This is vaguely Flash related. Macromedia heve released DRK3, with lots of new fun bits and pieces. The thing is that they made Mike Chambers do some publicity shots for it. I have to admit I found it kind of weird, but Mike (we’re obviously on first name terms :)) has taken it all in his stride. He now has a competition running where the best “altered” publicity image will win a copy of the DRK. Some of the entries are superb – my Favourite so far is the donut one.
When I’m making an application, I always come up against having to track the current depth, so I can attach objects to the new depth. I’m just starting out on the whole oop path, but this seems to make it a no-no to have a variable to keep track of this. I stumbled across this post and I reckon it could be really useful.
I spent ages this afternoon trying to work out why an onEnterFrame script wouldn’t work. Neither would a setInterval script(my preferred method). Turns out it was the machine – I mailed the script to another machine and – hey presto – it worked beautifully. after a reboot, the script worked fine on the other machine too. one to remember for another time.
(drool)
// returns true if file is on specified server.
// returns false if file is not on specified server.
// server format - http://www.myDomain.com
function atHome(myDomain){
if(_root._url.indexOf(myDomain)==0){
text1=true;
}else if(_root._url.indexOf("file://")==0){
text1=false;
}else{
text1=false;
}
return text1;
}
I’m waiting for Moock’s book to arrive from Amazon, and I’m kind of excited. Aside from having a pleasingly alliterative name, it’s also THE BEST reference guide for Flash MX actionscript. I’ve decided to use the opportunity to try out an amazon associates link, so click to buy the book from Amazon:uk?us. If you do, I’ll earn a little money (not that I’m expecting to make a million :D)
Sean Corfield has been good about keeping us informed about the performance of minority browsers (opera, safari, etc) on the new Macromedia site, and with the Macromedia tools in general. A week or two ago he posted about the problems that some browsers were having with binary posting.
Since then, Opera have released Opera 7.10 for Windows, which now supports flash remoting!!! yaaay! I really like experimenting with remoting, and having to open up IE every time to test was annoying me. now I can test in the comfort of my own (preferred) browser.
A couple of advertising agencies have started making popular adverts available in Flash. There are two which I’ve recently enjoyed. This Advert for Tennents Lager has been on in cinemas recently (I go to the cinema quite a lot). It made me laugh a lot. The advert’s great, but the flash implementation isn’t so hot. For a kick off, it lookds like the video has been compressed and then re-compressed for Flash. There are some visible compression artifacts, which I’ve mainly seen in non-quicktime video. There is a link to an mpeg version (noice if you want to download and keep it) and I think that this might have been the version that was compressed for Flash. If you want to compress video for flash, start with as uncompressed an original as you can find, and then bring it into Flash (or, if you’re actually serious, Sorenson Squeeze) and compress it there. Squeeze can also output other video formats for you. It is well worth experimenting with the compression settings. It may be my browser settings but it seems not to know when it’s cached, and keep reloading every time I visit the page. The preloading is also a little uninspired, but since this is more of a press release than a consumer site, it’s maybe understandable. I’ve always loved the way that Looney Toons give you a game to play while the cartoon loads.
This advert for Honda cars (which is fabulous in itself – apparently the only bit of CGI in the whole thing is the exhaust rolling, linking two pieces of painstakingly set up pieces of genius) is part of a much better experience. it is built into a flash interface, which does not wait for the whole movie to download before playing, rather it buffers the appropriate amount of video and therefore starts much more quickly. It also gives me the opportunity to select a video quality appropriate for my bandwidth.
I can tell some of these blog entries are going to be very random. I haven’t done anything technical today, so here goes. I was visiting in Moffat in southern Scotland today. I went to one of my favourite shops in the world. The Moffat Toffee Shop is a great place, which has almost any kind of sweet (candy) you can imagine. Since it’s Easter Sunday today, I spoiled my self and bought some Toffifee chocolates. I leave the nuts, but love the chocolate-toffe combo.
I’ve just been to a ceilidh (pronounced Kaylee for anyone who doesn’t know) and I’m knackered. If you don’t know what a ceilidh is you’re missing out. I can’t dance at all (disco style) but with ceilidh everyone is following a set dance. it’s great fun (as long as nobody cares when you make mistakes, and nobody usually does) Anyway, I’ve looked around and found a couple of ceilidh links. This site contains instructions for dances. This is the ceilidh cd we were using.
I started learning flash about 2 1/2 years ago, just after flash 5 was released (has it really been that long??) One of the first things I started doing was making games. I sat down and recreated lots of the old favourites – simon, pick pairs, shootout. When I look at the files now, they may look shocking from a coding point of view, but they do work. Anyway, if you’re interested in game design, you may find some of the articles on gamedev.net useful. Have fun.