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Our mate Ali has had his Mechanaught game reviewed over at Jay's. We really like the game.


I just finished Arkham Asylum the other day. Fantastic game, believe the hype. All the reviews said it's about 10 hours gameplay, but I've been off the xbox for a while so I'm a bit rusty, it must have taken me more like 12/14 ( I've still got to go back and max those achievements out. I'm a gamer score whore ). That didn't have lives, and just as well as it would be in the bin by now if I got a Game Over after dying 3 times and then sent back a fair way.
That's a 10+ hour game, not a 30min Flash game. A lives mechanic only really works if you can complete the game with the base number of lives, or you can either collect extra ones or have continues ( Or it's pure score attack, Geometry Wars being the perfect example of a popular console shoot'em up with a nasty ol' Game Over ) so you can actually complete it.

I think it's fair to say that there isn't a progressive Flash game with 10 hours playability before the job is done. Yeah you may have played DTD for 10 hours in total ( Which has lives in the form of energy ) but nothing that I know of that's 10 hours from the start of the tale to the conclusion ( Does Dofus count ? Feel free to correct me if it does ).

Lives are a valid mechanic for small Flash games. I'm not saying every game in Flash should use them ( Untold games shouldn't ), but a lot of games suit them, need them in fact. Just to repeat myself, they lengthen the game play ( The game play we can't lengthen with more real content due to budgets ). It may be a slightly artificial and forced way to do it, but in adding a clear risk and reward to the game it works well.
The alternative being ? Grinding out a victory ? I'm old enough to have used infinite lives pokes in games, and no matter how hard you try you soon succumb to the safety / apathy that offers and with no risk you miss out on that all important money shot that is reward.

Squize.

So, it's 21:11h here in Germany now and just 2 minutes ago I wiped off the last item on my todo list for Via Romanum, a word game I've been working on for the last couple of days.

There will be no public release for the next 2 weeks though (I'm on holiday, yehaaa!).

So without going into detail (I'll have to do a quick rant about creating and searching large lists of words and how to make that quick enough to test a whole 10x10 grid for left/right and top/down combinations of letters that might form words)



Off to the beach now ... nGFX

One of our rare political posts on here. Both Olli and myself try and avoid them as we don't speak for each other when it comes to things like politics and religion, and this is meant to be a blog about Flash and our tinkering with it. But sometimes things need to be vented.

The whole ethos of the political system in Britain, and most Western countries, is that you vote for someone to represent your views in Parliament / equivalent. At a maximum every 5 years ( There is no fixed term government in the UK, it's up to the Prime Ministers disgression ) we have a general election where every "seat" in the House of Commons is voted for. The only other time a seat can be contested is during a by-election, which usually comes about due to the current MP ( Member of Parliament ) being taken ill and unable to carry out their duties.

In Britain we don't have the power to "recall" a MP. Recall is basically a vote of no confidence in a MP where through voter power they can lose their seat and a by-election can be called to replace them. Ironically we do have the power to push through a motion of no confidence, but that's not in our hands, that's only available to the opposition parties. If a motion is put forward then the majority of the house of commons has to vote for it for it to be passed. If the government of the day has an overall majority, then unless a lot of it's own members rebel, it's not going to get passed. I can't see many MPs voting to lose their jobs on morale grounds.

In effect, there is no way through voter power to remove either one single MP, or a whole government, until the current Prime Minister sets a date for a general election, or the parliamentary term runs out.

Earlier this year we had the expenses row. MP's more than playing the system, they were effectively stealing from the British public, the tax payers, the people who put them into power basically. They've stolen our money, and we can do nothing at all about it. Nothing.

One of my favourite quotes about it was from the Tory MP Alan Duncan, describing the situation after the expenses row broke, "You have to live on rations and you are treated like shit.". This is someone who in the last six years has claimed £127,658 under the second home allowance. Of course he apologised after wards, explaining it was just a joke. Mr Duncan, you jokester you.

No way to get rid of these people. Unreal.

What can happen though is that public opinion can turn so badly against an MP that they look to stand down at the next election ( As there is no way they can win ). This isn't really falling on the sword for things like claiming extensive mortgage payments on a property which is already paid for and claiming it was an oversight ( That's not even me making it up to justify my point. Or happened just the once ).
Come the next general election a lot of MP's will be standing down due to the expenses row, so up until then they will still be representing their constituents in parliament. Why aren't these people quitting on the spot and enabling a by-election when they have lost the confidence of the people they are paid to represent ?

Meet the golden parachute payment. This little beauty is in place to "ease" MP's back into life outside of politics. This is a sum based on age and length of time as a MP. The best thing ? The first £30,000 is tax free. Recently it's been agreed that the amount of the salary they receive will increase. Every 3 years the Review Body on Senior Salaries ( SSRB ) reviews MP's pay levels. This same review body recommended that only MPs who have lost their seats at an election, or due to boundary changes, should receive this payment. If you've resigned, you shouldn't get it. Just to show how toothless this body actually is, this recommendation has been overturned by a committee of MPs. Vested interest ?

Is it any wonder that MP's are going to stand down at the next election, rather than do the honorable thing and quit now.

Here's an interesting thing. In May 2007 BP ( British Petroleum ) signed a deal with Libya to embark on a sharing deal of any gas or oil deposits found in the country. BP gets a healthy 19% share, in return for a $900 million investment. It's been quoted that the deal could generate as much as £15 billion in revenue.
Now BP have had a rough time of it recently, their profits are less than projected over the last quarter. A mere $2.6 billion, with yearly profits being $25.6 billion. Hard times, when you consider how much they spend on exploration and still see profits like that. These numbers are just vast. This is the 5th largest company in the world.

21st December 1988 a terrorist bomb was detonated in Pan Am flight 103, with the bulk of the wreckage landing on the Scottish town of Lockerbie. In total 270 were killed.

On 31 January 2001 Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

On the 20th of this month he was freed on compassionate grounds as he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He's gone home to die.

This has obviously caused an outcry from all corners, relatives of victims, the US government ( Including the FBI ), the British press, the British people as a whole weren't in favour of this ( See this poll taken in Scotland ).

Remember how we mentioned BP and it's deal with Libya. Letters have been leaked that implicate the release of al-Megrahi with that deal being ratified.

Here's a quote from Saad Djebbar, a lawyer who advises the Libyan government "No one was in any doubt that if al-Megrahi died in a Scottish prison it would have serious repercussions for many years which would be to the disadvantage of British industry". Pretty obvious which industry that comment was aimed at, unless there are lots of British businesses investing $900 million + in Libya.

Here's a quote from a letter from Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Justice, sent to Kenny MacAskill, his Scottish counterpart in December 2007.
"The wider negotiations with the Libyans are reaching a critical stage and in view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom, I have agreed in this instance the [prisoner transfer agreement] should be in the standard form and not mention any individual."
In his defence Straw originally didn't want to include al-Megrahi in any prisoner exchange deal, but did a U-turn as can be seen in the quote above.

Six weeks after that letter was sent the deal with BP was finally ratified.

One last quote, from Saif Gadaffi, Colonel Gadaffi's son, "People should not get angry because we were talking about commerce or oil. We signed an oil deal at the same time. The commerce and oil deals were all with the [prisoner transfer agreement]."

I think we're all grown up enough to know that all governments do things for what could be deemed the greater good without informing us. It's just that when politicians are shown to have told lies to us, the people who put them in power, the people who pay their wages, that we should have the right to remove them from their posts. The BP deal could generate up to £15 billion. How much of that will come back to us the tax payers ( Going by figures from 2002, only 20% ) ? Has a person who was convicted of killing 270 people been freed for purely economic reasons, to help wealthy people become more wealthy ? And if so, it's been done in our name, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Squize.

We're like everyone else, we love a bit of attention. It's good for the ego, and good for the soul.

But spammers, your attention is a little like that slightly smelly and always drunk uncle that you'd only meet at weddings. The uncle who it wasn't 'til years later you realised was a little bit too touchy feely.

That's right spammers, I'm equating you to a made up story about being touched up by a relative as a child. That's how we see your attention. Deep down inside flattering ( It all counts ), but in every other way, as unwelcome as molestation.

Our comments are moderated, we get fired off an email every time we get one, and to be honest, we're getting a bit sick of getting emails with links to your products. It's nice that you start off all friendly and un-spam like, just like our imaginary uncle in so many ways.

So do us a quick favour, to save us reading emails we really don't want to read, and then deleting comments which really shouldn't be there, how about you move onto the next blog ?
I'm sure some of our readers are interested in low cost loans, but I'm guessing they're not going to get one via a link in a comment on a blog that prides itself in being 70% swear words.

You may have nothing better to do to build up your web empire, I mean I imagine you get a huge kick back for every loan which is taken up, but we're bored of clicking delete.

We're cool yeah ? No hard feelings ? We'd just prefer it if you'd fuck off. Thanks then, take care, bye.

Squize.

PS. I know I'm just talking to myself, but it really helps some times. Give it a go if you've got a blog, you'll feel much better that you've vented.

Perhaps 'cause it's late, and I'm tired, and I'm coming down from quite a hellish crunch ( All the games got there in time, and the client is pleased. Just thought I should share the good news along with the moans and gripes ), but something is bugging me.

Mike Chambers, well known Flash community facing guy at Adobe, has posted "What new game APIs do you want in the Flash Player ?".

Fantastic!

Why do I feel the need to be churlish about this, I mean it's great news, isn't it ? A chance to air our views to someone whose in a position to push forward ideas to the roadmap.

"I have been learning some game development lately, and building my first game... I think game development and deployment are some of the real strengths of the Flash player, but ones which we haven’t specifically focused on in a while... While working on my game, there were a couple of things I needed to do where additional player APIs could have made the development easier... So, what APIs would you like to see that would make game development easier."

( That's the gist of the post, but please take a minute to read it all ).

Personally, I'd like to see all the things that so many game developers have been asking for since Flash 5. Mike mentions how handy it would be to have a built in pixel perfect hitTest. Surely everyone one reading this right now has been thinking that for years ? Has no one ever requested that feature ?

Why have all the feature requests fallen on deaf ears before ? Flash has been geared towards RIA's for years, with a recent glance at 3D as Away3D et al have helped fill in a short fall with the player, along with the huge ( And really successful ) push to own web video.

But games have been left out in the cold. They're treated like they're almost a happy side effect of the Flash player, that it's not really a real use of Flash ( Noticed that very few of the really high profile Flash developers make games ? Some of them touch on game related mechanics, and do it really well, but actual complete games are very few and far between. I'm sure if they did they would be vocal about the shortfalls in the API and help to have forced a change sooner. Sound got a kick up the arse using a similar approach ).
And yet, GameJacket had a stat that 28% of internet traffic was Flash games ( I can't provide a link for obvious reasons ). The Flash Forwards have a game category. Until a couple of years ago BAFTA did too ( That's now being merged with console games, and in all fairness I can't see Desktop Tower Defence giving Call of Duty a run for it's money ). Millions of people play Flash games, and talk about them, every day
There is a knowledge and interest of Flash gaming, with huge budgets for them, outside of the "Suck and Fuck Street Racing"s.

So why has it taken until now for it to be recognised by Adobe ? Would it really have taken so much effort to not package yet another fucking scroll bar component and give us a hi-score table component just once ? I know there's an excellent one from Mochi, but we're talking first party support here.

Yes to some extent I am being churlish. In effect I'm bitching about Adobe looking to make all our jobs that little bit better, it's just that does it really only take one employee at Adobe to notice the shortfall for things to happen ?

( And yes before you ask I am a bit of a hypocrite as I've never filled in a feature list request for Flash. Maybe all of us who haven't have just got ourselves to blame that we're going to have to wait 'til F11 before getting the sugar ).

Squize.

More a case of doing-anything-rather-than-work-on-the-current-project I thought I'd have a quick glance at our stats, see where we are in the grand scheme of things ( Our Alexa rank has had a little bump recently, we're back to a more healthy #324,797 ).

In terms of countries visiting us, our friends from across the pond are number #1,

United States,
hits: 150,381
sexy visitors: 25,793
percentage out of everyone coming here ( And weeping ):  65.56%

The following places were a bit of a surprise though,

2     Republic of Korea     10,606    3,795     9.65%
3     France                   10,864    3,735     9.49%    
4     China                     10,313    1,987     5.05%    
5     Russian Federation   4,518      1,691     4.30%

I didn't realise there was such a passion for Flash combined with reading a blog which doesn't ever actually say anything at all, in some of those countries. It may be a little egotistical ( Me ? ) but I thought Germany and the UK would rank higher.

So if your are visiting here from one of those top 5 countries, it'd be nice if you could say hi in the comments. Actually, it'd be better if you taught us a swear word in your respective language, be fair, you must have picked up quite a few English ones here.

Squize.

It's finally occurred to me that there must be some blogs out there that are silly enough to link to us, but because we're so wrapped up in ourselves, we're not aware of them.

If you do link to us ( Albeit out of pity ) and we've not linked back, do us a favour and let us know via the comments so we can redress the balance and keep the whole internet ticking over the way it's meant to be.

Cheers,

Squize.

I think all devs have had that scare. The one where they've deleted a file they shouldn't have. The one where their router died on the day they need to send the most important email ever. Vista fucking up big time.

This story is about the latter.

I was installing Visual Studio yesterday, and there were some updates to .net, the kind where you need a reboot and then Vista tells you how it's all going. My gfx card crapped out mid install ( Of VS, the updates were ready and waiting ) and reset the machine.

Hope no files got corrupted there.

