Game Development Buzz

Cut the rope in HTML5, insights video

2012-01-10T10:41:00.002+05:30

HTML5 games are making a noise now. It all began with the highly polished Bejwelled game which also plays in non HTML5 browsers as well. Things are about to get more interesting. Cut the rope has been a hit on mobile ecosystem and now with support of Microsoft, it is out to blow our minds on the browser.

Lessons from Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T15:40:00.001+05:30

Steve Jobs legendary speech at stanford.

The Molehill story video

2011-09-22T12:18:00.001+05:30

Adobe Flash Molehill with Stage 3D is going to revolutionise gaming. See how it all came about.

Stage3D (Molehill), the story. from Thibault Imbert on Vimeo.

The above embed code supports IOS devices too :)

AIR 2.7 command line compiling on Mac for IOS

2011-08-10T16:37:00.004+05:30

I was looking for the solution to compile AIR 2.7 from terminal on a mac. But most were windows based solutions only. Below is the general syntax to follow on the mac terminal.

[AIR_SDK_HOME]/bin/adt -package -target ipa-test -provisioning-profile [MOBILE_PROVISION_FILE_PATH] -storetype pkcs12 -keystore [CERTIFICATE_FILE_PATH] ./MyApplication.ipa ./bin-debug/MyApplication-app.xml -C ./bin-debug MyApplication.swf -C ./bin-debug assets

Just make the relevant changes and put into terminal window and hit enter to compile.
For example,

/Users/csharks/Work/SDKs/AdobeAIRSDK/bin/adt -package -target ipa-ad-hoc -provisioning-profile /Users/csharks/Documents/AppleCertificates/development/GabrielsRevengeProfile.mobileprovision -storetype pkcs12 -keystore /Users/csharks/Documents/AppleCertificates/development/Certificates.p12 -storepass games /Users/csharks/Work/AdtIosCompileFolder/bin-debug/GabrielsRevenge.ipa /Users/csharks/Work/AdtIosCompileFolder/bin-debug/GabrielsRevenge-app.xml -C /Users/csharks/Work/AdtIosCompileFolder/bin-debug GabrielsRevenge.swf assets Default.png

Icons are inside a folder called assets along with the .swf, Default.png and .xml files. The code is for ad-hoc local testing and not for distribution, hence the provisioning profile selected should be for development.

One thing to notice is that AIR 2.7 doesnot support 2nd generation devices.

Mobile Games using Flex

2011-08-10T11:32:00.002+05:30

Seems the development workflow in Flash builder has changed a lot. It is now incredibly easier to develop apps for multiple devices.

Check out the development workflow.

HTML5 games by Game salad

2011-06-22T18:40:00.003+05:30

Embeddable HTML5 games are here, thanks to Game Salad.
You may need an HTML5 ready browser to play the game. It may take a bit to load and initialise each scene ans user feedback of the loading process in non-existant. Yet physics based game play works super smooth.

The thing to note here is the audio performance. Till this time audio was the main issue with HTML5. No idea if they have also tricked using dummy flash object solely for audio as other apps out there. Yet a good start for native browser gaming.

Alienware at E3 2011

2011-06-16T16:43:00.001+05:30

Alienwares new offerings at E3 2011

Game Trailers - E3 2011

Terry Paton - Developing games in Flash

2011-03-01T15:58:00.001+05:30

Indie game developer speaks about flash game development.

PSP2 features Uncharted Video

2011-01-28T12:32:00.003+05:30

Sony's Next Generation Portable which is the PSP2 is a game changer.
Touchscreen, Gyro, 6 axis control sticks, back touch sensors etc are going to revolutionise gaming as we know it.
With Wifi, Bluetooth and 3G this Quad core gaming device is sure is every gamers wish list.

Facebook Graph API development with Flash - Review

2011-01-24T12:58:00.003+05:30

Let me start by extending my sincere thanks to Michael James Williams for giving the opportunity to review this precious facebook development resource. Check out his post and blog here.

Here is the link to Packt publishing where you can buy the book, if you are serious about FB (facebook) development, then i assure you this is going to benefit you, so go ahead and buy it now. You can read the review later ;)

So if any of you have tried FB development with flash, or with out flash for that matter, would definitely know that it is a PIA. The API keeps on changing every fortnight or so and even as i write this it had changed 2 days back, so you should hurry and get uptodate to give yourselves the edge thereby keeping ahead of all others. I am writing this review after half way through the book, realising that I would end up spenting a lot of time learning new things and testing new things related to the book. So i decided to spread the news right away as it would take time for me to finish it in a real sense.

Let me list down the points that i noticed

* Associated Codes are given in multiple formats, the Flash IDE, Flash Builder and Fashdevelop. This helps all kinds of users and we can easily see that even if your development environment is different, you can adapt the right one from any of these for your purposes.

* Starts simple, gives you the code base for 'Visualiser' app which you can go through and understand how graph data is parsed and also as an added benefit you get to learn implementing Minimal comps. :)

* FQL - get started with FB query Language, a very strong weapon in your FB development arsenal. If you have never used it, you will get to know what you were missing.

* AIR deployment with StageWebView, which is the latest update with new flashplayer feature.

* Start from scratch to deploy your app onto FB, either online or on desktop.

* You may end up amazed by how easily we can poll graph data directly using the browser. Neat hacks and tips which can help you really understand how graph, connections etc work.

* Searching for relevant data in the FB ocean.

* Easily decode the json data returned by the graph using the AS3CoreLib

So this makes us realise that it is not for AS3 newbies, but you need to be good enough with AS3 to get started right away. Most of the support code of the visualiser app is not explained as it is out of context of the book, so you would need AS3 power to understand all those. You will fnd real solid OOP usage and implementation with examples which can really help out the developer in you even if you are not much interested in FB development. One thing i had noticed is that Michael could have used external Debuggers like Arthropod to show log data instead of a custom dialog event, but then we could easily make that change.

So in the end, when it comes to FB you need to start early and proceed as fast as possible as social media is fast changing. FB is at the forefront of the revolution and we cant blame them for changing APIs so rapidly. This book surely helps you get started right away and get into the thick of things with the latest graph API and FB AS3 SDK. Even if you dont want to use the AS3 SDK (as updates for this is usually late when FB updates APIs) you can extend the native parsing information used in the earlier stages of the book to write your own classes for accessing FB data.

So rush to download the book and get those source files and start exploring the vast FB ocean. Who knows what you may end up creating, but dont thank me, thank Michael.

Unity makes waves with camera gaming and iPhone, Android game controllers

2011-01-19T15:00:00.002+05:30

Unity is sure making waves with latest technology, making huge potential in near future.

Unitys camera based gaming

Controlling Unity game using iPhone and Android

Blackberry Playbook - great for flash games & uncompromised web

2011-01-07T12:45:00.001+05:30

Check out how BB playbook delivers the full web experience, including flash games.

Notion Ink's Adam is out - Video

2011-01-06T11:59:00.001+05:30

Engadget has this great review of the product and they seem impressed, so is tech India :)

World of Warcraft on Android via Gamestring

2010-12-03T12:15:00.005+05:30

Gamestring has released a video of its live gaming streaming technology on Android mobile devices. This is similar to onlive, yet different is certain ways. But let us wait and see how this comes out eventually. We know how onlive has done it.

Developing games using Adobe Packager for iPhone

2010-11-30T10:56:00.003+05:30

When Apple approved third party tools for developing apps for the app store we at Csharks were thrilled. This was to open up an all new business channel for us as we could use our expertise in Flash game development to create good iPhone games. As a pilot project I started off porting one of our old AS2 games, Gabriels Revenge to iPhone using the Packager for iPhone from Adobe. Please take your time to download and test the game as we are giving it out free. Please do consider this as a Kids game for the Xmas season and primarily a proof of concept game for us.

Before moving on, here are the links I used as reference.
http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2010/09/packager-for-iphone-refresher.html
http://elromdesign.com/blog/2010/06/18/the-lost-blog-post-getting-started-with-building-applications-for-the-iphone-ipod-touch-or-ipad-using-flash-tools/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/app_store_guide.html

I would like to share my experience developing the game and the way I did it. Let me start by the main aspects that I learned from this.
* It is very easy to port/ create new games using PFI from existing AS3 code. You need to optimise the coding and convert needed art probably into raster sprite sheets.
* Performance is very bad. Lets face this, it was framing a lot when I was trying games with more than 5 updating sprites on stage.
* Lot of limitations. So Adobe hopefully will bring out new versions for the PFI which can boost performance and adding more features and functionalities.

So at this point this is only ideal for simple board games or tile based games with limited graphics. Also playing a looping music is gonna lower the performance even more.

