At 9/17/09 10:59 AM, TomFulp wrote: PS - PsychoGoldfish is awesome. So is Mike.

no u

Try something like this:

function countChildren(clip:DisplayObjectContainer):void
{
  var count:uint = numChildren;
  for(var i:uint=0; i<count; i++)
  {
     var child:DisplayObject = getChildAt(i);
     if(child is DisplayObjectContainer)
       count += countChildren( DisplayObjectContainer(child) );
  }
}

countChildren(root);

To count instances of a particular type of clip, just check if(child is MySpecialClip)

good luck!

This is where the FlashDevelop workflow gets tricky -- how do you get actual art and sound assets into the game? :)

Here are some possible ways:

1) If you have Flash, you can create an SWF that contains all your sprites and other assets. In the library, set them to Export for AS with some class name. Then, go to File->publish settings, Flash tab, and check export for SWC. Then publish your file. You can now import the resulting .swc file into your FlashDevelop projects and use those classes.

2) Same as above, but export an SWF and use the [Embed] metatag to compile the art into your project.

3) Use raw graphics for your art, such as PNG files, and then import those into your project using the [Embed] tag, or load them at runtime using Loader.

good luck!

You need to do:

point = new Point();

before you can use it. Otherwise, you get a null reference error!

Also, this might help your debugging. In FlashDevelop, go to Project->Properties, Compiler Options, and turn Verbose Stack Traces to true. This will make these run-time errors give you the line number, so you can jump directly to the problem.

good luck!

Unfortunately it's not possible in AS2. The only thing you can do is use an external app to precalculate the sound data, and then import that into your ActionScript.

In AS3, you can use the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() and Sound.extract() functions.

happy birthday duder

setInterval has an 'overloaded' version that can take an object reference as a parameter. You should definitely use that if you're using class code, and it'll fix all your scope issues:

setInterval(this, "myIntervalHandler", 100)

public function myIntervalHandler():Void
{
  hasBlood = false;
}

good luck!

If I'm understanding right, you have a turret clip that rotates inside your ship, and you want the bullet to come from the end of the turret. Then you'd actually want to have an empty turretPoint movieClip *inside* turret, where you wanted the bullets to come out. Then you can do something like this inside turret:

point.x = turretPoint.x;
point.y = turretPoint.y;
this.localToGlobal(point);

The reason you don't want to do:

point.x = this.x;
point.y = this.y;
this.localToGlobal(point);

is because this.x and this.y actually give you the coordinate's in the *parent's* coordinate system. E.g., if turret.x = 100 means that turret is 100 pixels to the right of the parent's origin. But this isn't what you want -- you want to go to stage coordinates from the turret's coordinate system, NOT from the parent's coordinate system. So you need to go one level deeper. turret.turrentPoint is a point inside turret, so you can correctly go from the turret coordinate system to the stage.

It's a little confusing, but I always remember this: A clip's x and y are always in its parent's coordinate system.

Yep! You don't need the 'this's though. If you're inside your Turret class, and Turret is a MovieClip, then you just need to do:

point = localToGlobal(point);

That takes point from Turret's coordinate system to global Stage coordinates.

Hi AJ,

localToGlobal should take any rotation, scaling, etc. into account. You might need to call globalToLocal afterwards if you don't need to go all the way up to root.

Actually, in my previous code, I misued localToGlobal -- you need to do:

point = clip.localToGlobal(point);

so be sure you didn't make the same dumb mistake I did :)

Instead of mucking about with doing the math yourself, you could use DisplayObject.localToGlobal()

Assuming shotPoint is an empty movie clip inside the turrert:

var shotPoint:Point = new Point(tank.turret.shotPoint.x, tank.turret.shotPoint.y);
tank.turret.localToGlobal(shotPoint);
// now shotPoint.x and shotPoint.y contain the global coordinates to spawn the shot

good luck!

Yep, you can do that for each frame. Ideally, you'll wrap this all in your own Sprite class, that takes care of caching the images at init, and then handling the animation and swapping to the correct frame while running. You definitely can get a good speed increase from this, but it takes a lot of time to code the framework, and it's also more memory intensive and isn't particularly good with very tweened animations.

You can use getDefinitionByName:

var SymbolClass:Class = flash.utils.getDefinitionByName("SymbolLinkage"+i) as Class;
var symbol:Sprite = new SymbolClass() as Sprite;

'with' will not create variables inside the object if they don't already exist in that object. Instead, it'll try to access it through the normal scope you'd be in without the 'with'. For example:

var myObj = new Object();
with(myObj)
{
  aVar = 5;
}
trace(myObj.aVar);
trace(aVar);

will trace undefined and then 5, whereas:

var myObj = new Object();
myObj.aVar = 0;
with(myObj)
{
  aVar = 5;
}
trace(myObj.aVar);
trace(aVar);

wiil trace 5 and then undefined. In your case, since you put var v:Number inside the with block, you're actually making a local variable inside the function, which will get destroyed at function exit -- so both statements would trace undefined. For this reason, I'd recommend against using with statements, just because they act a little wonky like that. :) I'd bet that this is the source of lots of your troubles.

