The latest installment of Phantom Mansion went live yesterday.

Click here for your skeleton and zombie based puzzling action.

Nice.

Squize.

I guess most people reading this will be running the latest Flash9 player beta, "MovieStar".

It's pretty damn sexy in that we're finally getting desktop speed in our browsers, which makes a huge difference to the overall performance and smoothness.
For the platform game I'm working on we're really noticing the difference. With MovieStar it's great, feels like an emulated game. With the actual official FP9 release it's not quite as great ( Still good though :) ).

Which leaves us with a slight dilemma, do we push forward with games currently in development now and make them as nice and shiny as they could be 'cause in x number of months virtually everyone playing it will have the official MovieStar release, or do we stick with what we've got now at the expense of the game feeling dated possibly soon after release ?

I found this link which is interesting, and it does feel like MovieStar will be gold and released soon, so sod it, let's build for that power ( Orbs has been built from the very offset to need the speed of MovieStar, it would badly suck in the current F9 player ). I think it's safe to hedge our bets that game players by default move over to the most recent tech. whether that be graphics cards or Flash Players.

Let's hope so anyway.

Squize.

I was just tinkering and wondered what would be quicker, using clone() on a Rectangle or just copying each property by hand.

Totally blown away by the difference,

import flash.utils.getTimer;
import flash.geom.Rectangle;

var time:Number = getTimer();

function runClone():void{    
    var rect:Rectangle=new Rectangle(0,0,100,100);
    var destRect:Rectangle=rect.clone();
    time = getTimer();
    for (var i:int = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
        destRect=rect.clone();
    }
    trace("runClone: ", (getTimer()-time));
}

function runCopy():void{    
    var rect:Rectangle=new Rectangle(0,0,100,100);
    var destRect:Rectangle=rect.clone();
    time = getTimer();
    for (var i:int = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
        destRect.x=rect.x;
        destRect.y=rect.y;
        destRect.width=rect.width;
        destRect.height=rect.height;
    }
    trace("runCopy: ", (getTimer()-time));
}

runClone();
runCopy();

And here's my results ( Please feel free to post your own, or to point out anything dumb I may have done to affect the outcome )

runClone:  11567
runCopy:  65

Squize.

A couple of months back I dived in to help our mate marmotte out with a "reskin" of some games.

One of which needed a total re-write to get it doing what needed doing, so 8 days later out popped this...

Just discovered that "Signs of Life" has finally gone live ( But UK locked only! Licence fees and all that, so sorry rest of the world ).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/signsoflife/index.shtml



To be honest I didn't do a great deal, just some of the tests ( ep 4 and 6 from memory, I really should play it through before pimping ) and some under the hood stuff.
A huge amount of really good code was already sitting in place when I started, which made life easier ( And made me look good ).

It's far and away the biggest project I've ever worked on ( Check the credits page, it's just insane ), and I was lucky enough to work with some very talented cool people ( And I also got to see the sights of Shepards Bush for a month or two, always a treat ).

Only 3 more games waiting in the wings to go live now, getting there...

Squize.

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 once vowed that I'd never have one of my games on newground, and to be honest I was really blown away by the feedback mansion got, the vast majority of the reviews were both constructive and positive.

Teach me to prejudge a site.

I also vowed that I'd never have another game on miniclip.

Just goes to show what a commercial whore I've become.

Squize.