Well I was going to do a review of the year just gone, but time's against me, so I may be lame and do it tomorrow. Only a day late.

As regular readers will know finding the performance drop in the official release player compared to the beta's was as welcome a surprise as waking up next to your mum, so I thought I'd try and be a bit pro-active, rather than just bitching.

Firstly I posted at http://www.kaourantin.net/ although my comment wasn't posted ( 1 about the performance drop was at least, although no response there ), so I posted a comment over at Emmy Huang's blog, and Emmy was excellent and put up with my slightly wingy emails about the subject with some really helpful replies.

The up-shot is,

"@ Squize - I've filed a bug - you're right."

So the good news is it's on a bug list now, rather than just being moaned about by us game devs.

There seems to be quite a few bugs with the latest release. Normally I wouldn't even care to look, Flash player bugs are normally just things you stumble across as you work, so I don't know if there's more with this latest build than normal due to the big changes going on under the hood.
Looking at it positively if there are a lot of bugs we may get another update before F10 rather than people just coming up with work arounds.

Have a good New Year everyone.

Squize.

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.

"Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Flash Player that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these potential vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system. A malicious SWF must be loaded in Flash Player by the user for an attacker to exploit these potential vulnerabilities. Users are recommended to update to the most current version of Flash Player available for their platform."

See details here: www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-20.html

nGFX

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

Two posts in one day, check me out.

Anyway, this is a good one rather than a "Adobe, what the hell have you done" style post.

The Game of Life is finally live! Not on the actual client's site, but it's out there for people to play. Thanks HSBC for letting us run with this project, and cheers to Dom and team Tak for not stressing out during the development :)

Also a huge thanks to both olli and marmotte for their hard work on this. One of the most satisfying projects I've ever worked on, and to me it sums up everything about GYW. This is us.

Hurray!

Squize.

So a couple of days ago I was damp with excitement that the new Flash player was on general release.

After testing it for a short while, I'm bone dry again.

It simply doesn't perform anywhere near as well as the beta. My heart's not into comparing it to the last F9 release, it is quicker, but compared to the beta 3 it's a bunch of arse.

This is a real blow. In terms of Orbs it means I'm going to have to cut back on what I was planning, as that was specifically targeting the speed of the beta.

Beta 2 was quicker too, so I don't understand why the final release is slower than the previous 2 beta players which have been around for months. What's more annoying is that I don't understand why adobe would release two beta's with a certain speed, which you would code to and try and take advantage of, if the actual release player isn't going to match it.
It's like test driving a car only to have the engine changed when you actually buy it.

I'm pretty fucked off with this, as we all should be, and I've spent enough energy being annoyed, so if anyone else is interested to take this further, or has some insights into why this is the case, there's a thread on FK games.

Squize.

From Stanford comes this nifftly "little" browser based applications that allows you to convert your averrage bitmap file into a high quility vector image.


It's free (though you need to register), it's great (just tested a few images of mine) and it uses flash as a front-end (so I think it qualifies for a post here).

Have a look at it here: vectormagic.stanford.edu.

nGFX

Oh. The dgNotify app. now is in private beta stage (we're using it to track out project times now heavily) and I hope to be able to announce a public beta more sooner than later. If things work out like I hope, you can create an account online and use dgN to keep track of your ToDo's and bugs (and use it as small group, too).

Following on from this post, MovieStar is officially released !

That's fantastic news as it means that people will finally get to play our games at that sexy full speed.

Also my prediction was only about 14 days or so out, not bad :)

Grab it here.

Squize.

Whenever I'm developing a game I always get slightly paranoid when a game in the same genre is released, no one wants to write a game only to have something better pipping you at the post.

So I was a bit worried when I read about Fire and Ice ( And not the Amiga game of the same name ).

The worry wasn't removed when on loading it up it looked great, has slopes ( The icing on the Flash platformer cake ) and even uses a similar Star Wars wipe that we've got in place ( Argh ). On playing it through I was relieved to find it's aimed at a much different audience than our platformer. Man that's a hard game.

Let's just hope Fancy Pants II doesn't come out the same week as "NDA covered project".

Squize.