Good luck!

Say you have some arbitrary sound wave. It's actually the combination of a bunch of basic sine waves of different frequencies. FFT is an algorithm that will take in samples from the sound wave and try to spit back out the frequencies of those constituent sine waves. That's Fourier analysis in a nutshell: you've got some glob, but it can actually be represented as the sum of a bunch of basic units! :)

Unfortunately, you don't get a lot of direct microphone access in Flash, like you do for the webcam. You can see everything Flash gives you here. The best you get is just a simple activityLevel, which just tells you how loud the person is yelling into their mic. ;) The voice chat support is basically hard-coded to work with Flash Media Server, so you don't get access to any of the raw sound data or anything.

But there is an initiative to allow us direct access to the microphone data! Support the cause: http://www.getmicrophone.com/

The Genesis version is incredible, for sure. There's really no comparison!

There's still a pretty nice underground DC online scene -- it's kinda fun to explore, just to see these "dead games" from the past. You'll have to get hacked copies of the games that are designed to run on people's homebrew servers, and you will need to track down the broadband adapter which is pretty tough to find. :)

My advice? Just grab a copy of Powerstone and some friends -- THAT'S the real Dreamcast experience!

Yea, Flash Player doesn't use the GPU for a whole lot, yet. Pixel Bender runs on CPU, but it does use multi-cores for that, so it goes at a nice speed. But the normal bitmap filters run multi-core, too, so a BitmapData should be absolutely fine for a little blur trail. :)

I just made a blank SWF and pasted that code in. I had to changeer:Error to er:IOErrorEvent, but then it worked and I saw the "ERROR!" in the trace window. (I'm using Flash CS4, if that makes any difference!)

According to the docs, the ScrollPane itself should trigger the IO error event, so the code you posted should work. I just made a quick test with a ScrollPane, and the event handler seemed to catch everything okay. Are you sure you are adding the listener to every scroll pane you have?

Exception handling in AS3 kind of sucks. :) You're right, asynchronous events like IOErrors won't get handled by try/catch blocks. I think the problem with your event listener is that you need to add it to holder.contentLoaderInfo (which is the object that throws the event), not loader itself.

You should add keyboard listeners to stage:

stage.addEventListener( KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, jump );

The stage listener automatically catches all keyboard events.

good luck!

t - floor(t) will generate a sawtooth, but on the interval from 0 to 1. That should still generate audio, but you want it to be in the range of -1 to 1, so that'll it'll mix well with your other channels. So you can try 2*(t - floor(t) - .5). More generally, a*2*(t/p - floor(t/p) - .5) for a sawtooth with amplitude of a and period of p.

For sound envelopes, you just simply scale the amplitude of your waves. For example, to make a sine wave is a*sin(t), where a is the amplitude. To make it fade out over time, just scale down a from 1 to 0, and there's a simple sound envelope. For more advanced envelopes, try different functions on the amplitude -- you could try to implement ADSR envelope, which is just a sequence of envelope that occur during the different stages of a note.

good luck!

It should work fine -- the only thing you have to worry about is having a cross-domain policy file on your server. Flash won't allow you to load content from a different domain otherwise. You can find info here and in the Flash help!

Alien Hominid & CC are done with a combination of Flash and C++. All of the game logic is ActionScript, which is run with a home-grown Flash parser written in C++. The parser has special optimizations to let us run Flash quickly (and even still we rewrote certain AS parts into C++)

On Xbox360, all of the art and animation is stored as an SWF file, which gets rasterized when the game loads. This is how we pack a lot of animation into a small file! :)

managed to get all the achievements finally

bob it top S+++ tier

At 1/30/09 06:00 AM, cast wrote:

At 1/27/09 02:22 PM, TomFulp wrote: OMG you mean other people make excited faces?!?!

I'm surprised that everyone seems to have either forgotten about, or doesn't know about this one..

>: (

holy shit, old skool

Combat, for sure

This was the ultimate battle between you and your elder sibling

The true test of skill

Only one could be victorious

The other would be left dazed, their pitiful, blocky tank sprite, recently destroyed by a speeding pixel, was left spinning in circles

This guy gave us a poster, said he was a big fan. He was selling them at NY comic-con last year.