Sprout game

This is a neat little game. It's fun and pretty, in a crafty kind of way

I found it here: http://samgine.com/sprout/

The Nature of Existance and the looming ecconomic collapse... heady stuff!

I was watching this video called "The Nature of Existance" It filled with esoteric math and was really long and a bit dry, but their was something about the creator/narrator, who calls himself EBTX, that kept watching

He has a calm and lulling voice with soothing cadence, this was mixed with a bit of sarcasm and wit that somehow kepted me watching through the whole video. I'm not saying you should watch the whole video, about somewhere near the beginning he goes on a car ride to examine beer cans and pick up trucks and you kind of wonder what this video is about.

After finishing the video my curiosity was piqued. Who is this man that calls himself EBTX, well as it turns out he has a website which is an interesting jouney on its own. One little gem that I found was a link to a video series by a person named Chris Martenson. The whole series can be found here: http://www.chrismartenson.com/ Check out this video for an idea of what he gets into

Dungeon Game Sprite Sheet

Follow this link for a great collection of lo fi dungeon game graphics: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8970.0

Web Diplomacy is Awesome!

I've gotten into playing web diplomacy over the past several months. I like it so much I thought I would blog about it. I've been playing an online version and I have to say that this seems to be the perfect medium for the game.

Like most war games, Diplomacy is all about dominating battle field. What separates Diplomacy from most other war games is the negotiation or "diplomacy" phase, where players talk in secret about their plans for the next phase. Once you've spoken with everyone you write and submit your moves once everyone has submitted their moves they are compared and resolved. It is here that you see just how honest your opponents are. From the webdiplomacy.net home page:

"Luck plays no part in Diplomacy. Cunning and cleverness, honesty and perfectly-timed betrayal are the tools needed to outwit your fellow players. The most skillful negotiator will climb to victory over the backs of both enemies and friends.
Who do you trust?"
(Avalon Hill)

Below I've listed a few different sites to play on:

http://www.goondip.com
This one has the most features and a ton of map variants, but it has been prone to crashing.

Before I ame accross goondip I was using this site:
http://game.xbsd.kr/endip/
It's more reliable but generally less user friendly. Plus the community is less active

and of course:
http://webdiplomacy.net/
this is the original. No frills no variants, extremely active community.

Look for me out there, I go by the title "The kindly Tyrant"
Good luck ;)

AS3 Tip: Working with Flash assets in Flex Builder

I do all my action script development in Flex Builder. As a programming IDE it's miles better then the one built into Flash. One place where it falls short is when dealing with assets created in the Flash authoring environment.

How Flash works with classes associated with your MovieClips

Let's say you create a movieclip, you plan on affecting said movieclip with actions in you scripts, so during the creation process you click the "Advanced" button and export it for actionscript. Flash, being the helpful guy that it is (I snickered as I wrote that) looks for a class in your source path that matches the class name you just entered for the movieclip (this actually is very helpful). Say I draw a robot on the stage, convert it to movieclip, and call it "Robot". If a class with the name Robot isn't found then Flash will create a dynamic one at run time, but if there is one, Flash is smart enough to put two and two together and apply all actions in that class to the Robot movieclip, including the actions applied to the named movieclips nested inside of Robot. Not so when you are using Flash assets in Flex Builder.

Flex and swcs

You can have access to you assests created in Flash while working in Flex, Just tick the box in publish settings. It'll export a swc. A swc is basically a compression format of sorts, Flash bundels a swf and an xml file together in one package, the xml file holds a reference to everything that has been "Exported for Actionscipt" in your movie. Let's say we're developing in the Flex environment, it allows you to do something like this:

public var robot:Robot = new Robot();

Now let's say that we had other named movieclips nested inside of our Robot movieclip, let's say we have a Head movieclip named head as long as we have declared the type of our movieclip as Robot we can do this:

robot.head.x = 120;

Pretty awesome! I can draw and layout my robot in flash, name all the nested movieclips and refer to them in flex, they'll have all the same properties and methods as any other movieclip! But all is not so keen. Let's say nested inside head we have an Eye movieclip named eye. We can't refer to that by doing this:

robot.head.eye.x = 120;

Flex won't know what the hell you are talking about. This isn't a huge deal when your drawing robots. You can just nest all of the robot bits in Robot but when you're making interface elements sometimes you want to nest things. Let's say you are making a simple photo viewer have a standard button that you are using in a few different places in the app. It has a label that you dynamically add text to. Now let's say that you want to make a pop up panel, you'd like to use the same button, you could place it with actionscript but wouldn't it be so much nicer to lay it out in the Flash authoring environment? It sure would, but you can't do this:

var panel:Panel = new Panel();
panel.button.buttonLabel.text = "close"

The Handy Tip Buried in this Long Explanation

buttonLable is nested inside of button which is nested inside of panel. When faced with this, I would always place the button in my actionscript and be done with it, no big deal.

today I figured out a work around. You can do this:

var panel:Panel = new Panel();
var panelButton:MyButton = panel.button;

and now you can do this:

panelButton.buttonLabel.text = "close";

Awesome!!