As the box booted back up Vista let me know the progress of the updates, but hang on, 3/3 seems to be stuck at 0%. For a very long time. Ah, and it's rebooted without actually finishing.

Never mind, it'll just reboot and sort itself out.

Imagine my delight when the same thing happened. Over and over and over again. Not ideal. Fired up the installation disc, chose the repair start-up option ( Which it actually offered up to me, Vista knew something was wrong and wasn't ashamed of it ), reboot and... 3/3 0% reset.

Ok, let's try a different option, let's just boot up in safe mode. 3/3 0% reset. Safe mode with networking. 3/3 0% reset. Last good config boot ? Fucking hell. Fired up google on the mac[Book Pro. Yeah after paying £2k for it, I'm going to mention it at every opportunity ) and found that microsoft have the solution in their knowledge base. Seems it wasn't the crash that did it, it would have happened anyway.

Idea #1 was to use the repair start up option. Hmmm
Idea #2 was to boot in safe mode... Cosmic

Although the rest of idea #2 was sound, use a restore point. There were a couple just before the crash, so job done, hurray I can get back to my massive crunch of having to do another 4 games by the 15th of this month.

Restoring, restoring. All good. All good until it came up with a file error. It seems some files did get corrupted during the crash, the files being the restore points. God, is this revenge for all the shitty things I say ? Is karma that instant and that brutal ?

Idea #3 looked complicated, and it's boiling hot here and I want the easy option damn it. I want things how they used to be between us.

The easy option ( In my head at least ) was to install vista on a blank HD and then see if I can't fix the issue from windows on the 2nd drive. Installing Vista is like watching paint dry so I didn't have the most fun day yesterday as you can imagine.
Right, finally installed lets see what I can do... that's odd, windows has just hung again after a couple of minutes use. It never rains and all that. Let's try again. And again. And again. Fuck me.

Idea #3 it is then.

I finally got everything back up and running a couple of hours ago, so that's a day and a half wasted.

Do you ever read a blog, and think "What a waste of time, there's nothing I can take away from that, it's just someone bitching about something I couldn't care less about" ?
Yeah, me too.

Squize.

You must have seen that old couple, the ones that look older than time itself and you know they've been together 40+ years. They're eating opposite each other in complete silence as anything new to say has evaporated a long time ago, and it's much easier just to stay silent rather than force something just for the habit of it.

I think the blog has become like that recently. We're in our little ( Tired ? Not yet, not by a long way ) grooves working away on nice things but without much to say about them.

Twitter seems to a better outlet for conveying the day to day little / funny / annoying things and that leaves us with only big things to post here, and right now we're clean out of big things.

The puzzle game I'm working on is coming along nicely. I can't really share the gameplay, and in terms of code, it's a puzzle game. Nothing new or clever there so I can't share some new sweet way of doing things.

We've set our invite only board up too, and I'm struggling to post to that too. Perhaps I have just run out of words of interest. Maybe there are only a certain number and then it's just forced. Like sperm.

If nothing starts happening soon I'll just start posting lies to keep things interesting here, like the time I wrestled a camel. With lazer beam eyes.

Squize.

I recently did a reskin for a new CGI movie which we're not actually allowed to take credit for due to the nature of the contract ( It's a project which filtered down a couple of agencies before landing in my inbox ) so I can't link to it without giving it away, or even mention that it involved both Aliens and Monsters ( If you follow us on twitter you'll see I've been a bit less subtle there ).

I noticed yesterday that it's been posted to gameJacket, so thinking the worse I fired off an email to which I got a good prompt reply from Simon. Long story short, it turns out Rubber Republic have been contracted by Dreamworks to distribute the game and they're using gameJacket to do so.

Perhaps it's just me, and I'm being naive ( I've been shocked in the past, and still am now and again, about the size of the budget for paid placements. I live in a nice little garden where viral games sit on their own nice custom webpage and people just swap emails about them based on their actual merit as a means of entertainment until they get a nice lot of traffic and everyone's happy. I fear the busy road outside that is all about paying to put a game in the #1 spot on high traffic portals ) but it just doesn't sit too well with me.

An adver-game supported by adverts just feels overly cheap. I've had this before with Brain Voyage, and I really fought against that at the time ( Obviously I lost ).
If you're using a game to sell a product, then surely the game itself should be enough without further ( And random ) advertising before it, that just dilutes the message and to me cheapens the end title.

I think it's because advertising is such a common way to pay for the development of a game that when you see it in any game you naturally assume the same. So when you see a game by Eidos or Dreamworks promoting their IP it gives the same impression, that the games development costs need to be recouped by advertising other products. That's not a great impression to give out.
We don't have ads on here or the site for that very same reason. It's not that we're rolling in cash, it's just that the returns vs the perceived loss of quality to the site massively outweigh each other. We've even been asked to do sponsored articles, but unless it's enough money so we can ignore the feeling of being dirty, then what is the point ?

We pride ourselves on producing the very best work we can, dependant on the budget / timescales / project scope, and I think for the most part we hit that self imposed target. We want our work to be presented in the best light possible, so why don't companies like Dreamworks and Eidos, who at the end of the day are IP driven, feel the same ?

Ok here's what I'd like to do, follow me with this. I'm going to set up a fictional game called "Mackerel Queef" and buy advertising space on mochi and gJ

This is going to be a rant post - yeah!

If your following us on twitter, you might have noticed my tasks for yesterday:

"Quick update on the CMS then coding on the first unity game"

Well, I didn't get to the unity game part, thanks to some weird flash (bug) that wasted 5 fucking hours of my time and still is inresolved. Here's a quick rundown:

For our new german site I wrote a simple flash based menu/header which reads in an XMl and takes two params. The xml reading was all done, but I needed to pass the params from the asp.net page to the header. I decided to use loaderInfo.params for the sake of a quick and dirty solution and then it all went down the drain ...

Testing params in THE IDE doesn't work, so I published a HTML page withit (I did mention that so far the menu worked very well?).
But opening the file locally in FF 3.0.8 did do nothing ... no menu generated from xml, it just showed the background shape.

OK, lets try in IE (6, 7, and 8) and it worked just fine, params passed, menu displayed.
Chrome worked, too, same with Opera...

FUCK! Why doesn't it work in FF?

Next thing I tried was to upload the whole lot and tried it from the server - and look it worked in FF, too. ONE FUCKIN TIME! After the file was chached it quit working just like it did offline. (All other browsers still worked just fine).

FUCK!

K, let's add some outputs to the loading process - and viola the problem was quite easy to nail down ...

Here's a stripped down version of the code: (I used a document class and a single frame with a few vector shapes on it and some textfields with an embeded font only)

Code:

/**
* ...
* @author nGFX
* @version 1.0
*/

package {
    
    // skipped imports

    public class Preloader extends Sprite {
        
        public function Preloader() {
            
            stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
            stage.showDefaultContextMenu = false;
            stage.quality = StageQuality.HIGH;
            
            trace("init preloader");

            this.loaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT, this.initDisplay);
            this.loaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, this.initApplication);
            this.loaderInfo.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, this.showProgress);            
            
        }
        
        private function initDisplay(e:Event):void {

            trace("init display");
            
        }
        
        private function showProgress (eProgress:ProgressEvent):void {
            
            var fPercent:Number = Math.round((eProgress.bytesLoaded / eProgress.bytesTotal ) * 100 );
            
            trace("Loading: " + fPercent.toString());
            
        }

        private function initApplication (e:Event):void {
            
            trace("init application");
            
            this.loaderInfo.removeEventListener(Event.INIT, this.initDisplay);
            this.loaderInfo.removeEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, this.initApplication);
            this.loaderInfo.removeEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, showProgress);
            
            trace("loading language")
            Locale.loadLanguageXML("de", onLanguageFileLoaded);
            
        }
        
        private function onLanguageFileLoaded (bLoaded:Boolean):void {
            
            trace("language done")
                    
            this.initMenu();
                        
        }
        
        private function initMenu ():void {
            
            // some code here

        }
        
    }
    
}

As you can see there's no magic added to that code.

Running the swf through a a html page using FF showed the following:
- init preloader
- init display

... and nothing more ....

Anyone who hangs around Flash boards for any length of time will see a pattern ( Usually around school holidays ) of script kiddies turning up, asking a million lazy questions, telling you that in spite of a lack of knowledge right now they're going to see their project through 'cause it's the best idea ever ( It's like Mario, but with guns. And tits. And rpg elements. And zombies ), that if you can just help them with the character select screen the rest of the game will be all but done, and how much can you earn via mochi again ?

I just like to push back on my rocking chair, spit out some of ma there chewing tobacky onto ma porch and grin like a hog that found the shit.

Tweening a zelda sprite isn't going to produce the best game ever ( From the best idea ever ).

So look at me now, I'm playing with Unity3D and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm guessing it's not far away from the Unity equivalent of tweening a zelda sprite and yet I'm really confident about turning out a complete game fairly ( Relatively ) soon-ish.
Unity has it's quirks, and the javascript code is no as3 ( All those posts bitching about as3 being a pain in the ass, well it is, until you get a couple of games out of the way, then it becomes as natural as yawning in meetings ) but... already, 6 days into the trial, I have no desire to go back to making games in Flash again.
To me it's like going back to as1 and publishing for F7 only, it's such a step backward that it holds no appeal at all.

Now hopefully I'm not too much of an idiot to release I can just up and leave Flash. Unity may not be the pot at the end of the rainbow, for all the very lovely demos there still aren't a lot of complete games, which does ring some alarm bells, and perhaps it is a world of difference between having a nice mesh with some physics running on it all at 60 fps in your browser and making that full game ( The gulf between tweening zelda and making a game could be huge ) but... fuck me it's so good.

I've never been a Flash evangelist. I think a recent post I made on FK.games was the first time I've ever really bitched about what Adobe are doing ( And that was in the light of the windows release of Unity in comparison with the upgrade cost to CS4 ).
Basically I couldn't care less. I do like using Flash, but it's just a means to an end, it's a way for me to make games that can generate an income, a tool to do a job.
I'm not passionate about it.
I am passionate about making cool games though, albeit doing that within business constraints ( It is my job, so I can't just go off and do some GBA homebrew just for the hell of it ), and Unity seems to be far and away the best solution to that.
( I'm so glad I've not spent money upgrading to cs4, which is quite an indictment really seeing how I'm professional Flash game developer )

As a quick update to X++, nGFX was sick last week ( Well he was in bed with his nan, and that's pretty fucking sick ! Thank you ) so he's behind on things which means we're a little bit behind on where we want to be, although it'll be in selling limbo for a while even when it's done so I think the next update may just be a "Look it's live, tell us how much you love it" post.

Squize.

(Update on that):


So that's finally done. My own personal "get away from my beloved 3ds max and start with c4d" tour.

Basically I was a Max user since v1, so it's quite hard to forget about all the nice things it offers, though the deal for c4d was just that tiny amount better (price/what has the software to offer) so we switched instead of upgrading Max to work with Vista.

Now at first c4d was a shock. Nothing worked like it "should" a lot of things where at a different place or worked just plain different due to the very different background/history of the software.

As always it was so utterly depressing to not be able to do the easiest scenes, what should have taken just a few minutes to set up, now took a whole day.
When coding I and getting into a new language, I basically recode a very simple app, this helps to see the differences but I still can compare the code with other languages ... when I first started with AS3 I wrote this (you may have seen it).

Now there is something similar for me with 3d ... and this is the story (and it has pictures, too) ...


Lets start with the inspirational image:

It's one of my all time favs. An image from Magnetic Scrolls' "Jinxter" (if you have never heard of either the company or the game ... have a look here or here).

Lets start with creating the "guard"

The low poly mirrored mesh.


The smoothed (final) model.

Next to do on the list was the arc ...

The arc with some additional stones, so far it wasn't all that hard ...


OpenGL Display.

Now modelling seems to work quite well, on to scene composing (more images are comming).


Final scene layout.


Preview rendering, way to bright.


Added some trees behind the camera, better now ...


Final mode rendering, earliest scene layout, just some basic textures applied. The trees behind the arc need redoing, the cliff in the background is a joke and the plants in the foreground, well, I don't like them. Sky needs work.


Final mode rendering, sometime inbetween the image above and the final layout. Some ferns update, added some ivy to the walls, remodeled the cliff and added the two statues, still some work needed on the nature part. The sky seems ok now.


The final image after a good week worth of work. Most of the plants have been replaced, redone. Done.
Get a larger version here.

Scene stats:
- 29.045.199 polygons
- 1 light (sun)
- 91 objects, 231 plant instances
- rendertime 1600x900 px: 2h26m.
- postwork: none.

And while I'm at it ... we have new shiny pong clock :).

nGFX

That's one of my least imaginative titles ever, nice work.

Regular readers will know we've jumped onto the twitter bandwagon. Twitter, it's an odd thing. Totally pointless and quite self indulgent but very addictive for some reason I can't figure.

One major side effect I've noticed though is that it's given more weight to the blog. Twitter is like our side project, our experimental band with some friends, trite and simple and throwaway, whilst the lumbering beast that is the blog keeps floundering on, that things posted here now have to be justified a little more than before.

I wanted to write about how freelance forums bug me, more specifically freelance forums as part of more generic Flash boards ( Rather than things like elancers and all those nasty nasty ones ). I'm not going to single any out, as they're all pretty much the same level of dire.

I'm not sure what bugs me the most, posts like

"Hi, I'm really interested by your project, I've got 5 years experience in as1,as2,as3,php, ajax,ruby on rails,asp, dhtml ..."

