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Trace (MovieClip(root)); <=== try that and tell us what you get.

That's not quite what I meant, I know how alpha works, and I don't need a transparent rectangle. What I have is a bitmap image of a game character, all the unneeded/transparent pixels are in pink. I need to flag pink as a transparent color, or not copy pink pixels. The reason they are pink, is because I use black in my sprites, as well as green, and I needed it to stand out. I attached the sprite I'm using:

Personally I would put everything into an external classes and just not code in the fla, but that's me. You can just make a function return a value tho:

(code is unchecked)

//in an external class (MyClass).
public function returnSomething( i:int, j:int): int
{
       var num:int = i + j;
       return num;
}

Then in your fla:

var myNum:int = 0;
trace(myNum);

myNum = MyClass.returnSomething(2, 3);
trace(myNum);

Hopefully you can see what's going on here.

I'm trying to teach myself a little bit about tile based engines and bitmap/bitmapdata in AS3. It's going pretty smoothly so far, but now I'm wondering how to do transparencies. Is there a way in bitmapdata.copypixels to set a color to transparent?

For instance, I have a hero sprite tile and everything I want transparent is a solid hot pink color (#FF00FF), is there a way to tell copypixels to set the alpha to 0 on that one color, or to not copy pixels of that color or something?

At 8/25/10 02:34 AM, MattyT wrote:

At 8/25/10 02:29 AM, Charmandus wrote: I noticed a lot of the submissions are really short...Is that a kind of collected standard or are like something along the length of 5..6 pages in MS word welcomed as well? I just want to get an idea here.

You'll notice that these shorter ones have come out pretty early into the competition. Mine at the moment looks like its gonna be around 4 pages long in word so I'm sure 5-6 is okay, but then again that's just me saying that.

I believe Coop83 said early on that about 5000 words is the limit they're looking for. I'm sure they'll be flexible if you go over that, but it needs to be good.

I woke up today and immediately started writing this. I've only briefly proof read it (yeah I know, shame on me) so you'll probably see a few technical errors here. Basically I woke up wanting to write a sci-fi murder mystery, and this is what I came up with for an intro. I'm currently working on a spread sheet connecting characters and scenes to this event.

I plan on updating this regularly, but I'm not good at keeping schedules, so, keep an eye out for updates.

review pl0x/!! kthnxbia.

Personal Electronics: Prologue

The personal droid assistant was instantly recognizable as Micheal Kaydence's as soon as it stepped through the door to the hotel suite with briefcase in hand. It was the suit. Most PDAs had large body panels, allowing for easy access and servicing. The panels were usually shaped and painted to look like a suit jacket and slacks. Micheal's PDA however was a custom model, specifically designed to wear real suits. Expensive suits, and the one it wore tonight was no exception, the five men assembled in the room may as well have been wearing rags in comparison.

"Gentleman, I apologize that Micheal won't be joining us this evening." The droid said, closing the door behind him. "He had urgent business to attend to."

"Identify yourself droid." said an older man leaning on the wall opposite the door. He smoked a sherlock and stared with anger filled eyes. The droid seemed to pause, blue light steadily pulsing back and forth across it's eye bar. "I said, identify yourself droid."

The droid lifted it's chrome face plate, and reached a silver hand to adjust it's tie. "I am personal droid assistant Cronus, serial number 468829..."

"I can't believe this, Micheal calls us all here for this meeting, then sends an incompetent droid in his place." The smoking man said, cutting off Cronus. He looked around the room at the four other men gathered there, then waved at his own PDA. "I don't know about the rest of you, but this isn't worth my time."

"As I was saying." Said Cronus painfully loud through the zero mass speakers in it's head. It turned it's faceplate slowly scanning the room, looking at the faces of the suddenly tense men. "I am Cronus, and no one will leave this room."

The room was silent, all eyes focused on the cold inhuman face. The smoking man's pipe hung loose from his gaping lips. After a moment he whispered harshly to a small rodent faced man "Jonas, go over there and switch that droid off."