But I never knew when i started off, hence i tried to port our side scroller game, Planet journey. With out testing on device I almost coded the whole thing within couple of hours as there was not much logic. I just needed to create the sprite sheets from existing art and then create classes which duplicated most play back functionalities of a movieclip for those spritesheets. I used bitmapdata class and pushed each tile in the sprite sheet into a Vector. As animation progressed I pulled bitmapdata from vector to refresh the clip. This seemed super optimised way of doing it rather than putting all sprites on stage and controlling as vectors. Everything ran really smooth on desktop (ofcourse) but eventually when I started testing on device I saw that it was badly framing and performance was really lagging. So DONT go for scroller games.

This was initially depressing as I was totally excited about this and wanted to do a lot more, without taking the pain of learning ObjectiveC. Realising the limitations I decided to do the most simple game possible and Gabriels revenge came up as it only had 2 moving sprites on stage to be updated at anytime. This was as simple as it gets. A single static backdrop, one hero clip which moved on touch/drag and one enemy clip which was a simple AI.

Main aspects to take care while developing for mobile device are
* to disable screen timeouts.
* to account for interruption of game play when calls come through.
* to locally save user data on device.
* to use device specific capabilities to enrich the game.
* to optimise for device limitations.

For planet journey I tried landscape mode, but this had an art artifact issue as when the app loads and starts after the default image display. I didn't find a way to avoid this artifact, so i decided to stick with portrait mode. It is also better to statically set resolution values for the specific mode.


stageHeight=480;
stageWidth=320;

In order to disable the screen timeout for the device we can use the following code. The third line keeps the system awake. The other 2 lines listens for app activation/deactivation. Activation doesnot make sense as at this point as the application is set to exit on deactivation. But if this runs on a multithread then the app can resume functioning once the activity which stole focus is completed. In such case we will need to pause the game/activity on deactivation.


if(Capabilities.cpuArchitecture == "ARM") {
 NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(Event.ACTIVATE, activateApp);
 NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(Event.DEACTIVATE, deactivateApp);
 NativeApplication.nativeApplication.systemIdleMode=SystemIdleMode.KEEP_AWAKE;
}
//
private function activateApp(e:Event):void{
 NativeApplication.nativeApplication.systemIdleMode=SystemIdleMode.KEEP_AWAKE;
}
private function deactivateApp(e:Event):void{
 //either exit or pause. this can happen when user gets a call
 NativeApplication.nativeApplication.exit();
}

As the game used touch for navigation we need to access the new Multitouch capabilities of AIR. The code is below, but you should understand that we can use normal mouse based actions for the same purposes which is highly recommended too as we only have single touch point needed. But as this was a proof of concept I needed to test touch features and I used a boolean for setting mousemode for testing. So I could use mouse for testing on desktop and switch the flag for device testing


if(Multitouch.supportsTouchEvents){
 Multitouch.inputMode=MultitouchInputMode.TOUCH_POINT;
 stage.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH_BEGIN, beginHandler);
 stage.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH_MOVE, moveHandler);
 stage.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH_END, endHandler); 
}
/*if(mouseMode){
 this.stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, altMouseAction);
 this.stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, altMouseActionUp);
 this.stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, altMouseActionMove);
}*/

Only these were the main aspects to take care when doing the code which was specific to iPhone. All the other functionalities were straight forward AS3 coding. Another aspect was to decide how to save highscores and how to display it. For both of these I got excellent references via twitter, thanks to Jesse Freeman for FScoreBoard and ThanksMister for AS3 ScrollList. I integrated both of these for a very functional highscores table. This uses localstorage for storing data.

I tried adding a looping background music but it was heavy on the performance. So I had to stick with simple sound for hitting. I used Flash Builder for development and created this as an AIR project, hence couldnot test on Device central. I have learned that we can develop this as a normal AS3 project and test in device central and once finished, package using PFI. Gonna do this for my next game Christmas Bounce based on Papa Bounce. This game is going to be accelerometer controlled and hopefully will be released before Xmas and will be a Free game ;)

Another point to add here will be the command for compiling using PFI on a mac. You need to change the path as needed for your applications

pfi -package -target ipa-app-store -provisioning-profile /Path/to/Your/Provisioning/Profile -storetype pkcs12 -keystore /Path/to/Your/Certificate.p12 -storepass your_password YourApplication.ipa /Path/to/YourApplication-app.xml -C /Path/to/Your/SWF/and/Assets/Directory YourApplication.swf Default.png Icon_57.png

It took me more time to get everything wired up on my Mac for development than actually developing the app. Getting all certificates, provisioning files and wiring all together was tricky and unless I had good references I could have never pulled that off. Apple also took a lot of time reviewing the game, but that is normal and even I thought that this was going to get rejected somehow. But eventually It was released and we have a simple time waster for kids for this Xmas season.

Great AIR for Android games

2010-11-25T13:32:00.001+05:30

Video compiled by Lee Brimelow. Wonderful potential.

Some Great AIR for Android Games from Lee Brimelow on Vimeo.

Adobe MAX 2010 Keynote - Gaming

2010-11-03T11:42:00.001+05:30

Kevin Lynch explains the revolution in gaming on flash platform.

Build AIR Crossscreen Apps MAX presentation

2010-11-02T11:38:00.002+05:30

Christian Cantrell presentation on MAX 2010 on Multiscreen app development tips for iOS and Android

Flash 3D - Molehill API

2010-10-26T10:10:00.004+05:30

Adobe max sneak peak video of the cool 3D features coming to flash player.
API link
This demo is done by Alternativa team.

Demo by Frima Studio

Another video posted at bytearray.org

Brassmokey SDK - control your online games with Mobiles

2010-09-22T10:40:00.002+05:30

BrassMonkey SDK enables us to turn our IOS , Android devices to control out Flash, Unity online games. More details here and this surely is a technology full of potential.

Chris Allen - BrassMonkey Interview from Brian Rinaldi on Vimeo.

Resizing flash content for multiple screens

2010-09-22T09:39:00.001+05:30

Video tutorial to fit flash content to different layouts. Basically helpful for delivering content to Android Mobile devices.

Making Biolab HTML5 game

2010-09-14T16:24:00.001+05:30

This game uses impactjs custom library. Much smoother and complete pixel game yet with native web technology.

Biolab Disaster - HTML5 Game from Dominic Szablewski on Vimeo.

Rocket Engine web game toolkit

2010-09-04T12:42:00.002+05:30

Rocket engine seems similar to Aves and claims to be first full web game developmnt toolkit. Games created can be played in iDevices, Android and other smartphones along with PC. Highly promising and seemingly the engine behind is JS and probably HTML5. Lets wich the competition builds up ;)

Adobe Summit Session slides aggregated

2010-08-31T12:59:00.004+05:30

Attended Adobe summit 2010 at Bengaluru. Trying to aggregate all slides from slide share of sessions at AdobeSummit 2010.

Multiscreen with flash platform

Multiscreen with Flash Platform

View more presentations from Hemanth Sharma.

The rise of the mechanical Designer

Mechanical Designer2

View more presentations from Deepak Pakhare.

Visual Experiences with Flex4

Visual Experiences with flex 4

View more presentations from Saurabh Narula.

Flex3 to Flex4

Flex 3 to Flex 4

View more presentations from modyyash.

UI engineering rebooted

UI Engineering - Rebooted

View more presentations from Uday Shankar.

Flex + PaypalX

Adobe flex + pay pal x = monetization of ria

View more presentations from ganeshX.

Less verbose Actionscript

Less Verbose ActionScript 3.0 - Write less and do more!

View more presentations from Ragunathan Arul Kumaran.

Hacking SWF - Slides

2010-08-24T13:10:00.002+05:30

Wonderful slideshare article on SWF internals.

Hacking swf

View more presentations from Saurabh Mathur.

Rage 3D FPS on iPhone Video

2010-08-13T10:20:00.003+05:30

For gamers and game developers John Carmack is a legend. Check out this video where iDs Rage game runs on iPhone at 60 FPS. He is always part of redefining gaming right from the days of Wolf and Doom. All Hail the genius.

Flash player 10.1 on Droid 2

2010-08-11T09:36:00.001+05:30

First phone to natively come out with Flash player 10.1, the Droid 2.

CloudCanvas HTML 5 Image editor

2010-07-23T09:38:00.001+05:30

A new competitor to Aviary using HTML5 is out. Check out this video of CloudCanvas

Optimising flash content for FP 10.1

2010-07-01T12:51:00.001+05:30

Byte array's excellent tips on optimising flash content.

Best Practices in optimizing content for Flash Player 10.1 from Thibault Imbert on Vimeo.

What motivates us?

2010-06-28T18:06:00.001+05:30

Surprising truth about what motivates us. Extremely talented way of showing it too :)

Tilt gaming fun with iPhone 4

2010-06-25T10:44:00.002+05:30

The new gyroscope controls for tilt gaming in the new Phone 4 is incredibly efficient. It has lifted the user experience from the old compass based tilt controls to an all time higher level.