That just rings alarm bells. Unless their Nan is really ill and needs an operation, so they're trying to raise money any way they can ( K, the Xbox is on eBay, I guess I should try and bring in as much extra work as possible inbetween shifts at McDonalds ), or they're shit. Or lying.
My personal preference is that they're shit. 5 years experience at anything ( Even McDonalds ) and you should be aiming higher than $100 jobs on a board.

or...

"Hi, pm me"

That to me reads as "Hi, I'm interested in your job, but not actually enough to contact you, as you specifically requested, but I'm so confident that you want to work with me, you can chase me up".
If you can't get the first part correct, ie contact the potential client, that's not really a flying start is it ? It doesn't bode too well for the rest of the project.
There's a little sub-system of this that burns me too,

"Hi, check out my portfolio ( But it needs updating, that's old stuff there, not my latest work )"

Quick translation, "Hi, I can't be fucked to pm you, you check me out. Oh, but when you do you'll find my work is pretty piss poor, but it's 'cause it's old, the new stuff is really good, it's just that I don't care enough to upload it anywhere. I don't care enough about my own public image to potential clients like yourself to spend an hour of my life to upload this new and fantastic latest work ( Which to be honest is as poor as the old stuff, I just learned how to use a new filter for the latest stuff ), but I'll do a first rate job for you."

...and finally...

"pm sent"

Yeah ? Really ? I'm glad you posted that, because email is prone to being lost isn't it. I'll double check my email every minute now I know I'm expecting something from you, thanks for the heads up, phew.
Is this some sort of pr thing ? Just another reason to post a post with a signuture with your link in ? Is it to ward off others ?
"Shit, I see DeathSlayer49 has gone for that job, I don't have a chance. If he hadn't posted about it I would have gone for it, but not now, now there's no point. His location says 'under your mom', he's bound to get the job, any client will find that a sign of professionalism"

But now of course we've got twitter, we can just go there and post these petty / I'd rather be doing anything than working right now observations and keep the blog free for the high brow things.

Squize.

Since I started on X+++++ I've always had it in my head doing it as a d/load game too ( That's why it's 800x600 ), using Zinc to wrap it up in.

An awful lot of our blog posts are questions recently, we need to change that.

Anyway, where exactly is the Cash for Flash ? There's a very in-depth article on the always excellent gamasutra about Flash gaming and the money it can make ( Where's The Cash For Flash ) to which I see quite a few blogs have linked to already.

As a developer you're constantly aware that Flash games are seen as a very disposable medium. They're free and there are thousands of them, a lot of portals have no concept at all about copyright because swfs are just so ubiquitous now, they're moving jpgs aren't they.
If you're a fellow dev. reading this, I'm sure more than once in your life you've had to actually try and explain the value of a Flash game to a client, that good work takes time and money, that just because there is already a lot of content out there it doesn't mean it's all of the same quality. Basically, that Flash isn't actually disposable, that very cool things can be done with it.
If that's the case, if there's this near constant battle to validate Flash and Flash games worth ( To the point that if someone from EA quotes Flash as a valid gaming platform our hearts go all a flutter ), why the fuck do so many developers shout from the rooftops what they earn ?
I don't want the tax man knowing what I earn, never mind a 100,000 strangers. What's that all about ? If it's a full time job, a living, keep it to yourself. If it's a hobby with benefits, then it's just re-enforcing the whole Flash games are just a disposable something to do on the weekend and earn "$20k" from it view.

By now I'm guessing you've figured I'm not a 100% pro this article.

I suppose I should caveat things now to avoid a ton of hatred coming my way. I'm a big fan of what Adam and Chris have done at FGL ( I remember chatting to Adam only last year I guess and him saying "I've got this crazy idea that I want to try out" ), and all the game authors quoted in the article, in terms of their work, excellent.

If that's the case, what's the point of me writing this ? Am I just writing venom for the sake of writing it ? Am I bitter 'cause I'm not had my $40k indy hit yet ? Or is it because every article about Flash and it's commercialisation paints an even rosier and skewed picture than the one before it ?

Figures, let's stick with them, as everyone is so keen on them ( Me too if the truth be known ).

In the article there's mention that 25% of all games on FGL are sold. That still leaves 1,500 games unsold. That's a lot. I imagine not all of those are real stinkers.
Also the average deal brokered is quoted at $1000, but I'm guessing any >$10k deals skew that figure a hell of a lot.
( Again, this isn't a criticism of FGL, just note that spin is put on figures, everyone does it. I'm trying to highlight that when it comes to Flash and money you really need to read between the lines, I'm not digging anyone out for putting a favourable spin on their own business ).

"At a minimum, developers selling their first game ever -- if it falls into the 'good-to-great' category -- make about $500-and-up"

$500 is piss all really, unless you're 14, then you'd kill people for that sort of money. $500 really just makes it a disposable something to do on the weekend. But we all start somewhere, my first game was sold to miniclip for £350 ( There, now I'm spewing my guts on how much I earn, it's an addictive trap ).

Next up in the article is the Dino Run guys. $40k for that game, plus still more coming in. Great, really well deserved, Dino Run is one of the best games in Flash and deserves everything it gets.
Although that is 7 months development, between two people, so that's $20k per person. Still nice, $20k for 7 months, that's just under $3k a month. But... Dino Run is one of the best games in Flash right now. Have you got 7 months to develop a game as good ? I know I haven't and I wouldn't presume I'd even have the ability to make a game as good.

See these well done stories in the article are the pinnicale of where the indy market is, not the average, not the norm.

The article then goes on to say on the strength of Dino Run the PixelJam guys have got a couple of adver-game gigs that nearly earned as much as Dino Run in a much shorter space of time.
That's key. That the indy market is so far behind the industry as a whole in terms of finance that the best outcome is that you get some client based work out of it with the money that brings in. That's where the living wage with Flash is, not with mochi-ads I'm afraid.

Finally in the article they speak with Sean T. Cooper who coded the excellent Box Head series. He is very honest, and explains that you have to build up a fan base for your IP, that to get the really good money you need that fan base there, people who are just panting for the next installment. Sponsors know that, they have a very good idea of what a sequel as part of a popular franchise will bring in in terms of traffic, and will pay for that.
Keep in mind that Sean said he sold the first one for $1500. 4 games later and he's getting good money, he's in a great position, but that's at least a couple of games first that you have to sell for not a great amount of money ( If you're making games to the standard of the Box Head ones you're looking at a min. of 4 weeks, and this is if you do all the art and sound yourself. 4 weeks at 40 hours per week, that's 160 hours, which at $1500 is $9.38 per hour [ Thanks to Bryson for point out my really poor maths first time around, corrected now ]. That's best case scenerio. It really is a big investment of your own time to make it successful, don't expect to be paid well for that time. In effect your gambling on the strength of your vision if you're doing this for the money. If you're doing it for the love of the art, well, you can do whatever the hell you want and just enjoy it ).

"Which means that one person can -- with a lot of hard work, meaning every day of the year -- expect to bring in close to $400,000 a year, I think."

This is the core of why I've written this article. I don't want to pick a quote apart from one person, but come on mate, $400k ? I'll be happy doing half then, 5 games for $200,000.
It's things like that, the come on everyone, get Flash, it's like getting paid for having a laugh, then just rubs me up the wrong way ( Obviously ). It doesn't do anyone any favours.
Ask yourself this, if that sort of money is possible, is Sean or anyone else, earning it via indy games ? If I said to you, work hard for a year, and you'll earn nearly half a million dollars, you'd bite my arm off to do it, like I would yours.

Be realistic in what you think you'll earn, don't get your head turned by the Bloons or DTDs. They're great games, but there are other great games which have fallen by the wayside. Do it for the sheer joy of making something cool out of that untitled.fla, and if you make a couple of quid, then sweet, better in your pocket than anyone elses, but please don't fall into the Flash trap of timelines paved with gold.
With a lot of effort and maybe a bit of luck you'll get the $40k game, and then by all means post in the comments and let me know you wear a crown when you code now and I'll be gladly put in my place, and keep that as an objective ( The money, maybe the crown wearing, not the rubbing my nose in it ) but take all the quotes with a slight pinch of salt.

Squize.

Slowly but surely getting closer to the deadlines for the current projects. That's not really a time to worry, as it means they'll be done soon.

To everyone I owe an email too, sorry, I do love you, I just can't show it right now.

Just to give the blog a slight shot in the arm, I found an article which you guys may find interesting.

In-Depth: Biggest 10 Browser-Based Game Sites Ranked

A few surprises for me there, I thought some of the portals listed would have been higher up. There's an insane amount of traffic and therefore ad revenue being generated by those 10.

There's an interesting nod of the head to the newer browser plug-ins ( Such as Unity3D, which is coming to Windows at last, and StoneTrip, not to mention QuakeLive , which although "closed", is still bringing quality 3D to the web within a community ) at the end of the article,

"It also means that we will probably start to see a shift in the monetization model," he predicts. "This will be hugely underscored by 2008 technology developments allowing full-blown immersive 3D in the browser."

The future is more than papervision and Away ? Possibly. Hopefully. I think there will be a lot of smaller micro studios with existing 3D pipelines who will be looking at browser based content a lot more now, as an alternative to XNA and WiiWare ( And iPhone ), all of which are either already really saturated, or heading that way.
It won't be long before mochi, google and gameJacket ads are in more than Flash, and perhaps that's the Flash killer app that everyone has been glancing over their shoulder looking for all this time. It won't be silverlight, or Unity or any other plug-in, it'll be mochi-ads and gameJacket. If you can make money from Flash and make the same amount from something done in Unity, which are you as a game developer going to want to play with the most ?

Yeah, me too.

Squize.

Way back at the start of October we posted about the FHM game awards.

It seems the shortlist is up, and, well it's not awe inspiring to be honest.

There are some gems there, Bloons ( Not exactly bang up to date though, in spite of a steady stream of expansions ); ECaps was quite nice but far from stunning, Raccoon Racing is on there which was so good it's one of the few games we've blogged about ( Complete with typo ); Shift 3 is excellent like the rest of the series but aside from those there's no other games I really feel the urge to name check ( Doom port ? Clever, but kinda like picking Commando in FMame ).

I think the thing to take away from this list is what the audience is. It's young guys working in office swapping viral games to waste time. Tetris still rocks their world apparently ( It's a bit like Spank the monkey being on there ).

It's red carpet season right now in the Flash world too, with Jay having their awards too. Now this is more like it, the proper cream of last years games, and some very tricky choices in there ( For example the Arcade section has you pitting Dino Run against BoxHead, both a pair of beauties ).
Even if you can't be arsed to vote it's essential reading if you're a game dev, this is a collection of the current bench marks.

I can see winning an award at Jay's end of year review being up there with a Flash Forward in the next couple of years, it's a lot more grass roots and less elitist, and it's more focused on gameplay rather than branding dollars.
The Flash indy scene is growing, money is being thrown at it, it will need it's own relevant awards soon. I'd much rather see a site like Jay's, which has a real joy of playing games, pick it up than someone like Kong.

What else can I link to ? Found a beauty the other day, Xbox related rather than Flash, so please feel free to stop reading now if it's got to be actionscript or nothing.

levelmy360 is just great. "Are you having trouble leveling your X360 Gamerscore? Let us help!"
If you're that desperate to boost your gamerscore / achievements to the point that you'd rather pay someone else to have the fun for you, then this is the site for you.
They do different plans, with plan 1 being 500 gamerscore, and for a mere $39.99.

Want to hear GYW's plan 1 ?
Grab Rally-X, that'll cost you 400 ms points ( $5 ). It's a pig of a game, and a joke that it's on there ( You wouldn't play it on Mame honestly ), but it's an ultra simple 200 gs. It'll take you around 30 mins to max it out.
Next up is Doritos' Dash of Destruction. I think this may not be available in every country, but if it is get it, 'cause it's free. This isn't the best game you'll ever play, but it throws the achievements at you. The only slightly sticky one could be the multiplayer one, not 'cause there's loads of l33t Dash of Destruction boys online ready to spank your ass and tell you nasty things about "yo momma", but because it's local mp, so you'll need a 2nd joypad ( You don't need a 2nd player, just the pad plugged in ).

That's 400 gs for $5, so we've got $35.99 of our budget left.  Can you pick up a second hand copy of Gears2 for that ? Or a game in the classic range or even just discounted ? Or buy up all the XNA games on the marketplace to put some money in indy devs pockets ? Or, well anything but give it to levelmy360 basically.
I'm sure you'll get those missing 100 points in whatever game you spend the difference on.

It amazes me that you can pay someone to have fun for you. I'm thinking of launching letMeDestoryYourLiver.com where I'll just get smashed for you and you get the bragging rights ( Plan 1, quite merry, look at that girls chest a little bit too long, put my hand out infront of me when I urinate just to steady myself; going up to plan 5, wake up in my own piss with a dead stripper in the bath and not able to remember anything since last Tuesday ).

And that's it, have a good w/end, hopefully there will be time to actually talk about what I'm doing next week instead of just talking about what other people are doing.

Squize.

What has been done on Calisto Eclipse so far:

• the main menu is done, all the neat rollover effects are in place
• you can reach the two highscore screens (one for the action and one for story mode), alas the backend for that isn't working yet
• the medal screen is in place and the medals are defined, same as above the backend isn't done yet (more on that later)
• parts of the API for handling medals and scores are layed out (yet again ...)
• the game working is layed out and waits to be coded

What's need doing (in no particular oder):

• transition between the menu screens and the game
• the game :)
• finish the API for medals and highscores
• the backend for medals and highscore (oh there's so fucking much to do on this bugger, but maybe I can give away some more infos soon)
• ingame help
• ingame newsfeed reader
• even more backend stuff ...
• even more of that oh so boring backend stuff ...

what a boring post. damn.

