Archive for November, 2005
links for 2005-11-25
-
An approach to the tricky subject of shared fonts in flash
-
A manager for shared fonts in flash
links for 2005-11-21
-
Very well featured opensource framework for Flash (seems perfect for games)
-
Brilliant tool for debugging Flash movies at runtime
-
Top Flash Game Developer’s Blog
-
Flash experiments with lots of focus on game development
-
Craig Swann’s company
-
Contains some videos of the Spark Europe Conference (Craig Swann, Andre Michelle etc)
Spark Europe
I’ve just got back from Spark Europe, where I saw some fantastic presentations and learnt about some very cool things.
Top on my list is definitely XRay, which allows one to take snapshots of swf files. I do a reasonable amount of debugging and fixing of other peoples code, so this could be incredibly useful for finding out what is actually going on in a swf. It requires a component to be added to the content (it can be in a loaded in mc apparently), which talks over localconnection, so there could be issues with content on safari which already uses a lot of localconnections (I understand that there is a limit of 8 or so).
I also stumbled across pixlib, which is a pretty complete framework for developing games etc. There is all kinds of useful stuff in there like an extended version of Mike Chamber’s Delegate, and implementations of various design patterns.
I learnt about ScreenWeaver, which is a kinda replacement for Director to make excutable files from Flash. At the moment it’s only just gone opensource, and the current version (3) is windows only. Version 4 will be supporting Mac, so that’s one on my list to keep an eye out for. I hope it’ll be able to get MIDI inputs (somehow).
I went to lots of the presentations covering the new Bitmap manipulations. This seems to have gained the buzzword ‘expression’.
Andre Michelle gave a very inspiring presentation, where he showed off some of the techniques he’s managed to achieve (including nintendo mode 7 emulation!).
Mario Klinneman of Quasimondo’s presentation continued the theme, ending up with showing off his very cool algorhythmic VJ tool (I hope I can get to play with that at somepoint (it’s still being developed).
Craig Swann (of crash!media) got me excited about the possibilities of live webcam input and flash (I really must get a webcam, cos I started looking at webcam stuff a year or so ago, but on Ed’s computer).
Grant Skinner’s marathon 3 hour run through of Flash 8s new features was very good, breezing through some of the BitmapData features, scale9grid, and lots of other features.
Veronique Brossier gave a good presentation which covered some colour theory, and showed off some JSFL commands/panels she’s developed to help designers implement this in Flash.
links for 2005-11-19
-
Campaign to persuade developers to make ‘Happy Games’