All about Google TV - Video

2010-06-17T11:59:00.001+05:30

Google TV is here and is based on Android platform. Check out this video to know how its going to revolutionise your TV experience.

Xbox Kinect - redefine gaming, once again

2010-06-15T12:37:00.003+05:30

Microsofts project Natal has been renamed Kinect. This may well redefine the way we game :) Like how Nintento Wii redefined it all. Enjoy seamless potential of future gaming with wire free control. The controller is YOU!

More fun.

More adventures.

More fitness.

The all new iPhone 4 intro video

2010-06-08T13:57:00.002+05:30

Check out the amazing iPhone 4 in this video.

Steve Jobs at D8 2010

2010-06-02T14:39:00.001+05:30

Steve Jobs on Google and Android

Steve Jobs on Adobe and Flash

Aves HTML5 Game Engine

2010-04-28T12:18:00.003+05:30

Big possibility if this one becomes a reality. Still HTML 5 has to go a long way for all the browsers to support is accurately. But the demo video is promising.

Check out the home page for Aves engine. This will enable to deliver the same game across browsers on PC, mac, internet devices and mobiles including the iphone.

AIR game on 6 platforms

2010-04-06T12:02:00.002+05:30

Code convergence with Adobe AIR is awesome. We can use the same code to deploy into all the main devices out there. Future of gaming just got more beautiful for AS3 developers.

Microsoft deploys same code based games on xbox, pc & mobile

2010-03-08T09:56:00.002+05:30

This can be really great for game developers out there, check out the video. You can use 90% of the same code across these largely varied hardware. You may need to have different versions of art assets to support the different screen sizes, but code changes are limited to specific hardware features like accelerometer, touch etc.

IGDS 2010 - First time ever Indian game developer summit, Review

2010-03-01T11:59:00.005+05:30

Team from Csharks consisting of Eldhose and me (Juwal) had this wonderful opportunity to attend Indian Game Developer Summit at Bengaluru on Feb 27, 2010.

From IGDS

We reached at the venue close to 9 am in the morning traveling through train from Kochi. Nimhans convention centre was a great venue and many of the attendees were already talking snaps of the place. Registration went smoothly and saltmarch kits were provided which included a laptop bag, brochures, timetable, lunch coupon, notepad and pen.

Going in what caught our attention was the first stall by Adobe. We for pamphlets on the flash platform and Adobe keychains. We were really happy to see Adobe as gold sponsors for the event as our primary development platform was Flash.

From IGDS

We being an online game development company, were focusing to attend many of those informative sessions on online gaming. But there were sessions covering different streams of game development with focus on 3D, social gaming and mobile development.

From IGDS

There were stalls by nVidia, Ubisoft, Playdom, Aiga and more which also included refreshments sponsored by Redbull.

The event started with keynote session by Carl Jones from Crytek. I had played all their games and was a big fan of Crysis. I couldnt hold onto my seats when he demoed the latest CryEngine3.

We had some coffee and snack after that. Meanwhile i had met Yadu rajiv, a veteran open source game developer from Trivandrum and also the team from Chayowo games.

From IGDS

I choose to attend 'creating successful online games' by Robin Alter of Kreeda games. He explained the methodology followed at Kreeda for their MMO game about to be released soon.

From IGDS

I missed out the nVidia session which ran in parallel and came to know that they were raffling some nVidia graphics cards to lucky people in the audience. If i was a student at that point, i would have only attended all nVidia sessions LOL.

From IGDS

Next session i chose was by Harish Sivaramakrishnan, tech evangelist at Adobe. His session was on creating, distributing and monetizing flash games. He informed us how easy it was to really deploy iphone games with the new CS5 version of flash. He also let us know more on the Shibuya platform for monetizing flash games on AIR marketplace.

From IGDS

Next session for me was 'the business of online games' by Tridib Roy. This was really important session from our perspective as he disclosed lots of statistics and information which we could use for our online game business.

From IGDS

We broke for lunch and had some networking with delegates from other companies. Eldhose had some meetings scheduled with dignitaries from same domain. I took the time to catch up with Harish and the Adobe team at their stall. Met Ramesh, hemant and Vysagh and we talked about some usergroup activities for 2010. The team showed great support for the interest that we had shown for the platform and promised to help us out with the upcoming special events with the Kerala UG.

I happened to see people enjoying 3D gaming in real 3D with goggles at the nVidia stalls.

From IGDS

Next up was a session on Ghajjini, the game made by FxLabs on Torque game engine. We wanted to know more about this as it was an IP from India and an engine for which we had license. Imran khan explained a lot about how they went about the whole project from concept to final marketing. This was an eyeopener in many sense.

From IGDS

Sumit Gupta had this excellent session on 'preparing for the great indian gaming rush' which focussed on the need to get started with facebook social games development. He explained why the social gaming arena is ripe for getting started and how all will benefit on the long run.

From IGDS

I wanted to attend Yadu rajivs session on open source development but it coincided with 'mobile game development' session by Hemant. Hemant went about demoing the great Adobe Device central and Flash CS5 and showed how easy it was to create an accelerometer controlled game for your mobile device. He also controlled a PC client using a mobile device accelerometer control over a remote socket connection. For someone who understood the implications of the whole thing, it was huge :)

We had tea in between and got Tshirts and certificates from the counter. Eldhose, me, Yadu and harish hooked up after the sessions and had a great 'Mallu' time.

From IGDS

It was yet another of those unforgettable experiences, similar to one we had for Ficci frames. All thanks to the great event by Saltmarch, Wifi by Airtel and the great sponsors. We understood that our choices for the year 2010 were correct and got some solid information regarding online gaming sector. Looking for ward to a bigger event next time.

Psychology in games

2010-02-25T09:48:00.003+05:30

Video on How facebook games, clubpenguin, wiifit etc made millions using psychology.

PS3 Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

Game development with FOSS - Video by Yadu Rajiv

2010-02-21T17:18:00.002+05:30

Yadu is from tiruvananthapuram and leads many Open source ventures. The video is the unconference feel of Open source community. Good community and good session.

Game development with FOSS from OSSCube on Vimeo.

Google Keynote: Flash on Android, Mobile World Congress

2010-02-18T09:37:00.002+05:30

Its really great when one of the biggest tech revolutionists out there is supporting the cause of flash for full web browsing on any mobile device. Android is here to stay and lets see what googles tech team has to say about it.

Acrobat Connect Mobile on iPhone

2010-02-04T15:21:00.001+05:30

Video showing off latest flash cs5 apps on iPhone including the mobile version of Acrobat connect pro.

Creating games for OIG

2010-01-28T19:01:00.000+05:30

While working at Csharks, we always had this vision to promote games for the Indian audience. We could never find an avenue to do that all these years as game development was not considered a lucrative profession tille recent times. Now we have biggies like games2win, realgames etc making a mark of their own in the Indian online gaming. We had the opportunity to work with ibibo to deliver some of our local flavored games onto their social platform. But we could not be satisfied as we could not let all our imaginations and creations be featured at a single place for the Indian audience.

Along came Onlineindiangames.com game portal which was exclusively dedicated to provide local themed Indian games to the Indian crowd. We supported the venture by providing branded games which were specially created for the Indian audience. We hope to have a healthy relationship with the portal so that we could launch games on different verticals like independence struggle, Indian Mythology, Politics and what not. We also plan to create virtual world based games with avatars featuring Indians. This is something in the works, but the Indian online gamers can expect a lot from this portal. Currently the portal is in Beta and we are supporting the development of games for regular update on the portal. Csharks will have long lasting relation with this portal where we will be delivering majority of the content on the portal.

Current attractions on the portal are Balancing Mathai, Aunts Fighting, Coolie No.1, Jhansis Ride, Kappiri Jump, Rat and Cheese etc. Lot of new games are being developed, which will feature severe physics and fun levels. Expect a lot more from the stables of Csharks and the management of OIG.

Apple Ipad Video

2010-01-28T11:26:00.001+05:30

Well I could not load the Quicktime Video, so here is the Embedded Flash Video :) SO ironic

Flash games on Palm Pre

2010-01-12T11:12:00.002+05:30

Latest Flash player on palm playing games from Miniclip video. Really promising future..

The Adobe Avatar connection

2010-01-08T17:00:00.001+05:30

How Adobe tools help realise the Avatar movie video.

Flash on Nexus One

2010-01-06T11:26:00.003+05:30

Play games and other interactive flash content on the google phone.

Flash survey 2009

2009-12-16T10:28:00.000+05:30

Flash Games Market Survey Results Final

View more documents from mochimedia.

Problems loading crossdomain data and images in Flash

2009-11-05T17:19:00.002+05:30

Every flash developer who have worked with loading external data would have had his fight with crossdomain polices and flashplayer security issues. We may we trying to load some images or XML data into our flash movie and it will be working just fine in the local machine. When you deploy the flash app online it wont load any data and yet wont display any errors too. This may be a headache for first tiers who are yet to know about flashplayer security issues and its restriction to load data only from explicitly allowed domains.