I post an image next time, promissed.

nGFX

Sorry about our absence the past couple of days ( Although I can't imagine anyone pining for us too badly ).

Remember me saying right at the start of the X dev that if proper grown up paid work game in then it'd be dropped straight away ? Well...

I think we've had a years worth of work all arrive in our inboxes in the past week, and it's now time to do some of that work. I did update X the other day and posted it, but didn't blog about it. I think the main thing is the striker baddie, which is the good old UFO from asteroids.
The game feels much better for having that already, more balanced, and hopefully removes the ability to just sit still and shoot ( Which to be honest was something I always did in the arcade original 'cause that inertia is harsh ).
Also some instructions are in there now, although I think either level 5 or 6 shows the wrong ones ( Fixed on the version on my hdd ).

With X having a rest for the next couple of days ( Only code wise, Olli is about to fire up the 3D package and make beautiful pixels, and then leave it rendering for 3 hours only to come back to see the lighting was wrong ) I thought it would be a nice chance to catch up on all those links I mean to post but never get around to.

Don dropped us a nice line about Hero Town, a game he's developed single handedly. Development started in July last year and took him around 6 months to get it to the lovely standard it is now. This is what you get if you mix a hint of javascript with PHP / MySQL ( I know we're a Flash blog, but some things need sharing ).
Also as the dlc for Fable2 goes lives today ( Don't get me started on the Love Hurts bug in that, I'm one gargoyle short of getting the lot and that bug is stopping me. Of course for anyone who's not played Fable 2 this doesn't mean a thing ) it's good to mention that come this Feb "The Sprite of the Wanderer" update will be coming to Hero Town.
Give it a bash and if you get chance leave Don some feedback, it's what all us developers crave.

I promised a long long time ago ( 19/08/08 to be exact ) that'd I'd drop a link to www.2dgames.eu and I obviously didn't. Sorry GC. What seperates it from all the other shovelware sites that don't give a shit about your copyright is that GC has written his own spider that sniffs out Flash games from all over the web.
The design needs some love, but if you're looking for a specific game that's a great place to start.

What looks like a quick and easy way to hit those social sites with your bad ass game, J2Play is something we'd like to look at sometime. If you have, share in the comments.

Another thing I'm panting to play with, and hopefully will with in X, is Flash Joystick. It supports rumble, how sweet is that ? Yeah I'm going to go to a ton of effort to support it in X when there's quite possibly only me in the whole world who will go to the effort of setting it up. But it rumbles!

Flash Truth blog, man you get away with murder, I love it. That's the sort of honesty that gets dog shit posted through your letter box and is always a joy to read because of that.

A little late, but there's always time for good will to all men. 8-Bit Jesus, that is pure retro gold.

Wow, just linking to things is much easier than having to think of my own words, I can see why there are so many lazy ass blogs now.

Squize.

So what was his task again? Playing tetris with parts of the station that was meant to be built on Calisto?

What the heck.

Anyway it seems easy enough.

"No worries," they told him. "this is just a simulation right now."

"See, each of the modules has one, two, three or four air locks. The problem is that they can't be moved on their own. So all you have to do is to make sure that there are no unused airlocks. Once you have a closed set of modules, they can be filled with air and moved away from the landing site."

"Erm ... yes?"

"Yes, the orbiter is releasing new modules in a set interval, so obviously the landingsite would become a junkyard if we don't move away the modules fast enough. That's why we have this terminal, you coordinate the dropping position and make sure they connect to closed stations, before the buffer space is filled up. You can even swap parts of unfinished stations in order to build bigger ones - bigger stations are easier to move, so you'll get a higher scoring."

"OK. What is this other mode? It reads Action mode and Story mode?"

"oh, yes, easy ... Action mode is the test mode, you simply keep going until the buffer space is full, the release rate gets higher every stage. Story mode ... well that is the real deal. You're going to bring the station down to Calisto's differnt landing sites, there are different tasks waiting for you, ie. build a station with a specific size, or fill the all the empty space on a landing site - we'll give you instructions along the way."

"K. I think I get that."

"Fine, see you in the orbit then, Commander."

... That's what Calisto Eclipse is all about.

nGFX

I've already mentioned that I got Left 4 Dead for Christmas, and it's sex ( If you've got a 360 and a gold account, there's no good reason not to buy it, it's stunning ).

Whenever I get a new xbox game I often wonder what it would be like if it was written in Java and fits in only 4k. So far all my dreams have been dashed, but not any more.

Left 4K Dead

If that alone isn't the best title for a homage I don't know what is.

Squize.

It's time for our annual review of what we've managed to achieve over the previous 12 months, so bring that hangover and stale mince pie with you as we go back in time and space...

Jan:

This saw our first birthday, and Olli experimenting with web servers and the Wii. Quiet month, I'm putting it down to hangovers.

Feb:

The most loved up month of the year saw what has got to be one of the most camp games ever,

Merry Christmas everyone!

At this time of year we'd just like to thank you, all our beautiful constant readers and our sexy newer visitors, for helping make this blog what it is. Without you we'd just be talking to ourselves, and I'm no doctor, but that's got to be a bit mental hasn't it ?

So thanks a lot for keeping us sane, it means a lot to us.

Turkey, tv, unwanted gifts, eating until your eyes bleed, visiting relatives when you just want to play on the xbox, something about the little baby Jesus, a big fat man breaking into your house in the middle of the night, paranoia that you can smell burning every time you turn the tree lights on, getting a card from someone at the 11th hour when there's just no way you can get one back to them on time, wrapping presents far too late and making a really bad job of it, having to spend Christmas with relatives and their weird not the way your family does it rules ( "We don't open the presents til after lunch" ), it's just all good isn't it.

Have a great one,

Squize & nGFX
x

(ps. edited by nGFX):
So Squize was done with posting a good deal earlier than me, so instead of having a second post I decided to add to this one...

If you're not quite so much into Christmas (like me, although, only the stress before it spoils it for me as early as November) here's my usual:

Happy Hogswatchday!

"ER...HO. HO. HO."
-- Death makes a career move (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

So I guess a month or so has passed without a word from me, which either means I haven't got something to say or lost interest or something else.

Well, a bit of everything. This year has been a real let down in terms of games, Squize outnumbered me in terms of finished games by far, so what have I done at all?

First the official conversion I've been doing for gimme 5 still isn't really gold (still waiting for the level swapping stuff), which was or still is quite a letdown and has killed a good deal of the motivation I had put into a game of my own otherwise.

Then there were quite a lot flash based applications (not the stuff to write about here) and some .NET based backend stuff.

Oh and I've been doing a heavy "quick fix" session for Ubisoft (yes, that Ubisoft), which ment 3 weeks of 16h days to fix 3 flash games and write a menu in 3 languages (regular readers might find my post related to this) ... I still have to rewrite the third one, but that's another story.
We haven't been involved in the design, but it was quite a lesson for me to make them work at all (read: I got some half fininshed games and a very tight deadline).
If you're eager to take a look ... do it here: Handigo The Game - Ubisoft (first one on the right).

After all that I decided to have a quite long holiday now and start on a game that has been floating around my mind in varoius designs for quite a while now (I did mention that "unfinished" games like my CC port are big motivation killers?).

I doubt I'll do daily updates like Squize, so for now you just get the name (and static screenie of the menu):

(Oh, and did you notice the "Medals"? While writing on Calisto Eclipse I'm setting up something nice for us all ... more to come later :) )

Back to coding now (finally), nGFX

Irony irony irony, you don't have to be so heavy handed. Subtle irony is better. It's funnier. Hell it's the English way.

Big nasty smiling in your face as it twists the knife in your stomach irony isn't good. Unless it happens to someone really bad who deserves it, but then you're treading on Karmas toes a little.

Two days after writing the post "Xbox, we love you", just after the 3 year extended warranty has expired, just as I'm building up to some quality down time with a clutch of new games for my baby, just as the NXE has come out, we've had a death in the family.

I know there wasn't a lot of love for the Mii360's when it was announced, if you own a 360 by default you're a hard core gamer. Leave the avatars to Nintendo.

But... they're kinda more-ish. Here's what Olli and I look like when made of polygons.

What a great title. It sounds nice and gamey. Like a sweet bullet time effect, or maybe a real time rewind function. Picture that, being able to pause and then rewind the action in any game, just by dropping the cessation time distortion component into your game. Nice.

It's actually got nothing to do with gaming or Flash, it's yet another smoking reference. Promise it'll be the last mention of my own personal trial on here ( In 15 mins I'll have been a non-smoker for exactly 1 week, hence my final farewell to banging on about how hard it is etc. etc. ).

I've been doing a bit of reading about smoking and the effects it has on you, it does help when trying to stop, as it makes you realise it's not just a case of you being weak. It's a bit more than just caving in and eating that last bit of cake.
Ok we all know smokings bad. No one is so stupid as to think otherwise. Non-smokers just don't get how smokers can smoke, I mean it stinks, it's bad for you and it costs the earth. Smokers just hide behind a million different reasons just to keep smoking.
( Personally I used the combination of "I do actually enjoy it", "It helps me think" < Strong reason for me there, "I stopped before, and I remember how hard it was, and now I'm self employed I just don't have the time to effectively write off two weeks suffering withdrawal pangs". If you're a smoker I'm sure you can add your own to this list ).

So we all know all the bad things about smoking, the smell, the social costs ( It's no longer cool kids, try standing outside in the rain smoking, far from cool. Speaking of which, I'm sure I can't be the only smoker ever to stand in the rain, thinking "What the fuck am I doing this for ? I'm not even enjoying it that much anymore" only to do it again the next day. Same as going to a shop at 3am to buy some smokes 'cause there's nothing worse than waking up without a cigarette is there. ).

But here's something I only found out over the past couple of days. I was kinda aware of it, but never really knew the details. It's something that's never really thrown up as a reason to not smoke in the first place, I assume that cancer and heart disease are treated as good ( Bad ? ) enough reasons, in addition to the usual staples ( Smell, cost, ages your skin etc. etc. ).
To me it's caused more of a knee jerk than either of the big boy reasons not to smoke.

( Again, there's this pre-conception that smokers are dumb 'cause smoking greatly increases your chance of getting a million different cancers, with lung cancer being the big one, the mother of cancers. God's way of really smiting the smoker. You want to smoke ? Here's a cancer just for you. That'll fucking teach you.
As a smoker you know that, but it's an addiction non-smokers, so you can twist anything to suit your argument [ To keep smoking ].
Here's some stock replies, that I'm sure I've used before "I could get run over by a bus tomorrow", "You only live once, life's too short to worry about things like that. Anyway they say you can get cancer from <insert whatever has just been in the news recently that can give you cancer> so what can you believe anymore?" or the classic "I know it's bad for me, I'll stop smoking as soon as I notice my health getting worse, so I'll be fine".
I'm sure my Dad used that last one, he also used the other classic "Uncle Tom smoked 80 a day from the age of 14 and died in his 80s and was fit and healthy right to the end". Every smoker has that uncle Tom. My Dad died of lung cancer when I was 20, so 16 years ago. I started smoking when I was 17, and by the time Dad was dying infront of us I was quite happily smoking 20 a day. At his funeral ( Which btw was the first one I'd ever been too. Not the best way to lose your burial virginity ) I was desperate for a smoke, and when I got the chance, I did.
Here's a good definition of an addiction, "The uncontrollable, compulsive drug craving, seeking, and use, even in the face of negative health and social consequences." [source]. That's what smoking is, that's what makes you want to smoke at your Dad's funeral. It really is more than just not being able to turn down that last bit of cake ).

Nicotine is a poison, we all know that. It's the tobacco plants natural protection from insects. Drop for drop it's 3 times more deadly than arsenic. I guess there aren't too many insects eating tobacco leaves. It's also a member of the same family as cocaine, morphine, quinine and strychnine. Nice family.
But here's the detail that I only discovered the other day, the "If only I'd known that before I started smoking" bit of info ( That really wouldn't have made much difference in all honesty, but more than the big guns of reasons not to smoke ).

Eight seconds after your first ever drag your brain releases a ton of dopamine ( You can read the very dry definition here, or if you want to skip that, it increases heart rate and blood pressure. Basically it's an instant rush. It's also connected with your bodies reward system, which is handy in terms of forming an addiction ).
K, you've taken your first ever smoke. Nasty as hell. You're going to have to work quite hard to get addicted to this, but don't worry, smoking messes up your sense of smell and taste, so in effect it masks the fact that it tastes like what it is, poison. Also you know that stat about cigarette smoke containing 4000+ chemicals, included in those are things like Cocoa and Corn Syrup, added to make it smell less like death, and more like a white stick of nice.

Your brain knows poison when it gets a lung full of it. In return it reduces the number of [ Acetylcholine ] receptors available to receive nicotine to try and protect itself. It also reduces the number of transporters capable of moving the nicotine around in your brain, and as a final wave of protection, in other areas not affected by that first ever rush of nicotine it creates millions of extra receptors, so if you do have any more nicotine intake it's spread out more.
That's why you'll never ever get the same hit from a smoke as you did on that first ever time, every cig since that very first draw has been an attempt to re-create that first buzz. Your brain has re-wired itself to protect itself from having too much posion concentrated in one spot.

That's the thing that's freaked me out. That the crap I breathed in is dangerous enough that my brain is physically different, that it adapted itself straight away to avoid the harmful effects of nicotine ( The same thing happens with other drugs, it's the bodies way of coping with having something in it that really shouldn't be there ).

