When I find time (which is increasingly less often), I always like to set myself technical challenges to solve. I enjoy the challenge of it, and every so often I actually produce something which someone else could find useful.
In the last couple of days I have been trying to accurately simulate the movement of car (two steering wheels, and two fixed wheels). This is more complicated than it first appears because, when the car is turning, it is actually rotating around a point which is outside itself. The diagram to the right should help to show what I mean.
Getting this form of motion to work properly involves some complicated co-ordinate geometry to make points rotate around other points across multiple frames of reference. It took me a while, but I finally managed to get it working today. You can check out the result below
id="Driving" width="600" height="600" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab"> CLICK HERE TO VIEW SOURCE
Since my last post I have continued working on little ‘cat herding’ game as a way of learning about how a simple 2D game engine works. It quickly became apparent to me however that I was going to need a tool to help me define levels for the game as manually typing out the level definition (several large int arrays) was becoming very tedious.
A ‘World Builder’ application is quite a different puzzle to building a game, because the world builder not only needs to be able to render the level to the screen, but it also needs to be able to update the level in a fast and elegant way. These constraints are directly contradictory when you are trying to decide on the data structure to represent your world, and it took me several different attempts to get it right. What I eventually settled on can be seen above, and you can download the source here. Read on for an explanation of how it works.
Note: All of the tile assets used in this demo (and my previous one) have been borrowed from the application RPG Maker XP. It’s an awesome piece of software!
Recently at work I haven’t been doing much actual Flex development. Instead I have been spending my time working on a data mining/business intelligence system which is an intricate combination of some complex SQL, Ruby scripts and some software called Pentaho. Long story short I was starting to miss the feeling of getting my hands dirty in Flex code, so a few days I go I started messing around with building my own rudimentary game engine from the group up.
Above you can see what I have built so far in about 3 hours total coding time spread over the last four days. The age old adage “never re-invent the wheel, unless you want to learn something” has proven true here once again also. There is quite a lot of trickery to get even this small number of objects to draw themselves onto the screen in a fast, efficient way.
I’ll probably release the source code pretty soon. It’s still a bit in a state of flux so I’m not ready to let other people read it just yet
If I continue to have a bit of free time up my sleeve in the next few weeks I hope to port this project to AIR and have a go at trying to construct the map and characters from a definition in a text file. At present the layout is defined in a 2D int array, so the conversion will hopefully be fairly simple. If that works out then I’ll probably try and remember some of the AI techniques I learnt back in university… Should be fun
Came to this blog searching for a specific issue, which might be nothing for you guys, but have been hitting head for almost two days now.
I have a DataGrid of numbers. All I want to do is that when a mouse rolls over a specific cell, that cell gets highlighted with say, green color, not the whole row.
I have not gotten past this, but as a next step would like to increase the font of the text in that cell as well.. so to emphasize it.
I will appreciate any help or pointers in the right direction.
~Lead
I responded with a brief explanation at the time, but this afternoon I decided to see if I could whip up an example application showing how this could be done. I managed to come up with some code that is both quite simple and reusable. You can check out my demo application here.
Myself and many others have been high frustrated in recent months to hear the large number of tech journalists who have made incorrect comparisons of AIR and Silverlight. I’ve even heard respected tech journalists confusing Flex and AIR. These are people who really should know better, and they in turn create wide spread confusion within the wider internet community.
Peter Elst has started a badge campaign to help spread the word, and Mrinal Wadhwa has created a badge that people can use on their blogs (see the top of this post). What you do makes a difference! Just incase someone ever asks you about Silverlight and AIR, here’s a great quote I read on Mrinal’s blog:
Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together.
Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.
Computer World magazine ran this article today on SmallWorlds. SmallWorlds is gearing up for a public release in the next little while, and the latest version looks fantastic! Built entirely in Flex and Flash, SmallWorlds is launching the next generation of online virtual world which users don’t have to download and install.
If you work with Flex, and would like to see the potential of Flex get some wide spread publicity (or if you just think SmallWorlds is cool ), please help us out and Digg the article. Thank you!
My LoadingImage component takes a regular Flex Image component, and adds a self contained ProgressBar to it to show its own loading progress. I have wanted a nice simple component like this a few times now, so having nothing better to do this evening, I decided to whip one together.
Check out the demo by clicking on the image below. Full source code is available by right clicking on the application.
Today I received a pleasant surprise when I found out that my PostACard application won the 360|Flex API Contest Community category! It was a while coming, but I’m stoked to have won
Thanks to 360|Flex, and Degrafa for putting the contest together.
A special huge thanks so much to everyone who voted for me! I really appreciate it! The only thing I can offer you in appreciation is the full source code of the application. I hope you find it useful
A few weeks ago now I developed my PostACard app. PostACard is developed entirely in Flex, and sports an easily reusable movable UI module as well as many other features which are easy to reuse and learn from.
After finishing PostACard (total development time was 6 weeks), I made the source code (both the Flex code, and server side PHP) available on this blog, so that anyone could check it out. I place no restrictions on how you use this code. If there’s anything in there that’s useful to you, then you can do what ever you like with it. You can get the code here!
I do have one favour to ask however. My PostACard app has been entered in the 360|Flex API contest, and the voting to determine the winners closes next week. If you like free source code, and would like to encourage me to make more code and examples available on my blog then please take a minute of your time to head over to the contest page and vote for me.
In the last couple of days I have been trying to accurately simulate the movement of car (two steering wheels, and two fixed wheels). This is more complicated than it first appears because, when the car is turning, it is actually rotating around a point which is outside itself. The diagram to the right should help to show what I mean.
Computer World magazine ran 
Today I received a pleasant surprise when I found out that my 
A few weeks ago now I developed my 