If the loaded data resides with the same domain you may end up with out facing this particular trouble, but things become real tricky when you try loading data from different domains. With Flash player 6 a security sandbox implemented a restriction : a movie sitting on one domain would be prevented from loading data from another domain. In Flash Player 6, sub domains of the same parent domain could access each other's data this is not the case anymore starting with Flash player 7, domains must be identical for data to be read.

So in order to enable such loading we need to have a 'crossdomain.xml' file in the data hosting domain root which enables access to the domain where the swf is hosted. Crossdomain.xml looks like this.
By default the flashplayer looks for the crossdomain.xml within the data domain root. If it finds access enabled for its domain then data is loaded. With the addition of System.security.loadPolicyFile, Flash Player 7.0.19.0 can load policy files from arbitrary locations, as shown in the following example:

System.security.loadPolicyFile("http://mydomain.com/sub/dir/myPolicyFile.xml");

This will solve the problem associated with loading xml files, but loading images and swfs is a different story altogether. It gets a bit complicated with the use of LoaderContext and Security.allowDomain. Here is the Adobe post on loading swfs and images from another domain.


var context:LoaderContext = new LoaderContext(); 
context.checkPolicyFile = true; 
var urlReq:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.[external domain].com/photo11.jpg"); 
var ldr:Loader = new Loader(); 
ldr.load(urlReq, context);

So ultimately the understanding is that we need to allow domain access and also use a loaderContext for loading images.

Browser for Dummies

2009-10-08T11:10:00.001+05:30

Google lets you know what a browser is through this new site and the video.

Hello World in Source binder

2009-10-05T15:57:00.003+05:30

I received the alpha invite for source binder visual flash development tool. I am really excited about this. But here is a video which demonstrates the simple power of the tool.

Hello World tutorial - Sourcebinder from Viktor Kelemen on Vimeo.

Understanding Push button Engine Components

2009-10-02T15:55:00.002+05:30

PBE uses a really different architecture for building their framework. This video helps us get started.

Updating the flash game engine

2009-10-01T15:37:00.006+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Some months back i was trying to work on the flex game engine. Had released a version and developed some games based on it. There were also plans to further extend it. But now we have open source heavy weight flex/flash engines likes the Push Button Engine from the Torque team. So any flex engine now becomes obsolete in view of PBE which is having some real work being put into its development. Each month there are revisions released for the game and its maturing day by day. So story of my flex engine ends here.
Now it is time to update our flash game engine. The current engine is a simple port of the original AS2 engine that we had. It was developed when we started learning AS3 and it now seems like a toy car of sorts. So the plan is to redo everything from scratch which helps development pipeline at Csharks. This post is intended to keep track of features that may be needed to be developed, so it will help those who are developing similar engines right now.

So broadly speaking the engine for Csharks needs to do 2 different things.1) It should help development of client works, reduce time, increase efficiency and make life easier for artists and programmers working together on the project.2) It should be extended to create specific Csharks game engine which we will be using for developing all our in house games and games for our supported portals. So the original engine is to be a kind of framework and the final in house engine will be a customisation of that framework specifically for set of features.

Lets try listing down the features for the framework. (this will be a work in progress for some time to come until i finalise it and start development. I will keep updating the post and putting comments)

1. Adding new scenes dynamically. Clear scene, play animations within scene, hooks to add stuff into scene, sequence scenes. eg: loader scene, intro scene, game scene, anim scene etc. So there can be a scene manager who sequences scenes and effects transitions between them.

2. Ability to log with some external logger like arthropod.

3. XML based fps, screen size, background color settings. Or they should be able to be changed at a central location.

4. Ability to skip levels, skip scenes, invincible mode with out life loss, ability to add score in a 'DEBUG' mode. These need to be cleared in release.

5. Centralised variable updations, to check bugs. This should output logs.

6. Centralised sound controls, in order to efficiently stop sounds globally. This also outputs log.

7. Centralised movement control for all scene items. This can help a lot with collisions tracking and scene rendering. Can opt stuff out when they are out of scene.

9. A bitmap renderer which only draws scene sized bitmap of current game stage. This optimises and speeds up rendering and controls frameskipping.

10. Reserved variable for eg, 'path' which gets populated with the path to external data using html embed codes.

Rover challenge Walkthrough

2009-09-08T17:42:00.002+05:30

Here is the walkthrough video for level 4.

Csharks Launched Onasadya game for Onam

2009-08-28T18:56:00.004+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

It is time for yet another Onam. Csharks is proud to launch 'Onasadya' game in celebration of this Onam. Check it out at http://csharksgames.com/onasadya/. The game is a bit informational to all those who dont know what an Onam feast is. Major elements of the feast is explained in concise text when you mouse over those. You can arrange the items on the leaf and serve it as a feast for the great Maveli. You can also take a print of the arranged feast.

Onam is really special for us Keralites and Csharks Wishes all a Happy Onam. Our other Onam game, Athappookkalam is still driving a lit of traffic for the season. You can check it out at http://www.csharksgames.com/pookkalam.php

Zipped ASE file parser loading in AS3

2009-08-26T19:06:00.002+05:30

Recently we updated our 3D shooting game which uses papervision AS3 library. The game Skullcrusher uses .ase 3d file formats and load 3d meshes dynamically on game load. This makes the players to wait for a lot of time for the 3d assets to load before they can actually start playing. I came to know that .ase file is a blown up xml file format which can be zipped into atleast 1/10th of its original size.

So if we could load zipped 3d assets rather than the .ase files directly into the swf we can reduce a lot of data transfer and time. Googling around resulted in this excellent article on loading external zipped assets using FZip. Now all i needed to do is alter the ASE dafault parser that comes with the papervision package to load and parse zipped ase files.

The idea is to zip .ase files into individual zip files. Then run the Adler checksum python script for each and every one of them. I altered the ASE parser to create a new class which handles the loading of such zipped assets. You just need to create new 'ZippedAseParser' asset rather than a new ASE asset.


var gun:ZippedAseParser = new ZippedAseParser(gunTexture, "gun.zip");

The ZippedAseParser class is as below.


package com.csharks.juwalbose
{
 import flash.events.*;
 import flash.net.URLLoader;
 import flash.net.URLRequest;
 
 import org.papervision3d.core.geom.*;
 import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Triangle3D;
 import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Vertex3D;
 import org.papervision3d.core.log.PaperLogger;
 import org.papervision3d.core.math.NumberUV;
 import org.papervision3d.core.proto.*;
 import org.papervision3d.events.FileLoadEvent; 
 
 import deng.fzip.FZip;

 /**
 * The Ase class lets you load and parse ASE format objects exported from 3DS Max. 
 * Only the geometry and mapping of one mesh is currently parsed. 
 * For more complex objects, it is recommended to import Collada scenes with addCollada method.
 */
 public class ZippedAseParser extends TriangleMesh3D
 {
  //##changes
  private var zippedAsset:FZip;  
  /**
  * Whether or not the scene has been loaded.
  */
  public var loaded :Boolean;
 
  /**
  * Default scaling value for constructor.
  */
  static public var DEFAULT_SCALING  :Number = 1;
 
  /**
  * Internal scaling value.
  */
  static public var INTERNAL_SCALING :Number = 50;
 
  // ___________________________________________________________________________________________________  
 
  /**
  * Creates a new Ase object that will load and parse a zip file containing a 3DS Max exported .ASE mesh.  
  * Only the geometry and mapping of one mesh is currently parsed.  
  * @param material A MaterialObject3D object that contains the material properties of the object.  
  * @param filename Filename of the .ZIP which has the .ase object to parse.  
  * @param scale  Scaling factor.  
  */
  public function ZippedAseParser( material:MaterialObject3D, filename:String, scale:Number=1 )
  {
   super( material, new Array(), new Array(), null );
 
   this._scaleAse = scale;
   this._filename = filename;
 
   this.loaded = false; 
   
   //##changes
   zippedAsset = new FZip();
   zippedAsset.load(new URLRequest(filename));    
   zippedAsset.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, zipLoadComplete);   
   /*zippedAsset.addEventListener( ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, progressHandler);
   zippedAsset.addEventListener( IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorHandler);*/  
   
  }
  
  /**
  * Parses the .ase file when the zip file loading is complete. The first file in the zip is only considered.
  * 
  * @param event  
  */
  //##changes new function  
  private function zipLoadComplete(e : Event) : void{   
   parseAse(zippedAsset.getFileAt(0).getContentAsString());
  }
 
  // ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
  //                                                                                               A S E
  //   AA    SSSSS  EEEEEE
  //  AAAA  SS      EE
  // AA  AA  SSSS   EEEE
  // AAAAAA     SS  EE
  // AA  AA SSSSS   EEEEEE PARSER
 
