Migrant Workforce

Well, we're in the process of migrating our site and this blog over to a more integrated solution, which has proved a baptism of fire for me. Ricky's been on at me for a while to try and sort it, and it has only been in the last week that I've had a chance to do owt. Up until a week ago, my exploits into the wonderful world of html/xml were limited to cut and paste jobs on here and taking ages to get my head round LUA scripting. So it's been a fairly encouraging experience that I've managed to get the site up and running and looking something akin to a proper site in less than a week. 

Some advice I was given early doors on html editing was to hit the forums, and true enough 90% of the questions I've had I can get answers to pretty quickly on them. Other stuff I've battled without answers and there is very little that has defeated me so far. To be honest, it's been a pretty enjoyable experience (albeit punctuated with a number of expletives) and a nice little break from creative accounting and spoiling people's fun saying "Yes, that'd be really cool but we have no time/money/programmer/etc..."

With a fair wind, our new site should be up within the next week or so, then you'll be able to contact me on it to ask me what all the fuss was about.

P.S. Look out for a substantially less mundane update early next week, small developer fanboys!

A Useful Flash Extension

I'm not intending to make a habit of technical posts which are only tangentially on the subject of video games. However, when I come across something which is likely to be of use to other developers, it seems worth linking it up.

I've been pulling in a large number of bitmaps into flash recently (in fact importing them from Photoshop psds). I'm scaling the objects in my game, so I need to set the properties of each bitmap to 'allow smoothing', so they anti-alias as they scale (i.e. they scale smoothly rather than going all pixellated).

Quite unhelpfully, the Flash GUI doesn't allow the Properties of multiple library objects to be set at once. And even more unhelpfully, it defaults all Bitmap Properties to 'don't allow smoothing'. This means I would have spent the whole of friday afternoon going left click.. right click.. left click.. left click.. left click.. grind teeth.. repeat..

.. if it wasn't for this lovely Extension which allows you to select a folder, and recursively set the properties of all bitmaps below it with just a couple of clicks.

So thanks Devon O. Wolfgang! You just saved me HOURS of toil!

Okay, your normal exciting game development news service may resume...

/shuffles off..

Particles

Hello blog!

So I finally got around to porting my particle engine to Actionscript 3 last week. You can see a little test swf here.





What I particularly like about my engine is that it allows behaviours to be defined in XML. Which means the code stays nice and clean (you just create an emitter, give it an XML file and start it up), but more importantly that a non-programmer can tweak particle effects to their heart's content.

To give you an idea, here is the XML for the emitters in my test - both the one attached to the mouse pointer, and the one when you click.