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.

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.

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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I’m going to try to post some of my older work on the blog over the next few months, largely for my own archival purposes, but also because I think a lot of my older stuff was kind of fun and worth revisiting. I’ll probably also post a lot of the source code (when I can find it).

Since yesterday I posted a tiny new game, today I thought I’d post a big old game.

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It never ceases to amaze me how much functionality you can pack into a tiny file with Flash. I started out writing a test for generating random asteroids, and it blossomed into a full-fledged game. Doom III it is not, but considering it’s less than 1kb in size (1020 bytes [UPDATE 04/24] now down to 1007 bytes), I think it’s pretty impressive, having time, points, levels, bonuses and penalties.

Game play is simple: Shoot (click) all of the asteroids before time runs out to progress to the next level. You’ll want to be fast and accurate – you get time bonuses at the end of each level, and are penalized for missed shots. Have fun, and post your best score / level in the comments below.

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About a year ago I released this demo of grid based proximity management, which was loosely based on some work I had done in Flash 5 (at that time I was calling it zone interaction). Briefly, it allows you to determine which sprites on a 2d plane are near to one another. It is very efficient, and can deal with literally hundreds of sprites (the main limitation is usually the sprites motion and graphics, not the proximity management). For instance, with 350 sprites grid based proximity uses about 700 operations whereas normal iterative proximity testing would use about 61000 operations. For a description of the concept, see my original post on the subject.

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As promised, here is the AS2 source code for the Varicose-G experiment that I posted a couple of weeks ago. I stripped out some of the ancillary functionality like the grid and labels to make it easier to understand.

If this helps you out, or you use it somewhere, please let me know in the comments, or by email. It makes releasing this kind of stuff worthwhile.

Click here to download the Flash MX 2004 source files.

While I’m in Sydney, Australlia for MXDU (MX Down Under), I will be running a one day workshop based on my very well-received (if I do say so myself) 3 day Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development workshop. It is being organized by the same amazing folk who organize the conference, and will be running on February 16th (day “0” of the conference).

If you are looking to boost your development skills to the next level, or polish the OO skills you already have, this is a great start. The original workshop received rave reviews (see some of them below) – the most recent run of it (in London, UK) received an average rating of 9.5 out of 10 from the attendees. It has a strong focus on real-world applications, and on delivering a maximum of retainable, applicable knowledge in a minimum of time (I pride myself on pushing attendees to just under the “brain exploding” point).

The full workshop description and reviews are below. For more info, or to sign up, go to http://mxdu.com/go/workshops/enterprise-development.

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