Dovyski » actionscript

Improve your game with particles

Dovyski — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:08:37 +0000

When I play a game, I like to see all those flying particles popping up on the screen. Casual games make heavy use of this resource, sometimes more than what is considered healthy.

A particle system adds dynamism to the game and makes it feel alive. Where is the fun of blowing up an enemy base and see just a few flames as a reward? Players want to see lots of things flying around and sparkles shinning towards the camera. Flash gamers are no exception. In order to add particles to your game, you can use two free particle systems (both use MIT license): Flint and Stardust.

Flint is an open-source project to create a versatile particle system in Actionscript 3. The aim is to create a system that handles the common functionality for all particle systems, has methods for common particle behaviour, and lets developers extend it easily with their own custom behaviours without needing to touch the core code.

Stardust was inspired by Flint, but it has its own set features:

Supports 2D and 3D particle effects.
Easy to extend for custom initializers, actions, fields, deflectors, clocks, and 2D/3D renderers.
Includes 3D extensions for ZedBox, Papervision3D, and ND3D.
Includes a native 3D renderer.
Supports particle masking (particles can be masked out for actions).
Uses linked lists and object pools to improve performance.
Gravity and deflector simulation.
Action triggers (for creating complex conditional particle behaviors).
XML serialization.

QuickBox2D: AS3 physics engine

Dovyski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:54:33 +0000

The first time I saw a really convincing physics engine working on a PC game was during a Half Life 2 session. All that Havok physics created an unique game experience. Luckily the use of physics inside games has grown and now we have a wide range of tool to use, even in Flash games.

QuickBox2D is one of them. It is a mini-library created to work with Box2DFlashAS3, which is an AS3 port of the famous Box2D C++ physics engine. The main purpose of this library is to significantly simplify instantiation of rigid bodies and provide a simple way to bind them with custom graphics.

You can start with QuickBox2D by reading this great kick off tutorial. It explains the engine itself and demonstrate how to use some of it's features.

Flash instead of Powerpoint?

Dovyski — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:20:24 +0000

Probably I've spent several hours editing and arranging pictures to create a nice Powerpoint presentation. Even though the Microsoft product is a great tool, I do not like the final result. It seems unfashionable, too poor and/or simple.

This is one of the reasons why I like image sliders developed using Flash. I look at them and imagine how wonderful life would be if I could easily use it and some lines of text in a .txt file to create a presentation. Nice graphics, beautiful font rendering, smooth effects (including blur and glow) and maybe some physics, why not?

Trying to make my dream come true, I found two amazing image/content sliders in Flash: MegaZine 3 and CU3ER. The first one is an open source pageflip/flashbook engine, written completely in AS3.

The other one is a content slider with 3D transition effects, such as spinning.

Certainly those two projects have lots of cool features and they can perfectly fit into a wide range of uses. If I have the change to save some time for my personal projects, such as my own Flash slide presentation, I will use MegaZine 3 and CU3ER for sure.

SWFConsole: enhance the power of your Flash games

Dovyski — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:51:03 +0000

Sometime ago I was working on a Flash game and I had to output some information to the console. That's a very easy task when you use trace() and the Flash IDE, but things get a little harder when you need to output text inside the browser.

Looking for a tool that could help me output text, I found SWFConsole. It is a free developer tool for Flash AS3 projects that gives you output in all environments, not just the IDE. You can type commands in order to manipulate Movieclips in the stage, such as myMovieclip.alpha = 0.3.

SWFConsole also has a built in resource monitor that shows FPS and memory usage, pretty useful for game developers. I miss some features as listeners to handle custom commands and a method to "enable/disable" the console instead of showing or hiding it, but it does not make the tool less useful.

If you are a Flash game developer, SWFConsole can make your life easier!

FlashDevelop: a powerfull and free AS3 development tool

Dovyski — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:22:10 +0000

If you work with Flash like I do you probably have said a bunch of bad words while you were coding AS3 using the native Flash IDE AS editor. I like Adobe, I really do, Flash can do amazing things and the IDE is getting more and more powerfull, however as a AS3 project manager, the Flash IDE sucks.

I could have saved tons of working hours if Flash IDE had some sort of smart code completion, or if it had a better project manager panel (a simple one that hides the SVN directories, for instance). The logical choise for me would be change to another IDE or methodology, such as Flex Buider, but sometimes I'm binded to the Flash IDE because I can't use a different approach.

Tired of wasting my time coding like that, I've decided to search for a better AS3 development tools. Thanks to the open source community, I've found FlashDevelop, a free and open source ActionScript 2/3 and web development environment. It seemlessly integrates with Adobe Flash IDE, Adobe Flex SDK, Mtasc, Haxe and Swfmill.

Some of the features:

AS2 Project management with seamless Swfmill and Mtasc integration (using a portable standalone command line tool).
Advanced ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3 completion & code exploration with automatic classpath detection (even without project).
Smart contextual Actionscript code generators.
SWF and SWC classes and symbols exploration.
Test movie in Adobe Flash IDE and with clickable error results (Flash CS3).
MTASC compilation/code checking with clickable error results.
Types Explorer.
Automatically cleans ASO files of modified AS2 classes.
Files explorer (can create Flash 8 Trust Files for you).
Automatic JavaDoc creation from methods.
Smart Actionscript help websearch on F1.
Jump to class/member declaration on F4.
XML, HTML/PHP, JS, CSS code highlighting.
Multibyte character encoding.
Program menu customization with XML files.
as2api GUI for documentation generation.
Snippets, lines bookmarks, code folding and zoom.

FlashDevelop has enhanced my production cycle and I think it can do the same for you. Download it now and enjoy!