A couple weeks before the Flash Gaming Summit I found an interesting blog post from Colin Northway about managing texture memory in Starling applications. In this post he describes how he forces an error in ActionScript to receive an object's memory address which he then uses as a unique id. I thought this was a pretty cool trick and was discussing it with our engine developer at the office when we suddenly had a thought: if you can get the memory address of an object in ActionScript, what's to stop you from passing that address into native code and doing whatever you want with it? (more...)

I've written before about how to create your own native extensions for Adobe AIR, but what if you need to debug your extension? If you're doing anything but the simplest of projects, you're going to want to be able to debug the code on the native side, in addition to your AS3 code. The ActionScript side is (hopefully!) already taken care of by your IDE so this tutorial will focus on the native code. It's a pretty short tutorial, but also incredibly useful! (more...)

This class was officially added to the Citrus Engine on November 26, 2012.

After seeing Lee Brimelow's tutorial on the Citrus Engine, I was intrigued and decided to play around with it. The engine's platformer package is already great and has some very useful objects for game developers. I took a look at the code for the box2d Platform and MovingPlatform classes and extended the functionality to create a RevolvingPlatform class. (more...)

One of the most talked about features in the new Flash Player 11.4 beta is the new concurrency model which allows developers to spawn worker threads to handle intensive operations. While many people are singing the praises of multithreading, I can't help but to feel like this may not be such a great thing.

I've always had certain misgivings about multithreading. Without question, threading has become common practice for achieving performance gains through parallelism in programming. However, just because something becomes accepted practice does not necessarily mean that it's a good thing. If you want an exhaustive look into the topic, I recommend reading Edward A. Lee's report The Problem with Threads. The author is a distinguished professor and former chair of Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department. (more...)

In this tutorial you will learn how to implement a more advanced style of terrain following using Flash and ActionScript 3. Terrain following is a pretty simple concept in a flat or boxy world, but what if you want a more dynamic world with hills and slopes? Things become a little trickier. Luckily, Flash and AS 3 have some handy built-in functionality that take a lot of the grunt work out of the process. Let's check it out! (more...)

Last week I decided to look into building a native extension for AIR and was very surprised by the lack of quality resources and tutorials for doing so. I was able to find examples for Android using Java and for iOS using Objective-C, but pretty much nothing for a standard Windows C++ project. I was eventually able to get things up and running by piecing together bits of information from various sources, but I thought I'd take the time to write a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this so that perhaps others will have an easier time. In this tutorial you will create a native extension that simply adds two numbers together and returns the sum. (more...)

I've been seeing a lot of posts around the web the last few days about a new ActionScript 3 library, AS3MUL. The MUL stands for multiuser library. Of course this captured my interest and today I decided to play around with it. I'm pleased to say this library is really good! I was able to get a simple multiplayer scene up and running in just a couple of hours!

You can check out my simple demo here, head to the AS3MUL website to learn more about it and download the library from google code.

To see actual multiplayer with the demo either have a buddy sign on with you or just open the demo page in a second browser window/tab.

Just in case you haven't been keeping up with the news; there was a pretty cool announcement from GDC for Flash and HTML5/Javascript developers. Microsoft revealed Xbox LIVE Web Games which means they're opening up the Xbox LIVE platform to web game developers. Microsoft will provide an API for making web service calls into the XBL platform. API's will be available for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 and also Javascript. (more...)

A good friend of mine just shared a great link with me and I figured I'd post it here for everyone to check out. Adobe recently released a white paper which outlines their plans for the future of the Flash platform. After reading through it, I'm pretty excited about the direction they're going; specifically in regards to gaming.

The document discusses updates to the existing Flash and AIR players, as well as the next iteration of ActionScript: "While Adobe is working on releases for 2012, including 11.2 and the subsequent 2012 release, we are also modernizing the Flash Player code base in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes meet the needs of developers over the next five to 10 years."

They are also quick to point out that the jump to the next version of ActionScript, currently named ActionScript Next, will be "significantly less burdensome than the move from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3."

Needless to say, this is definitely worth a read if you're a serious Flash developer. Check it out!

Out of all the articles and tutorials I've written, by far the most popular have been the Flash and Kinect pieces. Since the February 1st release of the version 1 Kinect SDK, I've gotten quite a few questions about how to get Flash working with Kinect again. Many readers were having trouble with the old tutorials which no longer work as they were based on the beta release of the SDK. I decided to take a break from my current project this weekend and throw together a quick Kinect to Flash demonstration with the new SDK. This isn't a tutorial, but you can download the source files and see how it was made! (more...)