Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

I see tons of flash using a generic fps counter in the upper left hand corner. Anyone know what this is? http://www.nulldesign.de/nd2d/tests/3d_t ransforms.html

At 11/5/11 10:43 PM, MSGhero wrote: Just tried out FlashDevelop. Why didn't you guys tell me it was 394872 times better than Flash Pro's coding environment?! Flash Pro will only be used for vector image editing now.

You were using Flash Pro for your IDE? oh jeeze X_X. Have you tried flash builder?

At 11/5/11 03:38 AM, Cryoma wrote:

At 11/4/11 09:27 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote:

At 11/4/11 09:22 PM, Kirk-Cocaine wrote: Even on the devices Mouse Events work. Tapping things will fire Mouse Down and Mouse Up events etc.

Yes but I believe if you click in the simulator it will fire a TouchEvent.

Ew.
Hey does flash support multitouch yet?

Yeah since 2 years ago. ;)

At 11/5/11 02:16 AM, PSvils wrote:

At 11/4/11 09:20 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: I was doing some polling and it was pretty inefficient.

Yuck! For realtime multiplayer?
You probably already know, but you gotta go socket server with that. Oh, and by the way, there are a few optimizations you can still do for your A* thing, like not using Array.sort(), Array.shift(), and Array.splice() (Not sure if you're doing that even though...), and also treating the Open list as more like an Object pool rather than an Array.
So instead of adding to the array, you do openList[ len] = newObject, where "len" is a separate variable denoting the arrays length (You manually increment it).
To delete an object from the array, you swap the object that's being deleted with the last element in the array, and decrement len by one.
Also, there's no point in sorting the entire array, since you only need the Node with the lowest F value. It's faster to for loop through it and find it that way than using Array.sort().

Hey those are some really good tips. thanks. Yeah i know tcp is the way to go, but I haven't played around with that much. I've never written my own socket server before. GAE has this cool thing called the channel API that can push messages to javascript, which can then call a method in your swf. This way you don't have to poll the server. I was thinking I could do some sort of fake realtime wherein it just gives you everything on screens current position every 250ms or so and then pathfinds them there. So it may not be completely synced, but as far as the player is concerned it looks like it is.

Plus it's my birthday! :O

Happy Birthday! :D

At 11/4/11 09:22 PM, Kirk-Cocaine wrote: Even on the devices Mouse Events work. Tapping things will fire Mouse Down and Mouse Up events etc.

Yes but I believe if you click in the simulator it will fire a TouchEvent.

I'm still working on my silly A* demo thing. This is just a branch of my EasyStar demo. I am leaving EasyStar untouched. I am trying to turn this into an actual game now. I put physics in... and then took them back out... Well. I decided I like it better without them.

I have been fooling around with GAE and I had two clients being able to see each others movement which was fine. I was doing some polling and it was pretty inefficient. I might try to mess more with that but I want to try to flesh out the game some more. Maybe put in some little monsters that you can fight or something.

You can test in the simulator for free, but it doesn't simulate performance. It basically just makes your swf the size of an iphone screen and response to touch events from clicks.

At 10/29/11 04:29 PM, funkycaveman wrote: Hello,
I have recently finished making a flash game and now wish to get it sponsored. Any ideas on how to increase value of a game or get any bids quicker?
Thanks in advance.

Post it here and get some feedback.

At 10/28/11 04:47 PM, Spysociety wrote:

At 10/28/11 03:58 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: BTW anyone seen the new armor games front page? http://beta.armorgames.com/ it looks really good.

I didn't like. I prefer 1,000 times the one before (and also with rounded black buttons in the header).

ah yeah I see what you mean about the rounded buttons, overall I like it more though. I really like the little javascript animation when you click on a thumbnail in the game showcase.

btw will newgrounds ever see a redesign? its been a while they've been talking about it. I like what armorgames is doing with the beta "preview". You can even submit complaints and suggestions through the feedback link. This way you don't alienate your userbase and get some good critical feedback before you push the site live for everyone.

BTW anyone seen the new armor games front page? http://beta.armorgames.com/ it looks really good.

At 10/28/11 11:21 AM, PSvils wrote:

plus I was never expecting it to surpass Unity in any way.

Maybe when unity gets its browser penetration over 1% then they can start considering themselves competitors with flash. =P

I recorded a simple getting started with ND2D tutorial today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cysug6VNX PM

At 10/23/11 01:22 PM, Toast wrote: It makes mistakes sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't acknowledge walls.

Ah yeah. Good find. I think I know why thats happening. Basically it thinks that top tile is the fastest way since it doesn't know about the wall yet. It continues down the path and finds the target. The engine is set up so that once it finds a path, it immediately uses that path and doesn't bother checking for shorter ones, I definitely should look into this. Thanks.

I am also interested in doing another game jam. Not sure what happened to austinbreed. He was the one hosting them.

Also I was wondering would anyone be interested in a getting started with ND2D video tutorial? I was thinking about doing one.

Right now I am trying to add Box2D to my EasyStarAS3 example I posted up last weekend.

The company is pretty irrelevant. You aren't choosing which platform to develop for based on the company that makes it. Flash is great. AS3 is a decent object oriented language. It is easy to develop for. It has unbelievable penetration. Its extremely accessible. (10x more people have a flash penetrated computer than own an xbox). There is mobile support that is arguably pretty iffy but improving. It has a pretty great art pipeline with Flash Professional (which incidentally can also double as a level editor).

You can argue either way for flash or unity but I'd say the company who makes the platform is probably the most irrelevant part of that argument.