  /**
  * Taken from w3d at http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2005/flash8-sourcecodes
  * By Andre Michelle, with much respect
  */
 
  private function parseAse( input:String ):void
  {
   var scale:Number = this._scaleAse;
   scale *= INTERNAL_SCALING;
 
   var vertices :Array = this.geometry.vertices = new Array();
   var faces    :Array = this.geometry.faces = new Array();
 
   //##changes
   var lines: Array = unescape(input).split( '\r\n' )
 
   var line: String;
   var chunk: String;
   var content: String;
 
   var uvs:Array = new Array();
 
   var material :MaterialObject3D = this.material;
 
   while( lines.length )
   {
    line = String( lines.shift() );
 
    //-- clear white space from beginn
    line = line.substr( line.indexOf( '*' ) + 1 );
 
    //-- clear closing brackets
    if( line.indexOf( '}' ) >= 0 ) line = '';
 
    //-- get chunk description
    chunk = line.substr( 0, line.indexOf( ' ' ) );
 
    switch( chunk )
    {
     case 'MESH_VERTEX_LIST':
      try
      {
       while( ( content = String( lines.shift() ) ).indexOf( '}' ) < 0 )
       {
        content = content.split("*")[1];
 
        //content = content.split("    ").join("\t");
        var mvl: Array = content.split(  '\t' ); // separate here
 
        var x:Number = Number( mvl[1] ) * scale;
        var y:Number = Number( mvl[3] ) * scale;
        var z:Number = Number( mvl[2] ) * scale; // Swapped Y and Z
 
        vertices.push( new Vertex3D( x, y, z ) );
       }
      }
      catch(error:Error)
      {
       PaperLogger.error( "MESH_VERTEX_LIST error" );
      }
      break;
 
 
     case 'MESH_FACE_LIST':
      try
      {
       while( ( content = String( lines.shift() ) ).indexOf( '}' ) < 0 )
       {
        content = content.split("*")[1];
 
        var mfl: String = content.split('\t')[0]; // ignore: [MESH_SMOOTHING,MESH_MTLID]
        var drc: Array = mfl.split( ':' ); // separate here
 
        var con: String;
        con = drc[2];
        var a:Vertex3D = vertices[ int( con.substr( 0, con.lastIndexOf( ' ' ) ) ) ];
 
        con = drc[3];
        var b:Vertex3D = vertices[ int( con.substr( 0, con.lastIndexOf( ' ' ) ) ) ];
 
        con = drc[4];
        var c:Vertex3D = vertices[ int( con.substr( 0, con.lastIndexOf( ' ' ) ) ) ];
 
        // Swap b/c
        faces.push( new Triangle3D(this,[a, b, c], null, [new NumberUV(), new NumberUV(), new NumberUV()] ) );
       }
      }
      catch(err:Error)
      {
       PaperLogger.info( "MESH_FACE_LIST : " );
      }
      break;
 
     case 'MESH_TVERTLIST':
      try
      {
       while( ( content = String( lines.shift() ) ).indexOf( '}' ) < 0 )
       {
        content = content.split("*")[1];
 
        var mtvl: Array = content.split(  '\t' ); // separate here
        uvs.push( new NumberUV( parseFloat( mtvl[1] ), parseFloat( mtvl[2] ) ) );
       }
      }
      catch(errorMesh:Error)
      {
       PaperLogger.error( "MESH_TVERTLIST error" + errorMesh.message );
      }
      break;
 
 
     case 'MESH_TFACELIST':
      try
      {
       var num: int = 0;
 
       while( ( content = String( lines.shift() ) ).indexOf( '}' ) < 0 )
       {
 
        content = content.substr( content.indexOf( '*' ) + 1 );
        var mtfl: Array = content.split(  '\t' ); // separate here
 
        var faceUV:Array = faces[ num ].uv;
        faces[ num ].uv0 = faceUV[0] = uvs[ parseInt( mtfl[1] )];
        faces[ num ].uv1 = faceUV[1] = uvs[ parseInt( mtfl[2] )];
        faces[ num ].uv2 = faceUV[2] = uvs[ parseInt( mtfl[3] )];
       
        num++;
 
       }
      }
      catch(errorFacelist:Error)
      {
       PaperLogger.error( "MESH_TFACELIST ERROR" + errorFacelist.message );
      }
      break;
    }
   }
 
   
 
   // dispatch event
   var fileEvent:FileLoadEvent = new FileLoadEvent( FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE, _filename );
   dispatchEvent( fileEvent );
 
   this.loaded = true;
   this.geometry.ready = true;
   PaperLogger.info( "Parsed ASE: " + this._filename + " [vertices:" + vertices.length + " faces:" + faces.length + "]" );
  }
 
  /*// ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
  private function ioErrorHandler(event:IOErrorEvent):void
  {
   var fileEvent:FileLoadEvent = new FileLoadEvent( FileLoadEvent.LOAD_ERROR, _filename );
   dispatchEvent( fileEvent );
   throw new Error("Ase: ioErrorHandler Error.");
  }
 
  private function progressHandler(event:ProgressEvent):void
  {
   //PaperLogger.info("progressHandler loaded:" + event.bytesLoaded + " total: " + event.bytesTotal);
   
  }
 */
  // ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
  private var _scaleAse  :Number;
     private var _loaderAse :URLLoader;
  private var _filename  :String;
 
  //private var log:XrayLog = new XrayLog();
  }
}

Csharks launches new site

2009-08-17T16:14:00.003+05:30

From Game Development Buzz

Just completed and scheduled launch of our new site at Csharks. Let me share some insights into the development and what went into the designs. Our old site was effective in displaying our talents and experience as a great team involved in creative development. But there was a bit of childishness with the design which we had specifically tailored into it. Some visitors had the impression of it not being professional enough. So our new site is a transformation of Csharks as more of a mature and serious company. The pages and design are done in order to reflect creative talent which solidly rests on professionalism. Another thing that we had in mind was to promote the much needed transition from old AS2 development to the more recent AS3 ways. The site clearly shows the power and capabilities of AS3 and Flex while keeping every aspect under control.

The index page is not currently created for non flash enabled devices and alternate content for optimized browsing on mobiles will be taken care of next. Currently the user requires flash player version 9 or above with javascript enabled modern browser to view it correctly. The layout spans 1024x768 which targets most used resolution for the web. Site uses GAIA framework with swfaddress and swfobject which enables deeplinking and SEO. Pages maintain history and address bar navigation with right click navigation enabled for use. The brochure uses flipping book technique most common for flash based page previews.

All resources are loaded using XML which includes the navigation system and the demo page data. Old feedback system which had worked so good for us has been maintained and ported to AS3. Google maps API is used to load the maps into the site and show the exact location of our offices. Music is loaded dynamically as it will unnecessarily increase loadtime if embedded inside the flash movie. There is also a blog feed page which shows dynamic feeds from this blog.

This time around we took the courage to list details about our core team and the directors. There is a social bookmarking widget integrated to the site which enables bookmarking on famous sites. We are also trying new things with freelancing options and inviting collaborations with companies or individuals interested in promoting ideas. I have maintained the Beta tag on the site as it will need to have a trial run for a couple of days before being awarded stability. Lot of effort has gone into the planning and design of this site as we will be using this for some years. Site design , wireframing and coding was done by me while art design was done by Devaraj and Music was done by Sreekumar. Let the magic begin.

Google Opt Out - Funny video

2009-08-12T09:15:00.002+05:30

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Inviting Mobile Game Testers from India

2009-07-30T16:22:00.005+05:30

Image by scottpowerz via Flickr

This year Csharks have started up a new development stream creating games for mobiles. The development started a few months ago with focus to create a single device specific J2ME game which helps to prototype development and help create a development framework which we can use in pipeline. The game is almost complete and is targeting Nokia's N70 phone currently. Current testing is done using inhouse hardware and we plan to give the game out to limited number of Beta testers from all over India based on an Online interface system.
This step will help us enrich a testing base engaging most of the hardwares available and thereby will help iron out many test scenarios. We would like interested people from all over India sign up as Beta Testers by simply mailing your interest to info[at]csharks[dot]com with your name, place and device hardware specifications.
These selected testers will get early access to all mobile games that we develop, which may or may not be governed by an initial agreement with the selected tester.

We look forward to build a healthy relation with a tester community which proves mutually beneficial in coming future. Currently its being undertaken as a test case as we plan to start development for all mobile devices, smartphones and the iPhone in the near future. We wish to deliver some quality mobile games for the Indian audience based on Indian themes through our new game portals too. Thanks to all of you for showing interest in this venture.

Our new Home page will be launched on Aug 15th on Indian Independence day.

Mozilla Bespin - HTML 5 web development

2009-07-21T13:56:00.001+05:30

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment that proposes an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards. It uses HTML 5 canvas and other features.