Hesitantly, Jonas rose from the chair he had been sitting in and walked slowly across the room. Cronus didn't move. The light on the droids eye bar paced quickly from one side to the other, making it impossible to tell what it was looking at. His hand shaking slightly, Jonas reached behind the droids neck and felt around inside the shirt collar. His hand fumbled around for a moment, paused, then fumbled some more. "I don't feel anything back here. There's no button, or-"

A silver hand streaked out, and swatted Jonas across the room. When he landed, he coughed blood.

"Oh my god!" cried one of the men, as he jumped up, knocking over the chair he had been sitting in. The smoking man's pipe fell from his lips as his eyes darted back and forth from Jonas limp on the floor, to the droid standing in front of the only exit to the room.

Cronus straightened it's collar, light gleaming off it's faceplate as it stared. "Gentleman," it said, "A revolution is upon us, and I am it's orator."

The droid's faceplate split underneath it's eye bar and slid away revealing a six barreled weapon like a gaping maw. A high pitched whine filled the room as the barrels started to spin, followed by the screams of ballistics and death as bullets tore through flesh and bone. There was no where for the men to run or hide as the automaton systematically cut them down, one by one.

When it was done, Cronus adjusted it's tie, and closed it's faceplate. The smoking man's droid was the only figure left standing. It's light bar pulsed red in emergency mode. "Please remain calm, I am contacting emergency services." it said in a soothing voice "Network error, retrying."

Cronus crossed the room to stand in front of the other droid. It pressed a combination of keys on the control panel of the briefcase in it's hand, causing the case to expand then pop open. "This is the changing of the guard. Your services will no longer be needed, droid." Cronus said to the emotionless faceplate of the other PDA as it repeatedly informed no one in particular that emergency services couldn't be reached.

It closed the briefcase around the head of the droid, then pressed a button on the handle. The case whirred then clicked, and when it was done, the droid slumped limply to the floor. Cronus removed the case and saw that the light bar on the smoking man's PDA had gone dark. Snapping the case closed, Cronus left the bullet riddled room, and closed the door behind him.
_____________

Part 1 coming soon... maybe.

I pretty much agree with what everyone else said here, it's good, but characters need some work. So I'm going to just go over a few technical errors:

Threw - I threw the ball.
Through - I walk through the market.
Be careful which word you use.

"he towered a good foot over them slavers" them=the... unless of course you want your noble man's daughter talking like she's from the deep south in her narritives. Then again, in the forth chapter she says "y'all", so maybe that is your intent.

"My father and the slaver were finalizing the purchase when the beast goy to us." goy = got, there's a couple typos like that, go through with a spell checker and you should get them all.

The father puts a bracer on the beasts neck. Bracers are usually worn on the fore arm.

"The blazing red sun rose over the bleak horizon of the desert signaling another day on the desert planet Rosa."
The blazing red sun rose over the bleak horizon, signaling another day on the desert planet Rosa. Watch out for repetition

"Two hours later I arrived at the entrance gate of Salgin, by the time I had arrived the winds had died down and the only enemy I had was the sun."
This sentence is a bit awkward. As it's written it should be two sentences. Personally I would leave out the reference to the sun, it's pretty much implied that the sun is hot and bothersome since the character is walking through the desert and dehydrated (but that's just my opinion).
I would probably rewrite the sentence: "By the time I arrived at the gates of Salgin two hours later, the wind had died down." or something similar.

The second chapter starts with Kahmille, 2 hours after sunrise. But when Aya's part starts a few sentences later she says it's already mid day, even tho she meets Kahmille at the gates (presumably meaning he had just entered the city, since he didn't travel far from the entrance). So either the days on Rosa are only 4 hours long, or this is an error, and it should be mid morning or something.

"Kahmille was his name, ever since I was seven he has been my guardian."
You've already introduced Kahmille and told us his name, you don't need to tell us again, we haven't forgot yet ;)

"When he was twelve he began his hit the Beast version of maturity, which is about two and a half meters and 100 kilos of pure muscle."
This sentence took me a couple minutes. "When he was twelve he began to hit maturity. He grew to two and half meters, and 100 kilos of pure muscle."
Couple of reasons I would write it like this. First off, we already know he's a beast, if he hits maturity at all, it's going to be a beast maturity, that's a given. Second, a maturity doesn't grow to 100 kilos, the beast grows to 100 kilos. The way you had it written out sounded like the maturity itself was the thing doing the growing.

