Category Archives: Blog posts

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Preparing for Ludum Dare! Haxe, NME, Entity systems and semi-isometric projections

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I have started looking over my toolkit for the Ludum Dare 23 contest that will take place April 21-22. This will be the third time I participate in this contest where the goal is to create a game from scratch within 48 hours. You are however allowed to use frameworks (or even Game Maker, but from a programmers perspective that is taking all the fun out of it) as long as it’s open sourced and declared in advance.

I know that I want to use some kind of Entity System, and that I want to create it myself. My last entry (Abandoned) was created using a game framework called Push Button Engine, which is using the basic priniples of an Entity System, but not strictly speaking. I’ve been curious about entity systems for quite some time now, and I have been trying to imagine how I would have used it if I had made Ripple with such a system.

I’m most probably use Haxe/NME as programming language and I’ll build for the flash player. There has been a lot of buzz around NME the last couple of months since you can deploy your games to Flash, Android and desktop (…and iPhone, although you need a mac/xcode to get the game on to an actual device).

I have also been wanting to make something in some kind of semi-isometric perspective (y-axis is isometric, x-axis is regular top-down) for quite some time. This will make the game a little easier to control since the controls are always flipped 45 degrees in a regular isometric game, which does not map very well to a keyboard, but still give that nice, retro fake 3d-feeling =)

Well, have a look at my initial semi-isometric projection written in Haxe and published with NME =)
Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabled

Check back before April. I will probably do some kind of live coding, and I will post more details
/Tommislav

On my way toward new adventures

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I have left my position as flash developer on Isotop, and starting February 1st I will instead be joining Quickspin as Game Client Developer.

I have been working on Isotop for over five years, and it has been a great time. During that time I have been working with several large companies and projects such as TV4 and DICE. I have learned so much during this time, and I have gotten lots of great friends. I wish them all the best in the future.

Ahead of me I have some new and very exciting times, developing online gambling games. I’m sure it will be a great time, and I’m looking forward of being a part of Quickspin from such an early stage.

But before I start at my new job I have two weeks of free time (starting today). And that means I’ll be able to focus full time on Ripple Dot Zero.
Exciting times ahead indeed.
/Tommy

Embedded fonts disappear when updating to FlexSDK 4.1

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I recently updated my flex SDK to 4.1, (from 3.x) just to find that all my embedded fonts were missing.

This was the scenario:

  • * Embedding fonts using the [Embed] meta tag
  • * Applying font using TextFormat (don’t know what happens if you use CSS, my guess is that it won’t work either)


Quick fix: note the “embedAsCFF”

[Embed(source="font.ttf", fontFamily="x", mimeType="application/x-font", embedAsCFF="false")]
public var FontClass:Class;


What is this?

I used the Font.enumerateFonts() to get an array of my embedded fonts (my font was there, but still not visible in my textfield).
Check the fontType-property. Here I found that it was “embeddedCFF” instead of “embedded”. What is the difference?

“embeddedCFF” is a bit more lightweight, but can only be used with the new text engine (flash.text.engine.*).
“embedded” is an embedded font, but can only be used with the older flash.text.TextField.

Since the SDK 4.1 it seems like fonts are embedded as CFF by default, which breaks all the fonts in TextFields if you have coded with an earlier SDK before.

Docs about this: Livedocs about FontType.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

When Dreams Come True

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People who knows me know I’m a big fan of Sonic The Hedgehog. I still remember very clearly exactly how I felt the first time I saw Sonic the hedgehog on my friends tv screen. I was eleven years old and the graphics was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, it was crisp like a cartoon.

And now I’m excited again. I have just learned that some of the songs, especially “Star Light Zone” – one of my favorite Sonic level songs of all time – is actually based on a song by a Japanese pop group named “Dreams Come True”. This was totally new information for me, and hearing my old favorite tune with lyrics just gives me the biggest smile =D

So I just thought I should share my new joyous discovery! You can read more about the connection between Dreams Come True and Sonic in this article: http://info.sonicretro.org/DREAMS_COME_TRUE or watch the youtube clip right below! Enjoy!!
/Tommy

Runtime ASCII art generation in Flash

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On April 1 Youtube added a new mode called TEXTp – where their videos could be viewed as ASCII-art.
I really loved that feature, and was very disappointed when they removed it the next day, but ever since then I have been researching about ASCII art generation in flash.

To achieve the ASCII-effect they used the Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit – a tool for programming your own custom filters, which can then be imported into Flash, Photoshop or After Effects. Googling the subject seems to prove me right about this.

Pixel Bender is free, and it is very powerful since it performs image calculations way faster than runtime actionscript is capable of (reading and writing pixels in a bitmapdata object is pretty slow). However I find that it’s a bit hard to get started since I didn’t find any really good Pixel Bender tutorials out there.
If you are looking for a good place to start learning Pixel Bender I highly recommend chapter 9 in Keith Peters book Advanced Actionscript Animation (I love all his books).

Now there are also a few limitations when writing a Pixel Bender filter for flash. You cannot use loops and you cannot define your own functions. However, there are still ways to achieve some really cool stuff!

So, after learning the basics of Pixel Bender, we’ll need to start researching about how to generate ASCII art from a picture. This – together with the “limits” mentioned above – is where the real challenge lies!

I have been able to pull off some cool workarounds this far, and as soon as I have something to show I will post about it here. I will probably write a short tutorial about it if it turns out nice.
Get ready for more posts on the subject!

Relaxy ActionScript IDE

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I have a habit of trying out new actionscript editors every once in a while, and right now nothing beats the free, open source FlashDevelop IDE, althogh their buggy debugger is a really huge drawback (I really hope they manage to get it right really soon!).

Anyway, there is another IDE coming up that seems really interesting – called Relaxy ActionScript Editor. It is currently in closed beta, but I will check it out as soon as the beta goes public. Until now I have only seen a few video demos, but it sure looks promising.

Read more about it here: http://makc3d.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/get-realaxy-actionscript-editor-beta/, or look at the video directly below.

AS Editor : Smart complete from den ivanov on Vimeo.

Kickass theme!!

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I found a kickass theme called BASH at http://item-media.ro/repository/wp/ and I just couldn’t resist. Maybe it is time to change from my old flash-based site into a wordpress driven one?

Seems like a shame NOT to use a flash-driven site though, since flash is my area of expertise. I was acctually considering a completely text-based flash-front end/wp-back end site with a look like this – although all navigation would be by typing text =D

So much to do, so little time. Better to keep working on Ripple Dot Zero instead.

So, I’ll guess I’m going to start blogging now. Guess it will be about flash/actionscript, game dev… well… thoose thing in the header basically.
KTHXBYE