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...)

A couple months ago I created a simple demo using the AS3 Multiuser Library. The post has generated very positive feedback and I've also received a few requests for a tutorial so here it is! In this tutorial you will learn how to build a basic multiplayer, p2p application. (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...)

A few friends and I have been working on a game together for the last few weeks. Everything was going well at first, but then we ran into a major snag: bullets were colliding with the ground when they clearly shouldn't have been. We are using Flixel and FlxWeapon from the Flixel Power Tools and we would see the issue pop up only on uneven terrain. If we changed our map to a basic, flat piece then everything worked as expected. However, introducing varying height platforms in the map would cause the issue. The image below demonstrates the problem.

(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.

One of the most common tasks in Flash game development is calculating angles. This becomes important in even simple 2D games such as shooters where the player can fire bullets in all directions. If you're anything like me, you're probably not very good with math. I typically will find other ways to get the job done, and indeed I had my own way for figuring bullet paths, but eventually I decided to use real angles and I'm pleased to say it really isn't that bad. (more...)

At work we've done several projects that involve facial tracking of some sort. While we're still mostly a Flash shop, when it comes to facial recognition, we've been relying on C and C++ apis to get the job done. Today I decided to start looking into an ActionScript solution and the results so far have been promising! (more...)