I'm more excited by the new features of Flash Player 10.1.

For one thing, you might've heard of Stratus. If not, to keep it short it's simply a service that uses the new RTMFP protocol that lets you send data between two clients like a p2p connection.

Before Flash Player 10.0 you could use RTMP to send TCP sockets between a client and a server and in that way communicate with other clients. In Flash Player 10.0 you can use RTMFP to send UDP sockets between two clients directly without the data going through the server (the connection still has to go through a server to generate id keys though). Now, if you wanted to send data to a larger amount of people (Adobe talks in terms of millions) with RTMFP it would of course be too much bandwidth for the users computer to handle, most likely. With Flash Player 10.1 they have build upon this to allow the user to actually send this data to millions of users by using groups. How is this possible? Well, as explained here you're not actually sending all that data to all those millions of users, but instead you send to a small amount of listeners, and they resend that data to a small amount of listeners and so on.

I can't remember where I found this quote but someone from Adobe said something like "It's very much like the BitTorrent technology". So in theory you could create a BitTorrent client with only using Flash and Stratus/FMS. In practice, not so much, because you would have to save the files only to RAM since Flash can't save files directly to the computer. Of course, with a save file dialog you could save the file after it has been fully downloaded but that... is just not very useful and it's of course better to stick with a better platform for something like that.

Besides this there are more cool new features if you read the above link, like being able to get the same kind of sound channels (or whatever it is you can do with sound in Flash nowadays, I don't use those features very much tbh) you can get from MP3 files from the user's microphone. And Flash Player for a lot of mobile phones and recognizing multi-touch and less interesting stuff like that. ;)

At 12/3/09 12:31 PM, wreckages wrote:

At 12/2/09 11:12 PM, adam2510 wrote: even my site isnt that bad

I'm speechless.

Valid HTML is not hard to achieve. What matters is that a site can have valid HTML, but if it looks like dog shit it's still bad design.

It's been a long time since I last used the Flash IDE but you could try to use "Save and Compact", as explained here, and see if it helps.

TextField#restrict

You could check out Stratus which enables you to send UDP sockets directly to another client like a P2P connection. Stratus is actually a hosted beta service by Adobe, and is currently free to use if you sign up for a beta key, and the clients have to first connect to that server to establish listeners between each other. Then it's just a matter of sending data between the clients.

You can read a more detailed description, and get some example code, here.

At 11/27/09 08:00 PM, Starogre wrote: Flash was originally created for UI so i wouldn't be surprised at all

Where did you read this? The original Flash (aka FutureSplash) was simply created for vector animations. [source]

At 11/25/09 09:31 PM, lantaren wrote: what does REM do? idk.

REM are simply single-line comments. Everything after REM on the same line will be ignored.

At 11/25/09 09:56 AM, Version2 wrote: Ok, almost got it figured out. I was googling around and saw some stuff on Point.distance() so I wrote a distance() function. That works good, what I'm having trouble with now though is transferring items from one array to the other. I read the helpfiles on arrayname.splice() but I couldn't figure out how I would use it in my situation. Here's the code from my project:

How about forgetting about splice in this context. Array.splice () removes a number of elements from the array but then have to loop forward to update all other indices.

Instead, to make it less complicated, how about simply creating two new arrays and adding values to those as fits and set them as the new SpawnZones resp. ActiveZones. It's way simpler, and should be more performance friendly, than your splice approach.

var spawn = [];
var active = [];

for each (var i : Point in SpawnZones)
{
	var dist = distance (i, hero);
	if (dist > 650 && dist < 800)
		active.push (i);
	else
		spawn.push (i);
}

for each (var i : Point in ActiveZones)
{
	var dist = distance (i, hero);
	if (dist < 650 && dist > 800)
		spawn.push (i);
	else
		active.push (i);
}

SpawnZones = spawn;
ActiveZones = active;

...

function distance (p1 : Point, p2 : Point) : Number
{
	var x = p1.x - p2.x;
	var y = p1.y - p2.y;
	return (y*y + x*x);
}

Something like that. Also, simple addition and multiplication is definitely faster than an algorithm returning the exact distance, be it "native" or not.

At 11/25/09 07:58 AM, Zealotti wrote: Distance = Sqrt( y^2 + x^2);

Unless you plan to visually display the exact distance it's usually better to omit calculating the square root, especially in a big loop, to save performance.

dist = (y*y + x*x)

At 11/23/09 01:47 AM, Zealotti wrote: Could you set your event listener and then do something like:

while(!returned){}

That would create an infinite loop.

Flash is single threaded so delaying a function without delaying everything else is not possible.

You could take a look at haXe's format library. It can already read swf and abc. I had fun getting the abc from the ActionScript3 tag and reading it with the format library to create a very simple decompiler.

Nothing is as important as supper!

What exactly is the error? I didn't see you posting any error, just correct code. What is happening and what do you expect to happen?