Speaking of Flixel I stumbled across this cool article today about getting started with Flixel Development: http://www.photonstorm.com/archives/2247 /flash-game-dev-tip-12-building-a-retro-
platform-game-in-flixel-part-1

Anyone have experience with Flixel? What did you think? I'd be interested to know. I have used it and I learned a lot from it. If you're interested in fast development and don't care too much about fine-tuning stuff then I think Flixel is a good solution. If you spend enough time with it to go deep into the flixel classes you will learn a lot about how flash works and how to make a flash game perform well.

At 10/16/11 04:29 PM, MSGhero wrote: I'm not fond of Point(), and you will get better performance avoiding it.

Okay you are right about that. I changed it. Thanks.

The grid just stores the collision data. 0 means you can walk on it and 1 means you cant. As far as the Node class, I think it's the best approach since I need to store values associates with each node (G, H, and coordinate), right? :)

I finished this: https://github.com/prettymuchbryce/EasyS tarAS3

Any suggestions or questions are welcome :)

Could never be negative I mean.. doh

I like to use uint whenenver I know a value could never be positive. It helps me keep organized. For example if you were keeping track of frames on a movieclip you'd probably want to use a uint.. since you could never have a negative frame.

At 10/14/11 11:51 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 10/14/11 11:44 AM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: What is everybody working on? I am working on an easy pathfinding API. I am tired of using other peoples code for such a common problem. I am also playing with ND2D, which I find better than starling so far.

I started learning Flixel this week with the hope that it will adapt well to hardware acceleration. I started looking at ND2D as well, are there any good tutorials for people who really need a hand-holding through getting started?

I'm not sure if there is yet since it's so new. It's pretty similar to Starling in the way you start it up. Maybe I could write a basic "Getting Started" tutorial over the weekend.

I'm not sure if Flixel will transition well to hardware acceleration since its still being rendered with software (BitmapData.copyPixels). I am sure there will be new engines that take advantage of the GPU stuff sooner or later though. Starling and ND2D are not really like Flixel. Flixel is unique because it geared 100% for making games. So it includes graphics, sound, physics, state machine, etc. Starling and ND2D are just for graphics, so you have to write the rest of the game logic yourself. Learn Flixel anyways though! The concepts will carry over.

As far as the difference between Starling and ND2D. I have no statistics to back this up, but I find that ND2D is just faster. It has a nice support for animating your sprite sheets similary to the way Flixel does it. Starling has no documentation other than a massive messy PDF file. I worry that Starling is trying so hard to imitate the traditional display list that it is making concessions with performance. One downside to ND2D however, it has bad support for smoothing. For example, if you're looking to make a pixelly game, you might want to go with Starling for now. If you resize a texture in ND2D then it will automatically smooth it and there is no way to turn this off. The work around I found is to resize your sprites with bitmapData.draw before you make it into a Texture2D in ND2D. Lars says that he is working on fixing this, though. In Starling there are a number of resize modes you can choose from which is pretty nice. ND2D also has a brutally awesome virtual camera. Honestly though it probably doesn't matter too much which one you use. They will probably both change a lot over the coming months.

What is everybody working on? I am working on an easy pathfinding API. I am tired of using other peoples code for such a common problem. I am also playing with ND2D, which I find better than starling so far. I finally forked over the money for a private account on github because I can't be bothered to set git up the hard way. Also I am addicted to triple town.

At 10/10/11 04:33 PM, x-factor11 wrote: how ya guys doin :O!

I'm trying to get back into actionscript, and I remember newgrounds had a huge AS2 resource thread (with a compilation of threads in it) once upon a time.

is there anything like that anymore for like AS3?

I think there is an AS3 resource thread, but it's pretty crap. I would recommend the Shootorials. http://www.kongregate.com/labs

BTW Newgrounds should definitely let developers and animators contribute to a "labs" type page. NG should be doing way more to show it's audience (especially young people) that the tools to make games or animations are pretty accessible. If you don't get them to create content for you, then one of the others sites will. :)

At 10/4/11 12:06 AM, JoSilver wrote: Hey GUYS!

Flash Player 11 Just got released!

The starling engine looks pretty sweet. I wish there was an easy way to mix 2d and 3d. As far as 3d engines I am hearing a lot about alternativa and flare3d. If you're coming from a background where you've used OpenGL you might be able to roll your own. Cool stuff!

Does anyone have any resources to good beginner AS3 tutorials? Like a tutorial to read if you're coming from another language.. ? I know someone who wants to learn, but I just realized I am at a loss of good tutorials for beginners because it's been so long.

Any one know of any good flash devs looking for work? I mean good ones. Knowledge of memory/cpu management, blitting, game data structures, A*, experience with engines like box2d,away,nape, or others. Finished games to show. Send me a PM because I'd like to talk to you. :D

4urentertainment - That looks great! I can't wait to play it.

Flash on the beach looks cool. Too far away for me though. It looks similar to Flash Gaming Summit which I've also never been to. but want to go. I went to Pax for on friday. I bought a pass at the last minute. it was fun. I saw a lot of cool games!

So if I buy a 1 day pass off ebay or something will i get a chance to see everything on the floor? or do certain games only show on certain days? I dont care about the events and stuff. I just want to check peoples booths in the expo halls. Please advise!

I'll be in town but I have no tickets to PAX. Bumsauce :[

At 8/22/11 12:56 PM, PSvils wrote: FP11 is now in Beta, so it's exciting, should be released soon. When it is, I expect give it a few months, and it'll be up'n'running on 90% of browsers. And us making games for it will only help.

I'm skeptical about only a few months. FP versions take a while to penetrate. Check out this information:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_cen sus/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

You can see FP 10.2 was released back in February (~6 months ago) and still only has a 77% install rate. My guess would be that it might take more like 1-2 years to reach 90% penetration following FP11's release. Although, I think if you're just releasing a game here on Newgrounds then it's probably fine. It's probably safe to say that most tech-savvy people tend to keep their FP updated.