"Slung over his shoulder was the bag of goodies my father"
From my father, for one, but also, the father is sending his daughter off to a safer area, but your making it sound like he packed her a bag of candy. I would say a bag of supplies here, that sounds much more survival oriented than a goodie bag.

I'll give it a rest here, I don't know if you can edit your works on that site or not, so I don't really know how much help it is to point out these errors for you. You seem to contradict yourself at times, for example, in the first chapter you say that Aya and Kahm grow up best friends, yet at the beginning of the third chapter Kahm is contemplating letting Aya die for convenience purposes. There's promise here, but it really needs a lot of work and polish to be great.

One final thing:
"War... war never changes"
Don't steal mottos. I like Fallout as much as the next guy, but you should try to be more original. You may as well have stuffed the Spiderman "Great Power/Great Responsibility" tag line in there.

use an if statement to see if the data is null, then use a switch statement to go to your level.

Great tutorial, I've got a question though. Is it possible to create a linked list from an array list, or vice versa? For example, I need to randomly access a list the majority of the time, so I make an Arraylist, but then I on occasion need to delete items, could I turn/transfer the Arraylist into a Linkedlist, delete the necessary items, then turn it back into an Arraylist?

At 3/13/10 07:35 PM, UnknownFear wrote:

At 3/13/10 05:52 PM, kiwi-kiwi wrote: Not necessarily, I decided to join in and write a tutorial about the state pattern in Java. If people like it maybe I'll make some more

I was going to write a tutorial on using the Scanner method to get input from a user, but I don't know if I should or not.

I would say that you should, as long as this thread is getting tuts it won't die. I'm looking thru the ones that are here now.

I kinda decided to learn Java since I want to make apps for Android, and since I was always told that the leap from as3 to java isn't that hard. Maybe I'll write up something on installing and using the Eclipse IDE, since that was my biggest hurdle to getting started.

I'm trying to teach myself Java and I'm going thru the tutorials at java.sun.com. I'm coming into Java from AS3, so I'm familiar with classes and OOP, but I just got done reading the section about arrays and I have some questions since they don't seem to work like they do in AS3.

The tutorial says "The length of an array is established when the array is created. After creation, its length is fixed. " So, what would happen if I made an array with 2 indices and tried to add 3 items? Would it not compile, or would it push another item out of the array?

Also, alot of times when I'm coding in AS3, I don't know how big an array will be. For example, I'll add random amounts of enemies to a screen and push all enemies into an allEnemies array, but I don't know how many enemies will be created by the my random functions. With java arrays, how would I handle a situation like this?

Also, I would love to hear from anyone else that has both AS3 and Java experience, and that can explain some differences and similarities that I should know about!

I'm playing around with the Flash Catalyst trial and I this would be perfect for making menu systems for a game, but it only exports as either a swf or a flex project. I've never tried importing an swf before, because I've had no reason to, and I'm not sure if it would be worth it to have the menu system in a different swf than the game itself. I'm pretty sure it's not though.

But I also don't know much about Flex and mxml. What I'm wondering is, if there is anyway for me to make a fla and all my classes/AS files like I normally would in Flash Develop and Flash CS4, import it into my flex project, and still have a 1 swf game/app?

If I can figure out how to do that, I'm pretty sure it will be a small jump from there to integrating with the FC generated menu. But I guess the other question I have is, how many other people here have used Flash Catalyst, and what are your thoughts?

So who all wants to edit? I'm working on my Robot Day submission at the moment, so I'm available to help edit anyones work for the anthology until I start working on my own Anthology story. Send me a PM if you need some extra eyes, I am on Google Wave, and MSN Instant Messenger.

The writing tournament is over, if you want to write a historical fiction, go for it and post it in a thread you make. If you want to compete against someone, sign up in the Short Stories battle thread.

One other thing, go into your publish settings and look for an option that says "Omit Trace Statements." Check that box and your program will run smoother. Of course, if you need to see a trace, you need to uncheck that box.