How about passing the container as a parameter in the constructor?

function MyClass (container : DisplayObjectContainer)
{
  var s = new Sprite ();
  container.addChild (s);
}

function Main ()
{
  var s = new MyClass (this);
}

At 11/8/09 09:07 AM, ZehGameMaker wrote: I'm using Smartfox, if none of you have heard of it, let me just say it basically does everything for you.

lol.

At 11/4/09 06:11 AM, Ahnimal wrote: What I asked for was a way detect which is closest, not how close it is

Of course you have to calculate how close the platforms are to know which one is closest. Loop through all platforms and on the way calculate their distance from the player, i.e. by using the Pythagorean theorem, and store the lowest value.

How about something like

var lowest = -1.0;
var p : Platform;
for (i in platforms)
{
	var dist = (i.x - player.x) * (i.x - player.x) + (i.y - player.y) * (i.y - player.y);
	if (dist < lowest || lowest < 0.0)
	{
		lowest = dist;
		p = i;
	}
}

Not to choose any sides here but I think what ProfessorFlash is getting at is more the "might get paid". Helping someone personally without any return is not very likely. It's one thing to help on a forum, you can come in, write something, and then you're out. But when being regularly counted on for help some sort of return would be to be expected.

At 10/29/09 01:47 PM, SweetSkater wrote: Epic Movies you have to see
I love myself a good film, and I'd like the reg's opinion on what they think is an epic movie.

Lion King, hands down!

At 10/28/09 12:56 AM, monbons wrote: Is it the same deal as with Photoshop, and you get better at it when you use it more?

At everything you do, as long as you enjoy doing it, the more you do it the better at it you will become. It will get easier and easier but you will never know it all. I still learn things every day.

Maybe you could post some concept art or something similar for the game to spark some interest? Considering you already have people doing art that shouldn't be a problem.

At 10/19/09 04:26 PM, zuperxtreme wrote: 500 x 500 bitmap would be 25000 nodes, I think that'd get a bit processor intensive.

Well, if processing time would be the timing factor the programmer would have to try and optimize that. Going by number of steps I think would be pretty pointless because if implemented correctly it will always find the shortest path, ie the lowest amount of steps.

I don't know, maybe I just don't get what these challenges are about.

You could just use a simple A* algorithm, add all pixels as nodes and find the path from that. In the case of how fast the bot can get to the finish, would that be processing time then or what?

At 10/4/09 04:00 PM, Saza wrote: Xfactor
Fav first audition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNmdGVqV aQ

My favorite was definitely Richard Green. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvmtyKi6S H8

At 9/25/09 05:51 PM, Duchednier wrote:

At 9/24/09 12:21 PM, fluffkomix wrote:

chlauds

chulaid?

Chluiad

chluaid

One simple way to kind of simulate threads is to do smaller chunks of the operatons in a timer. For example, instead of looping 10,000 times at once, loop 100 times in each timer iteration.

Ultimately, it will take longer time to loop through all those 10,000 objects but because it will not try to do it all at once you save some performance.

I have used this technique for large loops in flash and it has worked fine for me so far.

At 9/15/09 03:26 AM, Fickludd wrote: Ideal use case:

Personally, I usually just opt for skipping to the last step. :)

At 9/1/09 12:41 PM, Hoeloe wrote:

At 9/1/09 08:16 AM, hesselbom wrote: You want to separate outputted, formatted, values with actual raw data.

Actually, I planned to do it like that in the first place, but used my method (which worked just as well in a separate .fla) instead in order to lower the number of variables the .swf needs to process at any one time.

Still, I'm pretty sure flash has to jump through more hoops to convert strings to numbers back and forth instead of doing operations on numbers and then just displaying those. Either way though, there's no real need to optimize here considering it won't be called very often and the difference is probably minimal.

Glad you got it to work.

It's not possible with ActionScript alone. But if it's on your website anyway you can use JavaScript to recognize the drop and send the information to your running flash app. Check out Swell for example.

You are mixing numbers with strings and doing operations on the variables without knowing what type they are (just assuming they are numbers even though you recreate them as strings :s actionscript 2 is confusing)

I am guessing "_root.minutestime" etc are actually strings that should be displayed in a easy to read way. Then how about doing something like this?

var minutes = 0;
var hours = 0;

timer = setInterval(function () { 
	if (minutes >= 59) {
		hours ++;
		if (hours < 10) {
			minutes = 0;
			_root.hourstime = "0" + hours;
			_root.minutestime = "00";
		}
		else
			_root.hourstime = "" + hours;
	} else {
		minutes ++;
		if (minutes < 10)
			_root.minutestime = "0" + minutes;
		else
			_root.minutestime = "" + minutes;
	}
}, 60000);

You want to separate outputted, formatted, values with actual raw data.

The server simply notices that a user has disconnected and sends that message to all connected peers.

Afaik there is no way to detect when a user closes your flash application.