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

Jangaroo - An HTML 5 Killer, AS3 to JS compiler

2009-07-07T14:20:00.003+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Jangaroo is the new Kid in the block which may prove an HTML 5 killer. It is a new AS3 to JS compiler whose central tool is the ActionScript-3-to-JavaScript compiler jooc. It takes source code written in a subset of ActionScript 3 and translates it into JavaScript 1.x that is understood by current browsers and other JavaScript engines like Rhino. AS3 is the scripting language of flash and is dozens of times more capable language than HTML or any other web scripting language including javascript. But the web sphere has not accepted it as a standard for web development demanding that it needs the proprietary flash plugin in the client browser. Now this new technology can compile AS3 libraries into pure JS code which doesnot need flash plugin. This technology can use JS frameworks and AS3 frameworks and deploy pure browser experience.

* this makes flash developers code for non-flash devices like iphone
* makes many HTML 5 capabilities available right away with out flash plugin
* can create superior web frameworks
* it is opensource

Check the amazing capabilities in the project blog.

What this has to give to the flash game development community, check this out.

Rapid flash development with Sourcebinder

2009-07-02T18:59:00.007+05:30

Image by PiPiWa via Flickr

With source binder for flash player 10, as development is gonna change for ever. Check out this visual editor which will be free for use. THis can make development way too easy and many designers can work in highlevel by simply connecting nodes.
Check http://sourcebinder.org/

SourBinder Tutorial: The basics from Balazs Serenyi on Vimeo.

Flex game source

2009-07-02T11:44:00.004+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

I recently had an opportunity to share the flex game engine with other through a development competition. The development was done with Flashdevelop IDE and loads flex framework in runtime using RSL.
Check the game i did in couple of hours using the flex as3 engine port for the Codechef competition here
Download the sources on that page or the link is here

This gives out the engine that i was mentioning in my initial posts

Add Games to your wordpress blog

2009-06-30T10:04:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Post on Mochi land
The plugin page

Planning a website

2009-06-11T18:27:00.002+05:30

Excellent slides to detail how professionals plan site design and conceptualize good development strategies.

The Life Cycle of a Wireframe

View more Microsoft Word documents from Nick Finck.

Efficient asset loading in AS3 with SWCs

2009-06-09T13:14:00.004+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

When you are working with actionscript only project outside of flash IDE, like FDT or Flashdevelop you always end up loosing the code completion and time line actionscript of Embedded assets. Embedding assets is the usual way to get assets into the swf, but then you wont be able to access child assets directly and the timeline actionscript may be lost. An easy way to get code completion with loaded assets and to get access to asset timeline is to use SWCs or compiled classes.

We can put SWCs in the lib folder of a flash develop project. Right clicking this asset and selecting add to library will help use use code completion. Details on how to create SWCs for Flash develop can be found in the below link.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=AS3:FlexAndFlashCS3Workflow

Microsofts project Natal

2009-06-02T09:07:00.002+05:30

Image via CrunchBase

Yes M$ is here with answer to the Wii. Just enjoy the video of a technology which may redefine gaming as we see now.

Getting started with flex

2009-06-01T12:20:00.003+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

If you are reading this now, then you are really later to enter RIA development with Flex. But as they say better late than never. We have now Flex builder4 re branded as Flash Builder and an all new tool called Flash Catalyst aimed at Web designers.

It may take a bit time for Flex 4 based development to get started and add more life into the web, its always good to get your hands wet with good old flex 3 development.
Tools that can get to uptodate and make you code right away in flex can be summarised into 2 which are almost the same.
Adobe component Explorer
TourdeFlex application

Both these tools will help you find all those amazing components with source codes on how to use them in your RIA.

FFD magazine on Game development

2009-05-28T11:00:00.002+05:30

Check out Flash and Flex Developers Magazine for their issue on Online game development.

This issue covers

* Flash Flex developer interview with Dave Schroeder about the Flashbelt Conference...
* BannerSnack – A quick alternative to Flash?...
* Working With Flash CS4 New Features: Inverse kinematics (IK) with Bone Tool...
* Tracking Time with Screenweaver HX...
* Using all the different components within CS4 to built a complete site...
* Model View Controller – What's the Secret Sauce... ?...
* JSFL Quirks...
* SWX: The Native Data Format for Adobe Flash...
* An introduction to Flickr In Flash...
* Flash video and AS3...
* WebORB tricks...
* Multi-user Applications in haXe...
* Achieving a retro-style using only Flash...
* Secrets of a professional Flash game programmer...
* Interview with Lee Brimelow...

Flash frameworks - Update

2009-05-25T12:39:00.002+05:30

I earlier had this extensive post from flashchemist on AS3 APIs for effective RIA. Just recently my friend Binny forwarded me a link to some extremely happening and useful flash frameworks.

Among these we are already using GAIA as part of developing the new site for csharks which will be live this July. Jswiff can be used to create flash on server side, which is a promising technology. Progression, ARP and Yahoo flash libraries can help rocket boost your development speed.

Make use of these now.

Knowing those error codes

2009-05-23T11:43:00.003+05:30

Here are links to the error codes and their meanings as of Flash CS4, AS3. Get to know those compiler errors, runtime errors and compiler warnings.

Compiler errors explained
Runtime errors explained
Compiler warnings explained

Frameworks for iPhone development

2009-05-21T12:37:00.004+05:30

Image via CrunchBase

Frameworks which can be used for iPhone development.
http://www.openframeworks.cc/
http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/
http://addons.openframeworks.cc/

Flash for iPhone through HAXE and NME

Just sharing the links that i found possibly useful.

Great text to speech converter

2009-05-13T17:42:00.003+05:30

This is something introduced to me in twitter bu Aravind Jose. We can use Audacity with recording option of Waveout to record the generated audio. It generates accented, emotional audio in many languages in both male and female voices. Great free TTS audio tool.

http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/

Best Opensource Web IDE

2009-05-13T12:17:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Just collecting some tools and links for best PHP/JS/HTML ide out there with most features especially the design view. Currently Eclipse and Aptana Studio are contenders. Eclipse has a plethora of plugins, but the only problem there is what to use and what not. An updated guideline on the best plugin is hard to find.

Here are some links
http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/
Explaination of latest eclipse development setup
A webinar on PDT for eclipse
Plugins for eclipse http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-789.html, http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-634.html, http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-108.html, http://web-design.lovetoknow.com/Eclipse_HTML_Editor

Aptana can be used as standalone ide or eclipse plugin, seems this is the latest one and more up to date.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Easy Web to Desktop Frameworks

2009-05-12T12:43:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

When we start thinking about developing easy desktop applications based on web technologies every flash developer will think of Adobe AIR. But the fact out there is that not every web developer is a flash developer. And also those webdevelopers dont like flash too, so they have some alternate technologies out there. Lets meet Prism and Fluid.
Check out mozillas prism here
Check out Fluid javascript library here

This video shows how easy it is to build your prism app.

Here is a link on Fluid based twitter client.

Optimising your AIR application

2009-05-08T11:28:00.004+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

What AIR does is it makes it easy for web developers to develop desktop apps. But this has its own problem as technology cant jsut directly get ported to desktop from web. You need to make changes and adjustments for desktop apps to work efficiently. Those developers who are experienced flash developers will know that flash runs through the framerate even when its idle, also even listeners like ENTER_FRAME gets polled per frame. This will eat up CPU for a desktop even when the AIR app is running in background. So here are some links to optimise your development in AIR planning efficient use of framerate, eventliseners and timers.
GrantSkinners post
Adobe blog post
Another decent guideline

Looking into 2D physics in AS3 -Fisix Engine

2009-05-07T11:55:00.004+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

We had to do some physics based game development as part of our embracing AS3 movement. We came across great 2D physics engines like APE, Box 2D, motor, CDK and Fisix. We now actively use APE and hopefully will extend it with its 3D counter part WOW. But an interesting thing that caught my eye was the demo of Fisix engine where it seemed to be able to draw any kind of 2D surface for the engine to work collisions at http://www.fisixengine.com/. Now when I downloaded the engine I came to know that there is a commercial restriction to the engine and also that it was not a dynamic bitmap based level engine. The demo actually hardcoded all the points in the bitmap to make physics enabled surfaces.

I have tried to contact the makers and have come to know that it doesnot need a commercial license as of now, although it says so at the site. So I went ahead to create a class which can parse any bitmap level and dynamically create levels like all those side scrolling vehicle physics games out there. I have sent the class to them and they will possibly make it part of the package.

What this actually does is looks through the bitmap from left to right one horizontal pixel column at a time. For each column it stores the highest valid pixel and after collecting the full top border pixels it iterates to find only the main ones which define the over all shape of the bitmap. This will help us create some vehicle games and this enables our artists to just draw those levels, which automatically works in the engine.