And connected to your brain being different to cope with nicotine ? Cessation Time Distortion.
In that first 72 hours when you stop smoking you have some nicotine left in your system ( It has a half life of 2 hours that's why when you're a smoker going over a couple of hours without smoking is hard as hell, for me it was an hour before I'd start getting really needy for one ), but it's not enough and that's why your brain throws a hissy fit.
This includes mood swings, lack of concentration ( It's exactly a week today that I stopped, and it's only just starting to sort itself out, although this post has taken ages to write ) and all the other things that make you a pain in the arse when you stop. At it's most simple level, you have a panic attack due to not being able to get what you crave, mixed in with your body regaining control of it's fight or flight mechanism, which has been run by nicotine since you started smoking ( Hence the attacks of instant pure rage for no real reason. Your body isn't used to handling anger itself properly any more, it's like when people have their sight restored after years of being blind, it's just over whelming and your brain doesn't really know how to cope ).

After those first 72 hours your brain kinda gets it, and starts resetting the changes it had put in place. Basically you're learning how to be the real you again, as opposed to the smoking-in-the-rain-even-though-you-don't-enjoy-it you. This isn't too smooth either, but should only take a couple of weeks.
Part of this re-wiring process is this really weird side effect, time distortion. Your whole concept of time is screwed. As a rule we all have pretty good internal clocks ( We've all had that "Got to get up in the morning it's really important" and then woken up a couple of minutes before the alarm was due to go off ) but during this process of re-wiring it's a million miles out.

At first that's a nasty thing. You know how when you're waiting at the doctors or the dentist time just drags. It's 'cause you're a bit bored, perhaps a bit worried about what's coming up, and it just seems to go in slowmo.
When you stop smoking, the whole day is like that. It's like the week before Christmas when you're a kid, it just goes on and on forever. Apparently actual physical nicotine cravings only last for 3 minutes at a time, but during the first couple of days you get hit by a lot of these cravings, and mixed in with this newly found no concept of time at all, they really really don't feel like 3 minutes.

Now I'm at the worst is behind me stage, this whole time distortion is nearly as cool as a component you could just drop into your Flash game to control time. I'm getting more done because I have more time on my hands. Not just 'cause I'm not having to shoot outside every 45mins / hour for a smoke, but because my brain really doesn't have a clue how long things take.
Which is such a result, as I have a deadline this Friday, and I've done relatively little the past week because I've had no concentration at all. I'm hoping I'm going to stay ever so slightly mental long enough to get the new game done.

And on that note, we're back onto games and leaving smoking behind. Normal service should resume tomorrow, thanks for indulging me.

Squize.

Gears of War2, the most stunning game I've ever seen, and despite some of the on-rails sections being a bit tricky to the point of swearing at the TV, it's a fantastic game.

One of the new features in it is your "War Journal", where your progress is kept.

The indie Flash game community seems to love stats. I guess it's 'cause it's always nice to see someone whose written something good getting the recognition ( Even if it is more in terms of traffic than cash ), and because it's slightly inspirational, that everyone is just one good game away from achieving the same results.

When our game Chimbo got blammed on newgrounds it really shook me quite hard. It's the first time that I've really had a project fail on me ( I've had games I've not been able to sell before, but never something out there which has performed badly on a critical level ).
We thought that was it for the game. We were under no illusions of what the game was, a reskin of an even older game. It's far from great, but both Olli and I chatted about it before hand ( Like we always do ) and considered it good enough to go out under the gyw banner. It's an average game that looks pretty with varying degrees of presentation.
That was it then, a footnote in our history.

And then the traffic started to creep up. It got on some front pages of high traffic sites, only for a day or two ( Such is the turnaround on such sites ) and got spread around a little.

I've posted here before on our google indexing. Also the blog software records what search terms drive people here, the most popular being "as3 frame counter" and "as3 flex preloader". We get a lot of disappointed Cure fans with "I don't care if Mondays blue" as well as some other really obscure searches landing here ( "Boylinks" comes up a lot, don't ask ).

Checking the logs Friday I came across this gem from google.com.au,

"WHY THE FUCK WON'T STUPID FUCKING as3 LET ME FUCKING CREATE AN EVENTLISTENER"

( We've got the number one rank for that phrase, I really don't know why, we can't be the only people using the word "fuck" and "as3" in the same posts surely ).

Anyway to be so pissed off at coding to swear at google is something we totally sympathise with ( As well as admire in a slightly mental way ), and whoever you were, you're a kindred spirit mate.

[Update: I've also noticed other people are entering the phrase into google, is that just to see if we're ranked number one for it ? I think we own it now :)
Also today, "wee sex" gets us a front page hit. I think I may need to calm down the bad language and obscure sex terms on here, as we're going to be getting hits for the most obscure stupid things. golden showers ].

Squize.

Air. The future of RIA. Unless you try and actually use it.

I've been wanting to write a swf encryptor for ages and last night I finally cracked ( As I'm working on something that I really don't want decompiling for various reasons ).
It was a toss up between Zinc and Air, but I opted for AIR 'cause in theory it is the future and therefore should have better support than Zinc.

So after all the hype surrounding Air I should just be able to google around, find out how to drag and drop, save a file and some other basics. I develop in Flex rather than cs3 'cause it's a million times better, but any search for Flex and Air just brings up examples using MXML. That's not great.

Eventually I found a hacky way to create an Air project in actionscript in Flex ( It's so convoluted it's untrue. You create a Flex project as opposed to an AS one as usual, tick the Air box, but on the part where you set the document class you alter the mxml extension to .as and it works ).
Getting there. Published the main class and up popped... nothing. More searching and I found out how to set it up ( A big thanks to Toby for blogging about it, without his words I'd have given up all together ).

Cool, got a window in place now. Close it, try publishing it again, and... nothing. Lot's more searching ( And swearing ) and I found out what the problem was, and the cure. If you don't exit your app correctly ( ie call an exit() after adding a listener to the close button ) then it doesn't actually exit correctly ( I found this out myself after a lot of messing about ).
When you publish an air app it runs something called adl.exe ( Adobe Debugging something. I've had enough air googling for a life time so can't face looking it up ) which runs the swf wrapped in the air api.
If you don't call exit() then when you close the app adl.exe keeps running. Ok, that's not the end of the world. What actually is though, is that you can only run one instance of adl.exe. If it's running after you've closed your app incorrectly, then you can't run any more air apps.
The beautiful thing is, it doesn't tell you. Flex doesn't tell you either. It's like they've ganged up to keep us in the dark.

Until I figured out the whole exit() thing, I was working with task manager open closing it down every time. The only solutions I found online were, yep, work with task manager open and...

Ok it kinda makes sense, and if you've got to call exit() then you've got to call it, but c'mon, this is the future of RIA and I've got task manger open to kill it ?
It all feels very beta-ish, from the hacky way to even create an Air project in Flex to that.

Once I got past these hurdles, I must admit it wasn't that bad. The lack of docs ( I only found this after I'd gone through a lot of pain ) has made it a less pleasant exercise than it should have been ( Oh joy, another mxml example for something I want to do with code ).

One weird thing which I'm putting down to me is that when I drag and drop a swf into my sexy little app it runs the app twice. I don't mean it opens another window, it just runs through all the code twice ( In alcon I was getting,
"wtf ?"
"wtf ?"
which was a bit of a give away ). A little kludgy check cleared that up.

At present we've got a simple little app which you can drag a swf onto, it then encrypts that with blowfish via the very nice Crypto library and you can then save that back out.

Next up ( And what I've been swearing at for the past hour or so ) is the decryption routines. Well, the code is being embedded and decrypted, it's just figuring out how to then make that byteArray run as a swf rather than just sitting there annoying me.

Squize.

Moms have tried their level best to prevent their kids from holing up in their rooms with their eyes glued to a computer screen and their hands busy at the controls of that new gaming console. But video game enthusiasts have found a way to beat this hurdle and prove to the older generation that these seemingly useless ways of passing time do have their practical uses in the real world that we inhabit.

•    Video game technology has been used with varying degrees of success to teach children with autism at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The games are effective teaching environments because of their richness and continuous nature. Video games have also been used by researchers at the University of Edinburg and the Glasgow Caledonian University to study cognitive skills in autistic children by using software that recognizes gestures and movements and translates them to the screen. This would help bring out skills that they possess but are unable to showcase because of their inability to speak.
 
•    Video games are being used as tools to teach business prep programs by global accounting firm Deloitte & Touche USA to help develop their future talent pool. High school children are invited to participate in a gaming competition that will test their skills in conducting and planning events and raising virtual money. The games help them learn business, ethics, money management and decision making.

•    Virtual gaming worlds like Second Life are being used as 3D simulators to view plans and diagrams of real world drawings in three dimensions as opposed to the flat two dimensions we see on paper. The realistic drawings are used to conduct training programs and make changes to the system as well.

•    Corporate houses are saving tons of money by using Second Life as a gallery to showcase their advertisements, posters and other design materials in 3D settings to employees and clients all over the world without having to travel miles to achieve the same. There’s also the fact that this move reduces the amount of fossil fuels used up in traveling and hence is beneficial to the environment.

•    More and more surgeons are taking to video games now that there’s a study done that proves that game-playing improves the dexterity of their fingers and helps them during surgeries.

•    Moviemakers are using 3D gaming environments to simulate three dimensional models of characters in different poses and styles in record time. In a life prior to Second Life, physical models would have to be built and tested to achieve the same effect.

The future of gaming holds a lot of promise – we may be able to visit a supermarket from home, pick up things from shelves and feel them before we use an online checkout cart, all in the near future too.

---

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick,who writes on the subject of the top online colleges. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.

Credit crunch. Man I am ever sick of that term.

Hold my a hand a minute or two whilst we go on a brief trip back in time.

Way back wealth was gauged in precious metals, mainly gold. Coins were made out of it to make life easier. Then to make life even easier they was replaced by paper bills. A bill is simply a promissory note to be exchanged for specified goods or services. On the £10 note I've just fished out of my wallet at the top it says "Bank of England. I promise to pay the bearer on the demand the sum of ten pounds". Cash is purely symbolic, it's still easier than a big sack of gold, but at the end of the day it's still just a way to show how much gold you've got. That tenner is worth £10 worth of gold, which is known as the "Gold Standard".

Sticking with the whole gold thing, the original bankers were actually goldsmiths. They worked out that it was really unlikely that everyone who had their gold stored with them would ask for the whole lot back in one big hit, so they loaned money to people based on a percentage of the gold they had bagged up in the back office. It was a bit of a balancing act, a war could come along and everyone would want to withdraw their gold in one go ( Which would lead to a "Bank run" ) but as they were charging interest on these loans it was worth the risk.

To quote author G. Edward Griffin, "[bills] are made in such vast quantity that it must equal in amount to all the treasures of the world".

Being able to print your own money is in an easy fix. Governments soon realised that you know what, fuck it, we haven't got that much gold stored away but we can print some more notes as we're running a bit low ( The process of lending out more money than you have actual gold for is called "Fractional-reserve banking" ). The offset of this being, the more money there is, the less it's actually worth  ( So my £10 isn't actually worth £10 of gold, as the Bank of England has printed more notes than they've actually got gold to cover. They no longer adhere to the gold standard ). The process of too much money in the economy causing it's actual value to decrease is inflation ( When it's all going wrong it's just a downward spiral, as can be seen with what's going on with Zimbabwe's inflation rate ).

Let's go back to the good old Bank of England. It sets the base interest rate. This is basically the interest rate it charges banks for borrowing money from it. Currently it's 5%, so all the banks who want to borrow a couple of quid pay 5% on that. Now on the vast sums that are shifted around, 5% is still a ton of money coming back.

Ok, I want to borrow a couple of quid. I can't go to the Bank of England directly for a loan, so I'll go to my local high street bank. Now this is where it gets really beautiful, having a quick look at a loan comparison site, the best I can get is 7.8%
There's a bit of profit there.

Back again to Fractional-reserve banking. It is what it says. A bank only has to keep a fraction of the money it has in reserve. Say you've sold a kidney and have £10,000 to put in a bank. The bank only has to ensure that it holds on to a percentage ( Or Fraction ) of that £10k.
In the UK that percentage is voluntary  (According to the wikipedia link above, in 1998 it was 3.1% ).

You've gone to the bank and paid in your £10k. Looking at savings rates, if you want to be able to take your money out fairly soon then you're looking at getting around 6.5%. Now lets say the reserve rate is 10% ( As it is in the US ). The bank will have to sit on £1000 of your money, the rest it can loan out. At 7.8%.

Not only do banks get a cheaper lending rate from the Bank of England, they make money on your money. Sweet.

So who's actually making all this money ? Who owns the banks ? Well, they all do. It's like cash incest. Despite it not even looking like a direct link, they all own shares in each other.

Right hopefully I've set the scene for why banks are not the most likable institutions. I can finally get to the part that really grinds my gears.
If a bank goes belly up, the government will dive in and "rescue" it. It happened with Northern Rock and the US has just sanctioned a bail out scheme.
As a tax payer ( The driving force behind this huge rant was a really snotty phone call from the Tax man at 5 past 9 this morning. Just 'cause my form and cheque haven't got there yet doesn't mean I want to be spoken to like I'm a fucking rapist first thing in the morning, thanks ) I now own a share of Northern Rock. Or rather, my tax is paying to keep that bank afloat. As more and more banks get into trouble more and more of our tax will be spent shoring them up.
In the current climate mergers are going to be more common place ( Such as the Lloyds / HBOS merger ). The credit crunch is a bad scary thing, we're all paying more for things in shops, getting a loan or a mortgage is a lot trickier, but in two years time it'll all be forgotton. But these huge banking mergers which have actually been sanctioned by the government will still be in place, giving us as consumers less choice than before.

