Categories
Flash

Never Finishing Anything

I work in an office. until we moved buildings there was quite a lot of space and, occasionally, to get around the office, I’d push myself around on my chair. A colleague of mine is working on a tank game and he wants to make it multiplayer. I was looking at it and moving around on my chair and he suggested I make a game where I whizz around on my chair. THAT is the sort of game I might enjoy. I played around a bit with it earlier and I think I may play about with the concept this weekend.

Categories
Personal

Which X Man Are You?


Which X2 Character Are You?

Categories
Internet

Another Opera Update

As Ive said before, I really like the Opera browser, but sometimes it does things that annoy me. One of these which had confused me, but which I thought was a configuration is fixed, according to the Changelog for Opera 7.11 for Windows. Now, when I type into a flash app, it won’t do funny things to Opera.

Categories
Coldfusion

Data for my Grid Game

I’ve always stored the grid information for my game as a comma delimited string(2,2,2,2,2,2,1,1,2,3,5,1,1,1,1 . . ..) This was because I had to have a reasonably efficient way of passing it into Flash. My only problem was that I used Flash’s String.split method to split this string into an array. Now in Flash 5 it took about 8 seconds (there are about 500 elements in the grid). Even using Branden Hall’s String Function Rewrites it took about 5 seconds. The Flash MX Player, with its optimised code for dealing with strings still took several seconds. It meant that my movie would freeze for the period during which it split the string.

But now, courtesy of the wonder that is flash remoting, I can pass complex data structures into flash, so I decided to let Coldfusion do the job and then just pass the array to Flash. New problem – CFMX doesn’t have an exact duplicate of flash’s String.split. After looking dolefully at the reference for a while, and thinking it would take me a while to replicate this functionality, I looked in Google and, lo and behold, there it was. On cflib.org they have lots of handy functions which you can include in your own files, and this one has saved my bacon. the server call still takes about a second, but my Movie isn’t sitting around waiting for it, it can be doing other stuff.

Categories
Flash

My Grid game

I’ve been working on a grid game in Flash for Ages. That’s not quite right. It’s been on the go for ages, but I haven’t really touched it for ages. It’s been so long that I think i am going to have to rewrite the thing totally to get it back into my head. It was also written before Flash MX was released, so I can take advantage of some of the new features in there. I was thinking about trying to turn the game grid into a component, but I think that I might be trying to run before I can walk.

It’s basically a grid based game where you run around collecting keys to open particular doors and then collecting the objects that are in the room. A the moment it has a Harry Potter theme, as most of my completed games did (I had to pick something, and that ended up being it)

Anyway, the bit that really interested me was that I could have the whole thing be dynamic, and allow people to create their pwn levels. I managed that mostly, but never saw it through properly. I think that, now I know more about Flash, I’ll do a better job.

Anyway, here is as far as I got (except without the “input” movie.

Categories
Flash

Playing about


//create a 10 by 10 movieclip in the library and export for AS as "mcBox"

var gridRows = 35;
var gridCols = 40;
var squareSize = 10;
var myWidth = gridCols*squareSize;
var limit = gridRows*gridCols*squareSize;
for(var i=0;i

Categories
Personal

Separated at Birth

I go to the cinema about once a week, which means I can also watch stuff that isn’t a big blockbuster, or that I wouldn’t otherwise necessarily see. So this week I saw the 25th Hour which I enjoyed enough to still be thinking about it. I was slightly disturbed though, because (and this will mean little to you if you aren’t from the UK) Edward Norton is sporting the Noel Edmonds beard and bouffon hairdo. see for yourself (these were the best pictures I could find).