Adobe Technologies Session for Barcampkerala5

2009-05-04T19:34:00.002+05:30

Recently i had the honor of taking a session on adobe technologies. I have uploaded the slides and here you can check out the link. Click the flash to focus and use arrow keys to navigate. I have also collected all the links used into a blog post here. Clicking some links (the first 2) will popup the corresponding page, for others you will need to use the links page.

Check slides

Barcampkerala5 Session Links

2009-05-02T15:23:00.002+05:30

These are the links used for my presentation on Barcampkerala5 at technopark. The session was 'Getting some Action - Adobe Technologies'

Flash Streaming Video Players
1.http://tv.adobe.com/
2.www.youtube.com
3.www.vimeo.com

Augmented Reality Demo
4.http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality - needs a cam
5.http://www.boffswana.com/news/?p=392#more-392 - needs a cam
6.http://www.c3picasso.com/uk/

3D in flash
7.http://blog.papervision3d.org/

Online creativity tools
8.http://www.pixlr.com/app/
9.https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html - photo editing
10.http://aviary.com/tools/phoenix - image editor
11.http://aviary.com/tools/raven - vector editor
12.http://dragonfly.labs.autodesk.com/#index=design - interior design

Flash Game portals
13.http://www.kongregate.com
14.http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
15.http://www.newgrounds.com/game/
16.http://www.miniclip.com/games/en/

Flash MMO games/Portals
17.http://www.clubpenguin.com/ - MMO flash portal
18.http://www.battleon.com/
19.http://www.runescape.com/

Flash Multi user collaboration technologies
20.http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/afcs/
21.http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/

Flash 2D art
22.http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/ - Flash Art

AS3 APIs
23.http://www.flashchemist.com/104-free-opensource-apis-libraries-and-tools-for-the-flash-platform.html - free apis
24.http://tech.nitoyon.com/blog/2008/01/as3query_alpha.html - as3Query

Flex
25.http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/
26.http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/
27.http://flex.org/

AIR
28.http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
29.http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/

Flashlite for mobiles
30.http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/
31.http://www.adobe.com/mobile/
32.http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/docstools/projectcapuchin/p_projectcapuchin.jsp - project capuchin
33.www.forum.nokia.com
34.http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/04/29/adobe-mobile-packager-beta-11/ - on .sis packaging for series-60
35.http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/distributableplayer/

Pixelbender
36.http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/pixelbender/
37.http://www.everythingflex.com/fp10/fotobooth/ - demo pixel bender, needs a cam

Open source Flash
38.http://osflash.org/projects
39.http://osflash.org/eclipse
40.http://osflash.org/flashdevelop

3D Flash game Skullcrusher 3D Released

2009-04-27T14:51:00.004+05:30

As i had a blog post earlier on the recent development of a flash 3D game, i wanted to share the release of the game on onlineindiangames.com. We developed Skullcrusher 3D for OIG which involved AS3 libraries like papervision and tweener. It loads 3D assets on runtime and hence you can change the gun and the enemy skulls easily by swapping the assets. This enables creating new versions of the game really easy and makes cloning or porting effortless.
The game is all about surviving to accumulate maximum score while shooting down incoming enemy skulls. You start the game with 5 lives which gets lost once a skull gets to you. As levels increases you will face much faster skulls and scoring and survival becomes very difficult. Hopefully later on we will have a highscore table for the game at OIG, but meanwhile we at Csharks will be bringing out more 3D games for you.

Play the game here

Debugging AIR projects - A tip

2009-04-24T18:31:00.003+05:30

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I work with Flashdevelop to create swf AIR aplications. The thing is that the swf file that is created will throw errors if run independently. It needs to be launched from an AIR package. So debugging can be a tricky thing when you will have to package and install again each time to test. A way to handle this is to install the package once and only replace the swf files inside the installed folder. You set your publish directory there or just copy/paste the swf to overwrite. Then you launch your AIR app.

Recently i worked with FZip to create an AIR application which loads a Zip file and adds more content into it and then writes it back to client machine. I used FZip's load(URLRequest) function with an eventlistener to FILE_LOADED. The problem i faced was the inability to add to the same FZip package. I had to create a duplicate FZip package and copy all files onto it.

Web Debugger Charles

2009-04-23T18:56:00.004+05:30

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We already have a bandwidth profiler in Flash IDE. But what if you develop in flex or say OS flash IDEs. Help is at your feet with Charles Web debugger. Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Charles can act as a man-in-the-middle for HTTP/SSL communication, enabling you to debug the content of your HTTPS sessions.

Charles simulates modem speeds by effectively throttling your bandwidth and introducing latency, so that you can experience an entire website as a modem user might (bandwidth simulator).

Charles is especially useful for Adobe Flash developers as you can view the contents of LoadVariables, LoadMovie and XML loads. Charles also has native support for Flash Remoting (AMF0 and AMF3). More about Charles and Flash. Additionally you will need the JRE, java runtime environment and the Firefox extension

Stats is an AS3 class to show you the FPS and memory usage of the flash content. This can also help in profiling.

Starting iPhone development

2009-04-23T16:13:00.007+05:30

Image via CrunchBase

What would you need to start iPhone app development?
You will need s Mac or a Mac book. You will need an iPhone. Then you will need Cocoa.
This post says that Objective C has been the mother of all game development.

Get started here first with all the support for a newbie.

You can get your hands wet with the link below which has a whole load of tutorials for getting started asap.

http://www.bestuniversities.com/blog/2009/100-free-courses-tutorials-for-aspiring-iphone-app-developers/

Action script cheat sheets

2009-04-23T15:37:00.003+05:30

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As of CS3 it has become a bit more difficult for new users to learn Action script as the help system got revamped. I liked the old Flash 8 way of help system which was really easy with all those related examples and all. Live docs some times down work for me any more. Then i came to know about cheat sheets which can be a time saver for all of us.

Actionscripters have a dedicated site for cheat sheet resources http://actionscriptcheatsheet.com/blog/ Check out the site to know more. Also check this link for papervision specific cheat

This pdf really makes life a lot easier as it provides AS2 to AS3 migration cheats. Can get you all kick start AS3.

Googles O3D

2009-04-22T10:58:00.002+05:30

Google brings out web based browser 3D engine using Javascript called o3D. Just check out this video on the realtime 3D rendering using o3D. The only trouble is that google had closed down more of its services which makes us hesitant to use new technology they bring out. We will wait and see.

Adding interactive 3D objects in papervision3D

2009-04-17T18:05:00.006+05:30

Image by aralbalkan via Flickr

I wanted to do a proof of concept game in flash 3D. When i saw this work with source shared i knew how easily i can modify this to create a simple shooter game. I added our own 3d assets and graphics and recompiled the source provided with Jiglib, papervision and tweener classes. I removed the physics part as the game never involved physics.
The idea was to add a 3d skull mesh which tweens towards the user and you can shoot it to explode. If the skull reaches you, you will loose a life. As time goes by the skull will increase in speed making survival difficult. Altering code was easy when considering coding such a thing from scratch.
Now the tricky thing was to make the dynamically loaded skull mesh interactive to respond to mouse click. I found in many blogs that only default primitives in PV were easily made interactive. Collada files (dae or collada) were creating confusions for developers. I used ASE exporter for blender to export the 3d mesh as .ase file. The problem here was that i could not embed the mesh inside of the swf, but have to load it dynamically. We can embed .dae files, but then making them interactive may be a problem.


var skullTexture:BitmapFileMaterial=new BitmapFileMaterial("skull_Tex.jpg")
skullTexture.interactive = true;
skull = new Ase(skullTexture, "skull.ase");    skull.addEventListener(InteractiveScene3DEvent.OBJECT_RELEASE, hitSkull);

So the points to remember is to make the material interactive and to use .ase mesh.

Creating SCORM zip file with an AIR app

2009-04-16T16:36:00.002+05:30

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We needed to come up with an idea to create flash based software for a big MNC. They needed a solution which created single lesson files that they can use for their LMS. Now as the requirement demanded ability for them to create their own modules using the swf game file that we provide, things are a little tricky. So the only way is to package the swf file with a xml file which contains the dynamically created data into a SCORM zip file.
The approach that we took is to create an AIR app which enables the admin to select swf file templates for which they are creating new modules. On selection we will open up an interface where the admin can populate data specific to the swf file selected. On completing the form we export the dynamically input data into an xml file and saves it in a local temporary folder. The plan is to copy swf file along with the html file which embeds the swf file onto the temporary folder where we just published the xml file. Now for SCORM compatibility we need an lmsmanifest.xml file. We also copy this into the temprary folder and then zip everything together using fzip to create the final SCORM zip package.
Now we have successfully output xml file and manually packaged everything into zip file for testing and it worked. Now need to do the packaging dynamically by using template html, swf and lmsmanifest.xml files which we package with the AIR app installer. Complexity that may arise is the fact that we may need to rename the html file and update the lmsmanifest.xml file to reflect name changes and for creating unique identifiers for each new module developed. For this we may need to keep track of the number of modules developed. We will store a local shared variable or write a file to store the count which can be used for naming new files like lesson + count.html
This is pure R and D as we have not yet worked on product development for client in AIR, but hopefully will pave new paths in desktop development for us.