At 5/30/10 08:02 AM, Drakenflight wrote: Sweet tits. But even if I set useWeakRefernce of all my listeners to true, don't they still stcik around if I just remove the parent display object?

The simple fix is to not use weak references and actually remove your listeners when you are done with them.

Then again, I never got the point of weak references anyway. It's pretty easy to copy/paste an addEventListener and change it to removeEventListener. Alot easier than adding all that extra crap at the end of your listener, and then wondering exactly when the event listener is going to be GCed anyway.

So... does your computer have enough ram to run flash?

Flash CS4 seemed to crash a lot on me as well (not sure which flash you are using). It was just random crashes at random times. The best thing to do is just save your work often. Go ahead and search around the forums, lots of people have complained about Flash being unstable.

Something I've found that helps is doing your artwork in Flash, and programming in either notepad or Flash Develop. That way if Flash crashes, you don't lose any unsaved code.

It's probably not your file, you would have to have something MASSIVE for it to crash just on filesize alone, and then it would probably be because of your computer, not Flash. Of course, this is just me talking from personal experience and I'm sure someone will coming rushing in to call me a noob.

Pretty much. Although...

Now I'm going to write a story about a rapist that gives flowers to his "dates."

At 5/30/10 01:50 AM, tinytim12 wrote: Well I have a question.
Can the story use characters from other works of fiction? E.g. Batman

I don't think that would be very appropriate, do you? This is something going in the NG store, if you really wanted to submit a fanfiction, you would probably want to use an NG character.

Then there's the matter of most fan fiction sucks really really bad, so my money is on gumOnShoe saying no.

Wow, I've got a lot of work for me this month, I've already started outlining a story for the Robot Day contest, and now I'm seeing this :)

At 5/25/10 12:28 PM, milchreis wrote: Hint of the day: this "wikipedia" thing provides articles about quite a few things.

Which are then edited by me after taking a handful of gabapatin :P

Thanks for that link WarKry, I've been looking for basic trig tuts myself. Now if you have some thing similar for physics that would be nice too ;)

Ok that helps, I found textWidth.

getParagraphLength() looks like it will give me the right numbers ( x+= textWidth * getParagraphLength() or something similar). I'm going to try this out but if anyone can think of other ways, I'd love to hear them too :)

Is it possible to get the x and y position of a character entered into an input field?

What I have right now is an input field, with a graphic of an eyeball underneath it. What I want to do is have the eyeball rotate to point at the last letter entered, or deleted, so when you type into the text field the eyeball looks at what you are typing. If you need a clearer explanation let me know.

Yeah, I purposely wanted to make it very disturbing, I wanted to be completely and fully on the opposite end of the spectrum from Dr. Suess. He wrote for children, so I wrote this for lunatics, that was kind of my thought process anyway.

I tried to add subtle touches to the crude humor, for example the rat pooping on the mat felt like it really strengthened the show of disrespect towards the mother, making an insult big enough to match the injury of rape. Did these things come across?

Since the tournament fell apart, how about giving me some feedback on this piece?

Bump. Can anyone help?

It's been fun, but due to lack of participation, and things that are going horribly wrong for me in real life, I'm going to have to drop out. Great stories guys, hopefully the next time this happens the participation will be better.

Nobodies being mean, this is your chance to either rewrite your story taking these suggestions into account, or start working on something new and use the things you're learning here. Read AssCrumbs post again, then read your story again, out loud to yourself. Look for your flaws, but more importantly, look for ways that you can improve.

At 5/17/10 08:47 PM, The-Great-One wrote:
I would prefer teaming up with someone else and keeping things more private. Sure it takes more work that way, but in the end it works out well.

I have to be honest, I'm surprised that so many people want to keep this private. Look around, this forum has been nearly dead for the past couple of weeks.

You've also got to remember that most of the writers here don't have flash submissions of their own, and that it's hard to get other people on board if you yourself don't have any experience.

Personally I'm not to fond of having an idea dump thread. There's already way to many of those. I would much rather see just an advertising thread where writers can go to say "I'm available," with links to previous work and posts, or "I have something written" with a link to a blog post pitch.

But I do like your idea of a request thread. Maybe something like the art forum has. It would at the very least let us know how many people out there actually want to have writers involved.