To recap. Banks can borrow cheaper than we can, and then lend to us for a profit. Banks pay interest on what we save with them but then lend it back to us at a profit. If we fail to repay that loan we can either be imprisoned or have our property taken. If a bank gets burnt by lending money to too many people who then default, our income tax will help keep it going, because the other side, the bank crashing, is even worse for the economy than nationalising it.
It's pretty much stacked in their favour on every level. You bounce a cheque you'll pay a £30+ fine, they screw up by taking too many risks ( ie To generate even more profit for their shareholders, the majority of which are their fellow banks ), we pay again to prop them up.

A very simple and naive summary I know, and possibly riddled with flaws. If you want to read real facts rather than my stabs in the dark I can recommend the book "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klen ( Check out Amazon ) which equates the money markets to actual physical torture, and is an eye opening read.

Hang on, this has nothing to do with Flash or games. Arse.

Squize.

Ryan at freelanceflashgames has compiled another one of his cheeky lists.

This time it's regards blogs. We're in there at 14, which isn't bad, but I think we need to bump that up a little. I just need to think of a subtle way to do it.

Full flash CS3 serial download, flash CS3 serial serial, flash CS3 serial crack, flash CS3 serial keygen, flash CS3 serial free new torrent ddl.  Full photoshop download, photoshop serial, photoshop crack, photoshop keygen, photoshop free new torrent ddl. Paris Hilton Movie video interviews, celebrity photo galleries,...Paris Hilton Movie Collect the Latest and Hottest Gossip and ya podaru tebe lubov'

So skip on over to the page and see what other 13 blogs you should be reading before coming here.

Squize.

PS. Can I just say it's amazingly hard to find content spam to copy / paste when you're actually looking for it.

Ryan over at freelanceFlashGames has just posted an epic list of sponsors with links straight to their contact pages, and even sexier, has put them in their alexa rank order.

So if you're in the market for whoring your latest game, pop over there and remember us when you're rich.

Squize.

Here's a funny thing.

Law of the West Pinball was posted to newgrounds. All good so far. Got a score of around 3.15, nothing great. Some helpful feedback, some pointless ( Well, one pointless ).

Being kind of anal I check back on it now and again, and this is the weird thing, it's score is going down every day. Every day, someone is voting it down.

Now it was never really on the radar, I've never linked to the NG page anywhere ( I don't really like to, it feels very "Here's my game. Oh look, you can vote for it, I never noticed that before. Well, whilst you're there, give it a 5. Please. I'm needy." ) so it seems really odd that either one person is going there everyday fuelled with petty hate and knocking it down slowly but surely until it goes the way of Chimbo and gets blammed or someone new is stumbling across it every day, and hating it that much that they're voting it down.

I'm not sure which is worse actually.

I just thought I'd mention it, as it's bugging me slightly, and what other reason is there to have a blog than to be self indulgent and post about petty things ( Tomorrow, "Why do people wear shades on the underground ?" ).

Squize.

FINALLY!

CC is going to become early alpha tonight. I spent the last week adding levels and testing them along the way (which takes some time because they are quite ... complex ... and not easy to play). While making sure the game behaves like it should and fixing things that don't work quite like expected.

There are still some features missing and *a lot* of love left to add, but I think the engine is pretty solid now, it runs smooth in the editor and because it's tilesize independent it should also run in game mode (I'll see that later today).

Marmotte from dot-invasion has dome some georgeous tiles so this is done, too.

Basically there are a few renderings left (mainly for the player deaths) and I have to do all the sounds (including a lot of speach) and music.

And for the sake of it:

nGFX

I think it's time to question my motivation.

While working on client projects, I allow myself always a more or less big "sideproject" (because as Bill Murray put it in Groundhog Day: "Keep the talent happy.").

I usually try to stay on the easier side (game wise), but I'm not the button basher game type of developer, although I tried it ...
When sitting there and plotting down ideas, the transform from "one week and done" to "woha that's big" is almost instant.

So let's just accept the facts.
Looking through my sketches it shows that this is again no quick and easy project, I see a lot of locations, all done in 3d, different maps, a story that ties it all together and of course weeks of work.
I think that anyone with some gamecoding background (i.e. coding games beyond the scope of flash) is looking for: the big one. A real game.

Puzzle games are somewhat of a different league beside all the clicketyclick-crap that is called "game" and not many flash games reach into that region for me.

One of the few ones I admire for it's depth is Luxregina's Two Kingdoms.

But how can you compare a flash game to a "real" game?
Savegames? Maybe.
Levels? Maybe.
Story? Maybe.
Depth? Certainly.

What was I talking about?
One of the questions that keep bothering me for the last days is: does it pay out?

Beside the fact that it will be quite fun to do a big game, this one question is really nagging me (espeacially since the LotW hacking incident).

There's the fact that flash isn't save at all. each damn script kiddy ot there could grab this application (which name I won't tell) and just open your swf and change a lot of things without even having to dig through the code. Changing an image or adding a new button is a case of a few mouseclicks. AS3 seems to make it a bit harder, but I doubt that it will be forever. (Maybe there might be some sort of solution, Squize and I have been talking about a ugly way of protecting you game from just changing things on the fly, but we need to test that before I can tell you more)

Using Director isn't an option at all and one of the environments that really would make me go away for coding a game isn't yet reachable because the dev environment is on Mac only and I don't have the space to have another box standing around, here even if is a pretty one.

Because we all know that such a project is normally for pleasure only, you still have to ask if you can get the odd quid out of it - can you?

Sponsoring isn't a route, because as I see it it's not a win situation for the developer, the exposure gained doesn't reflect in website traffic at all. The money isn't nowhere near what can be charged for a client development or an exclusive deal, but it's unlikely that you get one.

Ingame ads seems to be an option but you need some fairly good exposure to reach numbers that pay out well, too.

It's all personal again ...
So it all sums up to: do you enjoy doing such a big game. Well I certainly would. But there are doubts.

K. let's get back to some coding of CC, and later this week some tests on security ...

nGFX

As regular readers will know, we've been done over with a hacked version of "Law of the West". Instead of just bitching about it, we've decided to be pro-active.

This is going to take a number of forms, one of which is SICO, or "Source In, Crap Out".
We looked at what encryption and obfuscator software there is out at there, and came across irrFuscator. It looks pretty cool, and at 69 euros isn't going to to break the bank, but it also looked like it was something we could do ourselves without too much effort.
Where SICO fails compared to irrFuscator is that from what I can tell it takes the whole project and messes it up, so public functions ( And therefore getters / setters ) get screwed with too, whereas our project just takes one file and so has to leave anything which could be called from a different class alone.
Also it converts strings, but it looks costly. Looking at the example on their page, "end" gets converted to irrcrpt(23, "uzd."). That kinda looks like a static class is added to the project with a method called irrcrpt, which takes the first value as the "key", and I guess it's just a simple XOR with the string value.
Fine for scrambling a filename, but I think it would be too harsh [ In performance terms ] to do that to every string in the game, so it's easy enough to just add a method in like that by hand for your filenames / passwords / cheat codes etc.

( In case this reads like I'm just bashing irrFuscator, I'm really not. It's better than SICO, I'm just pointing out the differences ).

So what can our baby do ? Here's the loader class we use for it:

package Classes {  
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.net.URLLoader;
    import flash.net.URLLoaderDataFormat;
    import flash.net.URLRequest;
    
    public class IO {

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Properties
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        private var loader:URLLoader;
        private var callBack:Function;
        
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//Constructor
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        public function IO(){
/*
Null constructor, we don't need to do anything here
*/
        }

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Public
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        public function toString():String {
            return "IO";
        }        

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        public function loadScript(filename:String,callBackArg:Function):void{
            callBack=callBackArg;
            
            loader = new URLLoader();
            loader.dataFormat=URLLoaderDataFormat.TEXT;
            loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, xmlLoaded);

            var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(filename);
            loader.load(request);
        }

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Private
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        private function xmlLoaded(eventArg:Event):void{
            var source:String=eventArg.target.data;
            callBack(source);
        }

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    }
}

And here's what it looks like after being run through SICO:

package Classes {  
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.net.URLLoader;
    import flash.net.URLLoaderDataFormat;
    import flash.net.URLRequest;
    
    public class IO {

        private var _V64K0q:URLLoader;
        private var _87qjufb1lsM:Function;
        
        public function IO(){
        }

        public function toString():String {
            return "IO";
        }        

        public function loadScript(M85u8En4i:String,_87qjufb1lsMArg:Function):void{
            _87qjufb1lsM=_87qjufb1lsMArg;
            
            _V64K0q = new URLLoader();
            _V64K0q.dataFormat=URLLoaderDataFormat.TEXT;
            _V64K0q.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, _v1zr6rD62q);

            var kDu541CN2C5:URLRequest = new URLRequest(M85u8En4i);
            _V64K0q.load(kDu541CN2C5);
        }

        private function _v1zr6rD62q(_wVl6q:Event):void{
            var n1XScOB03y:String=_wVl6q.target.data;
            _87qjufb1lsM(n1XScOB03y);
        }
    }
}

Pretty mashed up. There are still some quirks to it which need ironing out, and it's not got a list of reserved words or anything that cool, but that code is nasty once run through it.

Next we need to actually make some sort of front-end for it, ideally using Air to get to play with that, more possibly with Zinc to make it easier, and then decide what to do with it. It won't ever be for sale, it may be a case of we just give it to friends and let it spread gradually like that, we're not sure yet, but it will be given away. There's no point bitching about hacking, and then coming up with something that makes our stuff safe and screw everyone else.

And that's part 1 ( Or 0.5 ) of our push to try and get the community as a whole being a bit more protected, there is more to come. Olli and I have had some long chats the past couple of days. We both came to the conclusion that yeah, having hacked games floating around sucks, but there are some things which are more acceptable than others.
If LoW had been hacked to use the hi-score component of the system it's been hacked for ( Some "shovelware portal in a box" system ) and everything else had been left intact, then we can swallow that. Just. The game gets spread so the sponsors happy, we get our credit out so it's not too bad for us, the ad gets seen etc. It's not that bad. It's only when the game is just ripped of everything like that we get pissy.

Part of this process of stopping it is to actually get involved with the boards that link these games, for fear of sounding like a politician, it's about education. A lot of sites with hacked games on are run by decent people, just trying to make a couple of quid, and not really knowing about any harm they could be causing 'cause they never ever have any contact with a developer.
Flash games are percieved as such a throw away commidity that the line between IP theft and hosting becomes very blurred. A lot of people who run boards wouldn't dream of hosting mp3's, but see Flash in a totally different light.

We really fucking resent having to spend time on things like this, but if we're in the position of toying with ads and sponsorship as well as the client based work, then we need to protect our IP. Like we all do.

There's more coming,

Squize.

This is somewhat of a rant post (again), although, it might just become some sort of history lesson... we'll see where it ends.

My current game somehow managed to be a real endurance test (as you might remember, if not, read it here), a lot of things that I had never done before, or at least not very often. The combination of the specific genre and the "new" language ... well it took it's time.
As a minor update on this, the game now seems to become more playable by the minute (oh, and yes, I rewrote the damn movement routine, dropping about 50% of the code needed making more stable and of course working - yet again I wonder why I haven't wrote it that way in the first place ... well never know.)

So while coding I started to look ahead for my next project. One of the things I didn't want this time, was to re-invent the wheel, so I had a lok at the game-engines I had coded so far and I discovered one, that never had been used in a game before, but was 100% working. It lacked of course all the nice and shiny things, it was just a working, ugly game - but something a lot of people seem to like (looking around the casual game scene).

The decission was quite an easy one, ignoring the fact that this is just a "me too" game.

Let the ideas come ...

Think, think, think.

One by one the ideas came in, this usually a blend of things I like or like to use, but hey, we're just at the beginning.

STOP.

This time I want something less bloated, slick, clean, minimalistic UI. Once again, I've spend a good time just hunting for inspiration, playing a few of some of the best minimalistic games I've managed to find so far, Tonypa's. They are slick, clean, easy to pick up and don't contain more than the barest minimum of visuals.

Great. Wait. It would be nice if I would add a hint of a background story ...
Oh, and for that I have a great set of visuals in mind ...
Hey, what if I let the player decide what to do next, even though it's just a puzzle game ...

Darn. That's for "less bloated, slick, clean, minimalistic".

Why do I think that this belongs into a game - trying to find the answer.

First of all, I don't like 99% of the mini games that are available in flash. this includes all the "tunnel games", "click as fast as you can", and even praised games like "filler" (which is a nice variation of the qix heme) leave me cold.
I think, it may be, because I've seen their predecessor in various forms on different systems before.
OK, so for me there needs to be some sort of substance attached to a game.

I grew up with a c64 and I collected games (as nearly everyone of this time did), I think my collection had over 2000 games, most of them well, not quite legally optained. But I also owned some original games and paid real money for them. (30 DM, which was a fucking amount of money for a 12 year old school kid).

Anyway these games pretty much defined what I like about games and what not, I like pretty visuals (ok, compared to today those old games look really shit), I like good sound (and I think it's essential for a game) and I like some sort of depth (just clicking and holding for creating a filled circle is it not), a simple form of variation ...

I even tried to add that to "Law of the West", which is a bit shallow, to be honest, but there is some sort of variation in it.

Most of the full price games had at least one or the other, even the low price games from Mastertronic had a lot more game to it than some of the hyped flash games.