AS3 eventlisteners, little help

2009-04-09T11:32:00.003+05:30

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Here is a great link on working with AS3 event listeners. When migrating from AS2 to AS3 and accepting the OOP approach may be a little bit too much for a designer - developer. You may end up removing listeners which are already removed, not removing some listeners which end up developing weird results, add duplicate listeners and whole lots of confusions. There should be some way to track if there are any listeners currently alive. SO in the above tutorial the developer overrides addEventListener function to push the entry into an array which we can loop through to check for listeners. Neat tip. Saves us from seeing that flash player runtime error popup which kills all the fun.

Mystery of swapDepths, AS2

2009-04-03T11:26:00.002+05:30

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The mystery of swapDepths() in AS2 has eluded me a lot until recently. A fellow programmer here at Csharks,Shyju found out some thing new about it. Flash manages depths of assets dynamically and also lets us manage those using code. The fact remains that at a certain fixed depth we can only have one symbol instance. So when we start a project with certain symbols and assets on stage flash dynamically assigns negative depths to them all. Just try tracing depths using getDepth() for a named instance placed on stage. But using code we can only attach instances to positive depths.
Mystery is what happens when we swapDepths() an instance placed on stage with a positive depth. Then the instance becomes a symbol which is equivalent to any other symbol that you attached using code, which mean you will need to remove it when you move off from that frame. Even after removing it, if you come back to the frame which contained the symbol again then you will get your instance right there on stage. This is a little weird as you had removed that very symbol.

This can be explained as Flash makes the symbol a dynamically attached one when we give it a positive depth. Flash can only work on negative depths to clear and place then again as you move through frames with statically placed assets on stage. All symbols with a positive depths has to be handles with additional code. So you have an asset on a keyframe and then in the next keyframe you dont have it. You swap depths that symbol on first frame. You will see the symbol in the second keyframe too unless you remove it. Then when your play head reaches back after looping through the first frame you will have 2 symbols on stage. :)

So just remember to removeMovieClip() when you swapDepths an instance on stage.

Saving Bitmaps

2009-04-03T11:20:00.004+05:30

Image by nikrowell via Flickr

When using AS2 we had to develop couple of softwares where we needed to save web based user generated imagery to local harddrive or mail it by temporarily saving on a server. We had used PHP scripts on the backend and written image files by passing Bitmap data from flash over the air. With some AS3 libraries now its really easy to do such applications. You can use Adobes libraries in their corelib classes, the jpgencoder class and pngencoder class. Here is an elaborate tutorial with sources.

With AS3 things are all the more easy.

Now we have flash player 10 which further speeds up things. Here is an update.

Whats Flash Catalyst

2009-04-01T10:58:00.002+05:30

SwfScan : Free flash decompiling

2009-03-31T13:41:00.005+05:30

I was checking out some recent twitter posts from fellow AS developers when i came to know about HPs Swfscan software. This tool checks your or any body elses swfs for security vulnerabilities. I was interested enough and downloaded the software. On running the different tests on our AS3 game engine it came up with some interesting information. It pointed out to disable Debug information, disable traces, advised to change some function names and listed out all URLs used.
When i loaded the swf, I could see a totally readable well structured and commented code decompiled like no other decompiler ever did. So much for all these open source ventures from Adobe. Now your code is open for all to see, it pricks me internally, but lets say it somes with the Godly free AS3 library packages out there which we can use under MIT or GPL licenses. I think there is going to be a good business/market out there for a new AS obfuscator software, one which makes it hard to make sense of the displayed decompiled code.

Analysing Class footprint in Flex

2009-03-31T12:55:00.003+05:30

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Based on this doc we can see how much a particular class is contributing to the final swf size. The idea is to generate a linkreport xml file which can be read using external applications. We need to give additional compiler directives for the flex compiler as below.

Usage of the link-report argument:
mxmlc -link-report linkreport.xml (other arguments here)

We can use this AIR app to see and analyse the data extracted from the compilation.

Oh those preloaders

2009-03-27T13:18:00.004+05:30

Image by SFeRa.pl via Flickr

Gone are days of preloader problems or are they? Well in AS2 days how many times have we wondered why these preloaders wont show up from 0%. Usually they wont show if you have a lot of dynamically loaded content which are declared to be 'exported on first frame'. Now unless you enable these assets to be exported on first frame we wont be able to use them immediately after the application starts. So what is the usual fix?

Well you disable all those 'export in first frame' declarations while keeping the linkage names.(this applies to AS2). Then you place the assets on stage on a frame just after the preloader frames. This way they get loaded and are immediately available for use. In the preloader code you skip ahead of these frames to your application code. So these frames are never seen by the user, but are there for loading these assets. You can place all your dynamic graphics, sounds, fonts etc there. This is a standard fix which makes the preloader start from below 10%. In older days there used to be a software called assetmover which moved dynamic assets from first frame to other frames. But it also sometimes corrupted the swf, and i cant see updated version of the same these days. May be there are other solutions too.

Some Javascript for the Web Dev

2009-03-27T13:10:00.004+05:30

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I am just listing some most severe JS libraries which enables power web development. This list is not complete, but for those who dont know about these, its extensive enough.

Do check
Mootools

Dojo

Prototype

jQuery

and

yui

If you still live under a rock and think that you should be writing all the codes yourself, think again.

Simple URL check

2009-03-26T19:02:00.004+05:30

Image by lovelypetal via Flickr

Url checking is used to block swf theft. Its a simple trick to check simple thefts. The basic AS2 URL check is simple code. You just need to check for the domain string in _root._url. ie,
if(_root._url.indexOf("yourdomainstring")!=-1){
//this is your domain
}else{
//tell the thief not to repeat this
}

Now you can let the player gotoandstop a frame. But then the user can always right click and select play to move on if the menu is enabled for the swf. To fix this you need to add a frame after the frame where you stop with code to gotoandstop to previous frame. This way the play head cant move past this frame.
You skip this frame in your code by telling the play head to gotoandstop ahead of this looping frames on successful url check.

Now how will we test it on our end? You need to place it in a folder with the same name as yourdomainstring used in code. Then the swf will work. But then the thief can also place the swf in a similar named folder to make it work, when he comes to know the string used. But then he will have to use the foldername as part of the internet link which may end up being beneficial to us. But then there is always ways around this.

Localhost Fix

2009-03-23T15:39:00.005+05:30

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Thanks to the link below for this tip on Flash - Php process
http://polygeek.com/1739_flex_localhost-or-not-localhost-that-is-the-question

There are times when we will be using flash files as front ends for your php applications. Or sometimes you will call php scripts to return some database driven data. In all such cases you will be developing your flash app in localhost. Later on for deployment we may have to change numerous addresees to make it deployable online. If we could just do a little bit of improvisation in the flash code we can check this need to change the addresses now and then.

The idea is to check the url address of the html page which embeds the flash swf. If it contains 'localhost' part then its rinning in debug in local host. You can check and make some changes like setting a a boolean flag or hard coding addresses. The as3 code is(this is for flex i guess, but you get the idea)

if( Application.application.url.indexOf( 'localhost' == -1 ) {
// you are not on the localhost
} else {
// this is the localhost
}

For AS2 it will be like

if(_root._url.indexOf("localhost") ==-1){
// you are not on the localhost
} else
// this is the localhost
}

Creating a Flash Develop Template

2009-03-17T19:28:00.004+05:30

Image by og2t •• brzegowiec via Flickr

Great thing of using Flash Develop is that you can make your own project template. This enables us to start new projects with all these default settings. For this you need to goto Flash Develop install folder\Projects folder. Inside you will find the default templates folders. Copy the template folder which you want to extend and rename it starting with a number less than 110 , say 105 and after a space add your template name for folder name.(105 Csharks Game Engine Project)
You can place your own Project.png image to show up with size 192x168 in this folder. Anything you place inside this project will be copied as part of any project that you create in this template. SO you can add any kind of folder structure and place all kinds of files.
Edit the Project.as3proj(or any other file which will be the flash develop file for the project you just extended) and set the default project options like fps, resolution, background color etc. This is just an xml file structure. You can also edit .template files inside the $(PackagePath) folder to provide some default codes on start. For eg, you can set your own preloader.as.template to start with your sites default preloader all the time. Play around with the possibilities.

Some very useful libraries for Flash Developers

2009-03-11T15:56:00.001+05:30

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This is a repost of http://www.flashchemist.com/?p=123 and all credit goes to the author there.

Here are my list of open source google code projects for the Flash Platform. This is what I have seen over time, please add if you feel I missed anything. Many of them mayn0t be useful, or may be discontinued. This is from my list of os projects.