Publish List Panel

Here’s a super simple panel for Flash MX 2004 that lets you quickly assemble a list of FLAs that you would like to compile as a group. It’s not really a finished product as it doesn’t remember the list after you close the panel, but I thought it might be useful to some people (a couple of my developers are using it on a project right now).

To use:

  1. install the MXP and restart Flash

  2. open the panel from Window > Other Panels > Publish List

  3. open a few FLAs, and click the add one button to add the focused FLA to the list, or click the add all button to add all open FLAs to the publish list.

  4. you can remove FLAs by selecting them in the list and clicking the remove button

  5. click the publish button to publish all of the FLAs in the list

You can download the publish list panel by clicking here. If this interests you, be sure to check out the much more powerful (but harder to use) batch compiler JSFL I released previously.

by Grant Skinner

To _root, or not to _root?

Stacey Mulcahy posted on her blog last night asking “Why is _root evil personified“. I posted a bit of a long-winded reply, which I decided to flesh out and re-post here, mainly so that I have my own record of it to point people to when they ask this question (it seems to come up a lot). She also followed up asking the same question about _global, which can be answered in exactly the same manner.
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