Back to pen and paper ... and forget "quick and easy"

Just before I started to write this (and bore you to death) I grabbed a pencil and some sheets of empty paper and began to sketch things out, draw a few charts about the progression of the game and what kind of things I want to add in order to distinguish my "me too" game from all the successfull ones that are already out.

So far I like what I came up with, as I believe I have added some unique things to the core gameplay. Of course it is way bigger than what I wanted in the first place and for sure just as I write this, someone had the same ideas.
To make it even more ... well, use a word you like ... I decided to go with a Pirate theme (still very popular, and although my first idea was to make a third LotW themed game, but I couldn't fit in the ideas I wanted to add)

The basic tasklist so far looks like this:

• draw a worldmap based on the Caribbean Sea around 1500
• create a set of outdoor images for the menus and ingame screens
• maybe create some 3d characters (so it won't look like Myst, ... yet I still want to do my own Myst-like flash based adventure game)
• draw a map of the decissions a player could make
• draw the level maps/playfields for the levels (I mentioned it's some sort of puzzle game?)
• decide on extras that can be used to help the player
• create a list of nice "medals" (more about that in later post, but right now, play the LotW Pinball to see some).
• find a way to allow savegames, either over the server, or using a code or shared objects
  

I'll let you know where this ends, and maybe (if there is interest) I go into detail and post some of the sketches and early renderings.
It seems like this one became a bit more than a simple re-use of an already existing game engine. It also seems that I decided to go a good deal beyond the usual flashgame timewaster - and it clearly shows that I'm nuts. I don't even know if there is money in this one (either as license or (most likely not) as sponsored game (as I had my share of sponsoring madness so far).

stupid me.

nGFX

Sorry things have been quiet here for a while, I've been busy going to a couple of weddings and making it to 36 without dying ( Quite an achievement considering my lack of doing anything healthy ).

The pinball game still isn't quite gold yet, we're hoping to finally kill it off Thursday. In the mean time whilst it's sitting on FGL we've been included in the new "First Impressions" feature of the site, which I think is a really great idea ( I think it may well still be beta, so I don't want to blab too much about it here as it's not my place to ).

The thing with feedback is culling out the good useful comments from the noise. And by good I don't just mean the "nice work" style comments, but the comments that make you remove the blinkers a little and be objective about the game.

The main concern which has come up is that people really don't like the fact that it scrolls. I find this weird in that I'm used to the 16bit era of pinball games where they all scrolled. It allows for a playfield which is a lot less cluttered and just gives everything a nice sense of scale and scope. I'm just hoping that the slighty broken camera in the version they tested ( Which is fixed now and hopefully always gives you the best view of what's happening and where the ball is going to go ) is the main reason people weren't liking that aspect. If not, then well it's not going to be that popular and that's all there is to it.

Yeah, that's a reflection on there.

Another interesting point raised was about the flipper movement, a lot of people felt that there was almost a lag on them, so that was fixed last night to make them more responsive.

Aside from that ( And filtering out the noise like I said earlier, eg "there are not enough features on the pinball board/play area itself (no bumpers/ramps/etc)", aside from those 3 bumpers and 2 ramps you mean ? ) it's just a polarised comments ( "Too complicated", "Not complicated enough", "Instructions too brief", "Instructions too wordy" ) and things we were aware of anyway, such as the animations running too slow ( This was due to developing at 60fps and then having to drop it down to 40fps for the browser version ).

So a bit more love, a couple of bug fixes, a few more assets from Olli, and it's good to go. We just need someone to buy it off us then.

Squize.

I'm old and cynical and very few things give me a real "Oh cool" moment any more. Too much too young I guess :)

Although today I had a real bit of sickly fanboy-ness. I was checking the FaceBook version of Brain Voyage, just nosing at the stats and in the top five was Jon Hare. Someone I've really admired for years has played my game. He may have thought it was crap, and it may have made him vomit, but I don't care 'cause he's played one of my games ( About 20 years after I first played one of his ).

So yeah, he may have worked on Parallax, Wizball, Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer etc. but I've done a blatant piece of advergaming for Eidos, basically a glorified banner ad, so it all balances out ;)

This has been a pretty sickly post, but I don't care. People like Jon / Sensi were a huge influence on me writing games in the first place so I find this really fucking cool and don't care that I look like I'm 12 again.

Squize.

So "Law of the West" is on it's way into the public now. Final preparations have been made and after *that* long dev. time ... well, I think it deserves some pimping :).

LotW was started back in the good ol' flash 6 days, with some 3d I just made for fun and the first idea was to make it a ***space*** shooter. I think the idea underwent some major changes. It soon became more "Wild West"ish (and later I discovered that I unknowingly adobted the idea of a game I played a lot on the c64 (it shouldn't be that hard to guess the title).

The first major delay was due to my idea to use 3d characters as well, but somehow the first test didn't match the style I had in mind (thanks to BlinkOk from Kazoowee Entertainment, who is the damn best Swift artist I know, for doing a few tests). So the final character drawings needed 2 more artists until the last one finally delivered (that was 2006 I think, thanks to Nephilim).
I got the rough, scanned outlines and started to colorize them in Photoshop with my wacom:


While waiting for the charcters to take shape, I started coding the game using an event-list system (I'll go into detail once the game is online, because I don't want to spoil all the fun). Basically for each "sequence" I set up an array with a timestamp and an action, as the first entry in the array is the next thing that can happen, I just had to do a iCounter++ and see if the counter has the same time as the first event in the list.
If so, the stored "command" is executed and the entry is removed from the array. If the last entry is removed, a new sequence is created ... easy as 1, 2, 3 ... or so I thought.

Anyway, the "game" was coded pretty quickly, but all the little details and "love" took a *long* time to do (I can admit that all the art took way longer than the coding itself).

To give you something you can look at, here are some screenshots frome the game:

Once it's online I'll post the link here too.

Back to work. nGFX

When I'm nearly done with a game, I start to do the paranoid thing and looks around for competing games. I did it with Toxic Shock ( That's the working title of "Professor Sauernoggin and the Landfill of Doom!" and that's what I'm going to call it from now on ), and made a blog entry about Fire and Ice

So with pinball game a week or so away from being done ( And then hopefully a week or two of whoring it around to sponsors before it finally gets out there ) I went a googling.

Bugger. I found a Flash pinball game apparently built with Box2D. And it scrolls. Bugger. It's here if you're at all interested. I'm not too sure how to word this without sounding too much like an arrogant cock, but it's not put the fear of God into us. That intial "Oh hell" quickly turned to a "Phew".

Olli's busy as busy can be rendering out the table, as soon as it's ready to show we'll be putting it here, then hopefully we can put together a video once it's done but still in that waiting to be sold limbo. Check us out, we're being all pimpy and commercial.
I guess it's 'cause we're trying out the whole world of in-game ads and sponsorship that we're slipping into being like a lot of other Flash devs. at the moment that we really admire with a well oiled self pimping machine.
It's a very fine line between generating interest in a new game, and just coming across as promising the earth only to fall flat on your face ( With the resulting backlash ). We'll see.

Squize.

I just got to thinking ( Not keeping myself awake at night or anything ), but with the self importance of the whole "blogosphere" where we all act like our words may be of some importance to strangers, today would be a good day to get something really bad off your chest, and just put it down as an April fools day joke.

It could be anything from "I had a sly smoke in the bathroom this morning" to "I shook a baby to death", so use the cover of it being a day for big fat lies and jokes to purge your soul. It'll make you feel much better.

Maybe I'll do the same.

Squize.

I doubt you noticed my absence from posting about the current game but I tell you anyway :).

Basically I had a few days off (unplanned) and then a f#%&%$§ cold (unplanned, too) so work came pretty much to halt.

The worst what happened during that time was the constant flow of new ideas. Yesterday was the first day I was working again and I learned my funny little lesson about AS3. I haven't used it much (or for more than a few quick tests) but when I started to code the basic functions of the editor I learned to hate it.
Seeing AS3 from an c++ point of view it all makes more or less sense, but when dealing with it having a few years of AS1/AS2 experience some things just don't come a "natural" as they should.

I think that one of the biggest problems existing AS2 users have when starting with AS3 is the way AS3 deals with the display. It's easy to get by the new event model (which I really like) but the new display model just pissed me off big time during the first 3 hours.
For the editor there are a few things that rely on a timeline so I have to use exported MCs, I got the strong feeling that AS3 isn't made for handling timeline based things. (Some of them might have been coded but to be true I don't see the point in coding a color / alpha tween for some 15 elements.)
But handling a "classic" attached MC from AS3 feels as clumsy as a one legged dog.

back to work ... and hopefully some more code oriented posts in the future ...

nGFX

...and a bit of self centered bleating.

As Flash developers we all know how a lot of sites just pull the piss and will quite happily steal games ( And if you're really lucky, drop their ads into them. Nice ), but this story is just a whole new level of pulling the piss.
Really worth a read.

Now on to the self bleating. GOL got a review at Channel 4 games. 5 out of 10. Visitors to the site actually rated it less than that. It works out ( Using channel 4's rating, let's not make it worse ) at 1 point per game. And nothing for the front-end.
Following that down it's natural path, it means that say "Souper Bowl" would only score 1. Hang on, perhaps it scored less 'cause it's a collection of mini-games, let's double that. 2. Out of 10.
It's a sickener to think that the whole is actually less than it's parts. That's quite an achievement.

Sorry, I don't like wallowing in self pity, but when it's the best thing I've ever done, doing so poorly, it's hard not to have 5 mins being a tart about it. All out of my system now, although don't get me started about Loved Up getting poor reviews 'cause it's "gay"
( Wait 'til Loved Up II - A mouth full of spunk, that'll get the homophobic vote ).

Squize.

After not wanting this blog to be just a linky one, I've just got to show this, although I imagine a ton of you will have seen it already.

Wow!

Squize.

Smokers who live / work in Kentish Town ( London ), here's an idea for you, instead of asking me if I have any "spare" cigarettes, why not go to the shop and buy your fucking own ?

Bad couple of days, don't know if you can tell.

AS3 continues to twist my melons. I've been working on a card game, always fairly straight forward. So I have a card movieclip with 52 frames, nice and old school. In that I have two other clips, one the "back" of the card ( So a quick flip of the visible property and it's facing upside down ) and within that another clip which has a tween in it for a glow effect.
A card gets picked, and it's just a simple gotoAndStop to the correct frame. But, within as3 I couldn't get to the glow tween clip. It just wouldn't find it ( So I couldn't call sprite["card"].face.gotoAndStop(1); to stop it going to frame 2 where the glow tween starts, and with it being as3 you can't just drop a stop(); on the mc's timeline ).
The fix was to trigger a one shot enterFrame and wait for a frame before being able to get to the mc. Logical in a way, pain in the arse in practise.

Speaking of the card game, I managed to delete the source code by accident ( Around an hour after it was feature complete. Obviously at any other time it wouldn't have had quite that same ring of irony ). It wasn't a recycle bin delete, it was a delete from within Flex ( ie Eclipse ). If you ever have anything dodgey on your machine, I dunno a list of drug dealers you employ, store the info in Eclipse, 'cause if you need to delete it no one will ever find it.
After a bit of a blind ( No backup anywhere ) panic, I thought ok, not a problem. Files aren't actually deleted, it's just a flag that's set on the block allocation map and so an undelete app will be able to find them, undelete them and everythings cool again.
4 undelete apps later ( Oh, 30 day trial, but without the ability to actually restore a file. What is the fucking point of that ? It's like buying Stephen Hawkings a great pair of trainers ) and not one of them found the files. They found files from a couple of years ago deleted by the God knows how many other people who have had this machine before me, but not a single one of mine.

No worries, Eclipse has this sweet local history feature. Hang on, if you delete the actual project file you can't get into the local history via Eclipse. Joy. So after a lot of hunting around I found the history files on my hd. Thank fuck. But joy of joys, they're stored in the most human unreadable form possible. A huge number of folders with hex names ( The catchy 8F, or the rather cheeky 5A ), and within those folders each little back up has a name like: 803d36994be9001c1049f5beb7af7d50
No file extension, no nothing.
Never mind, it's just an easy task to go through every folder with that days date ( A mere 60 or so ), sort each file by date, open it to see which class it is, and make a note of that. And then once all the notes are taken for each file in each directory I know which are the most recent and I can rebuild the game's structure from that.
3 hours to do that.
Yesterday with my 6 pages of notes, and the help of a decompiler ( The first time ever one has been useful, as opposed to allowing script kiddies to drop their own ads in your game ) I managed to fix everything as good as new.

There's a big fat lesson to be learnt there about backups ( Which I always do in-doors ).

Also discovered another fun little thing last night when working on Orbs. I've got senoculars' key.isDown class in there which works a treat. I've added the title screen, and you can click a couple of buttons to get into the game. What I found was though ( Which I wasn't expecting ) was the game lost focus in a way, so the key reading methods would only work by clicking on the game screen again ( I don't mean clicking away from the swf, just by clicking buttons on attached Sprites before hand meant that once in the game itself focus would be lost ).
After some hunting around, I found this would fix it,
stage.focus=stage;

There is more, so much more ( Don't get me started on Banks. I've been trying to sort out a foreign draft to pay someone for over a week now. From branches listed on google maps which it turns out have closed, to branches which are meant to be open at 9 but at 25 past still aren't ), but there's only so much venom one blog post can take.

Squize.

Some of the gimme5 community have gone a bit above and beyond and posted level walkthroughs for the Phantom Mansion games onto youTube, which really rock.

Here's a sample one, I'm pretty sure if you're stuck on a level you'll find it on there.

( Oh, if you want to actually play the games, here you go ).

Squize.

Whilst we've been talking about tinkering with Flash on the Wii this month, we've got this handy link that Amy kindly sent us to pimp here, and we appreciate the art of pimping, so here it is

how-to-homebrew-wii-games-73-tips-tutorials-and-resources

A really excellent list of links which should be a good starting point for anyone wanting to look into the subject more.

I promise we'll be back to normal service soon, it's just that things are waiting for sign off behind the scenes so we're like a swan, serene on the surface but hidden away it's a flurry of activity.
One way or another, there will be at least one new game posted here before the 14th of Feb ( Guess what the theme of that will be ).

Squize.

It's so long ago I've posted something that it's untrue. It may be because there was nothing much to say during that time, that is projects not really game related or so absurdly NDA protected that even to mention the general direction would be ... well expensive.

You surely remember my last (!) post where I have a bit of a rant about the media capabilities of the Wii (still no games on it for me, though). Right now this neat piece of hardware sits beneath the TV left of it's bigger and way more often used brother the xbox 360. All I do with it (you remember: playing Wii Sports after a lot of coding) is using it as TV based web browser.

Webbrowser ... well that brought the idea.

(OK, that and the fact that we had some friends here and wanted to look at some photos from the last party. One of them (a "no gamer") asked if there would be some music to play along and I had to admit that it's not working anymore (due to the glorious photo chanel update))

So inspired be the fact that I got the 360 playing my mp3/fotos/movies from my pc in no time, I started to set up a small test environment webpage on my local IIS to see if I could use the browser to browse my pc's hdd. And of course it works.

So I wrapped the output with some XML and viola I had a flash 7 swf that I could use to browse the directories on my pc. Well done.

The only drawback atm is the fact that there has to be a webserver running ... I guess you can't convince most people to install an IIS on their PC to get some media on the Wii. After a few minutes of thinking it came to me that I could write my own - or better integrate cassini (an open source micro webserver) - to host the services for the Wii ...

Well, let's see where that leads to ...

nGFX

[edit] just found this while hunting for informations about the Wii browser flashplayer ...
http://my.opera.com/[..]flash-7-and-not-8-or-9

Well I've been freelancing for over a year now, and GYW must be due it's first birthday, and what with it being the start of a new year I thought it'd be cool to look back at what's gone before so we can look to the future.

We just want to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas, and what the hell, a Happy New Year too.

Have a good one, and we'll be back soon with a cheeky platform game and maybe a slightly ego driven review of the past years output.

Squize.

So I admit it ...

I once was a proud Wii owner. "Was?" I can here you ask. Well yes somewhat.

I own a Xbox 360 since the week it came out and I really like it and the games, too. (And please, keep all Wii, PS3 or whatever is better comments to yourself, as it really doesn't matter).

But this summer I bought a Wii, I like the control scheme, the browser and a lot of the classic games. Oh, speaking of games, this is something the Wii is currently very weak at.
I played Zelda, which is nice, but not that nice, a lot of boring running around scenes, not to mention this very unpleasant save game system.
I like Wii sports after a few hours of coding.
I loved Resident Evil 4.
Excite truck managed to be some fun for a few hours.
I was very pleased when Alien Syndrome hit the stores, but that passed after 3 hours of mostly boring and uninspired playing.


Well that's it. Is that all they managed to produce on the games end? Pretty much yes so far.
I admit (agian) that I don't like party games (And metroid isn't my cup of tea either).

But this time's Wii update really hit me, now the photo chanel cannot playback mp3 anymore, just aac.
Speaking of mp3, why the fuck isn't there a music chanel? Something that can playback music while showing some random colours?
I'd really like to use the Wii at times as music player (yes, I could use the 360 and because the Wii cannot, I do it, too), but the 360 is quite noisy and sometimes I just want something smooth as background music.

So when are there going to be some more "adult" oriented games (not in the Squize way adult, mind you)?
Or a music player?
Maybe even dvd playback?

I reached a point where I think I could well have lived without a Wii ...

nGFX

Well, well, well, after a quite long posting absence I just returned for some not-game-related words ...

I think I told you guys last time, that I'm burried under work and all of it is NDA sealed, so no words on that for now.

While having a few days off (finally) I started to work again on the dgNotifier, a cunning peace of software I've been moving around with me for quite a time now, but never ... really got into.

Everytime I start a new project I notice that I *need* that damn application, but of course I can't code it *now* because of the new project ahead.

So what's this dgNotifier?
Basically it's a ToDo list.
and some sort of bug tracker
a micro message board
helps tracking your working times
and it's a small calendar app

My problem is that I have two offices to hang out, so most of the stand-alone ToDo lists won't do the trick. Most of them don't meet my requierements (being small and non intrusive) and just a few allow widows-server based list handling.
What I also wanted was multi user ToDo lists.

I think I go into the ugly details of flash-remoting later, for now just 2 images of it working ...

I imagine the vast majority of the whole world has seen the stunning Halo 3 believe ad.

This clip , from a much more innocent time, when the term "Arcade perfect" was the dream we all had, just shows how far we've come. And how old I am.

Squize.

That's how long it took me to play through Resident Evil 4, wii version. I also got some extra milage from the "second" mission, and the other bits and bobs they give you..
It's one of the best games I've ever played. When I first started playing it, I remember thinking how much the wii graphics suck in comparison to the 360 ( Gears of War has spoilt me ).
Sticking with it, you don't even notice it. In fact the fire and water effects are just stunning, and the whole atmosphere just drags you into that world.

In terms of levels, the game just keeps giving and giving. It's vast, and you never feel like you're just walking down the same corridor. Just when you think you've seen everything the game could possibly have, there's more. And more again.

One of the most stunning games I've ever enjoyed, just brilliant.

Wednesday, like I imagine one or two other people, I picked up Halo3. It's everything you'd imagine it to be. It's nice and familiar, but a million times larger and wider in terms of visuals and depth. So I had a couple of days hitting it hard after closing Flash. Picture how much it sucked that by Saturday, I've finished it.
Like sex, it's a lot of wow, a lot of enjoyment and... oh, it's finished. At least with sex it's my fault it's over before it needs to be.

It felt like the campaign mode is just there to supplement the multiplayer modes, rather than the other way around. That they've given you these huge ( And perfectly formed ) vistas to mess around with, a handful of new toys, and then sold it all a bit short.
I guess it just shows how much effort a game of this scale really is. I don't think Bungie have been lazy, I just think that if they tried to double the length of the game ( I'm sure I did it in 10/12 hours. Now I'm not the most anal gamer, I didn't go exploring every where, I just wanted to get in there and beat the game. Finding every hidden area has never appealed to me. So yes, perhaps if I'd gone exploring I could quite easily add a couple of hours to that ), then they'd still be developing it in 3 years times.

Maybe it's a symptom of the huge graphical advances that have come with the current generation of boxes, that we all expect every image to look like a photo of some alien world, that to actually finish developing a game the number of levels have to be cut down to balance it all out.
I mean the Halo3 world is really big, it's just that I didn't think I'd tear through it quite so quickly.

If nothing else, it's made me realise I do need to get a gold membership to Xbox Live so I can get a lot more milage out of that 40 quid I've spent.

Oh, and at the end, don't skip the credits, there's a little extra at the end.

Squize.

Written a game, or just planning to write the next HeliAttack ? Either way, no matter how great your love of game development is, it's still nice to have something to pay the bills with.

Our mate Adam ( Author of the sexy Asteroids Revenge III ) has put together a great resource for all things sponsorship. If you're an old hand, or brand new to the whole world of selling your Flash ass for cash, it's well worth a read.

In fact, do it now, by clicking here.

Squize.

Yesterday my CS3 design premium box finally arrived. Man was I disappointed.

You certainly know the excitement when a *very* expensive piece of software finally arrives? Not that I was already a bit bitter about the fact that I had to pay a *lot* more than an american customer (for the English version mind you).

So I opened the parcel, and what came ot was a ... 5cm x 15cm x 20cm, about DVD-Box sized, thin cardboard box with the CD's ...

I mean, not even a Quickstart guide ... I wasn't really expecting a printed handbook (which really would be a dream), but at least some sort of keyboard shortcuts ...

</rant off>

Though I must admit that the whole thing is impressive ... so I ordered a new comp, too.

So waiting for a bit of free (ROFL) time to start playing ...

nGFX

Just had a few minutes off coding and surfed for a few minutes when I discovered this:

Monkey Island the movie. (Available in English and German) Made in flash it somehow manages to bring the flavour of the first game to a browser next to you ...

I guess I'll fire up ScummVM now for a few minutes of gaming history ...

nGFX

Just finished the oh-so-boring part of the our new game: the editor, though, whilst enjoying the pure "place the tile" part, I really hate the "enter relevant data and save it" part.

Did I mention that I hate flash for it's form handling capabilities?
You either be stuck with using the normal textfield/button combo (with as much comfort as a nailbed) or use the wonderfull working, easy to handle, well thought components (in case you didn't notice the sarcasm in the last part, well there's a LOT).

While waiting for the upgrade to cs3 (shipped box, which is *cheaper* than the d/load version) I'm stuck with f8 and as2. Whoever had the idea of the event handling system must be a complete genius, I mean he just must be, because I don't understand it. I mean I can use it and I get all events wired, but I don't understand the "why on earth does it have to be so ...".

Anyway, I think I just have to live with it and use my own ".net" style wrapper code.

Having the editor done (and beeing able to load/save levels) I now start to create the game engine (which should also run in the editor, because you should be able to test your levels).
As the game will feature a few indepent moving "characters", I'll have to rewrite some parts of the time based tilemovement engine allowing to check for junctions, stops and of course other things moving around.

I'm not quite sure about this, but I guess I'm going to use the ASBroadcast approach I used for virus.

Back to the hell that is coding ...

nGFX.

ps: Just got my xbox 360 copy of Overlord (us, de) so I guess I'll give a short comment on that later this week.

Well that title should bring in more traffic.

Anyway, check out this Spectrum emulator, for a retro boy like me, it really is sex. Although a bit dryer and slightly less awkward.

Squize.

I've noticed my little frame counter pop up in quite a few peoples games since I included it in a bit of open source, which I do find pretty cool ( I wonder if anyone's used my scroller class ? Doubt it ).

Anyway, I thought it may help someone out there if I posted my as3 version. It's written using Flex as opposed to Flash, so it uses [Embed] to bring the assets into the swf, but I wouldn't have thought getting it working in CS3 would be that much of a mare.

Hopefully it should all be pretty straight forward, it just requires two arguements to get it going. Anyway, enjoy seeing how quick your shiny new as3 code really is.

fpsCounterAS3.zip (8.35 KB)

Squize.

Ever noticed that computer people do have a thing for Lego?

While waiting for feedback for "High Jinx" and "Hold the Baby" I decided to play with Legos ... or at least with virtual Lego bricks (saves the cleaning up afterwards *and* of course you have all the parts you need)

Virtual Lego?

Yep. Right now I know of two methods to do so:
The Lego way using Lego's own virtual Lego builder. Great thing if you want to build your virtual model with real Lego bricks afterwards, because you can buy the parts you've used online. Only drawback atm is that not all parts are available, so you have to use the "default" ones ...

The "LDraw" way.
LDraw™ is an open standard for LEGO CAD programs that allow the user to create virtual LEGO models and scenes.
Just head over to the download section and get started. I prefer MLCad, which is a great editor (it takes a few minutes to get used to it, but you get things done without looking at the manual)

So I grabbed some of my old model building instructions and just recreated one of my very first Lego model I bought from my own money (and man, did I mow a lot of grass for it):

Here it is: Galaxy Explorer (497-1)

May be some fun to render it with Max :)

Happy building, nGFX

ps:
Mehr zum Thema bei Amazon.de

More books on Lego on Amazon.com

This is completely game unrelated post, but I just thought this is worth sharing ...

I finally got the new NIN cd year zero. Glued to the back of the CD was the following, which I found quite amusing:

---

USBM WARNING:
Consuming or spreading this material may be
deemed subversive by the United States Bureau
Of Morality. If you or someone you know has
engaged in subversive acts or thoughts, call:

1-866-445-6580

BE A PATRIOT - BE AN INFORMER!

---

I don't think that there's much to add to this ... because it just might become reality sooner or later ...

nGFX

Hi folks,

while inbetween two bigger projects (that surely will leave no room for just "playing" around), I wanted to get my head into a new game. The idea was fresh, and highly motivated I started to code some samples in order to see if the flash player could handle it at all.

Nope, it couldn't.

The goal was to be able to move over a "3d" landscape, textured was my first plan, coloured is what I ended up with.

And no, it *wasn't* code excution speed. So two weeks were wasted trying different approaches to achieve the same result, but somehow failed. While the code took about 1 at a high rate 3 ms, flash's graphic renderer consumed between 30 and 90 ms.

As the stat's say the code is fast enough, I didn't see the point of moving to AS3, though it might make the whole thing possible - but for now I can happily ignore all the AS3 buzz and see that I get things done.

shish!

Anyway, I hope I be able to set up a little example swf, because the idea still isn't dead - it just needs some more thinking :)

nGFX

Well let me kick my posting off here with a bit of a techy one.

Just finished work on my profiler, which looks all transparent and nice.

So here we are, waiting for the first visitors and writing about game development in flash, finished projects, flash news, flash tools, flash ... I guess, you get the point.

We, that is the current team behind gaming your way, will try to keep this thing interesting and we hope you don't mind adding a piece of code, an image or a link to something we like (and in most cases is related to flash in some way).

so stay tuned ...

nGFX