At 7/2/13 08:56 PM, MSGhero wrote: No, message hero is the dude on twitter. I'm monosodium glutamate hero cuz hero was taken and I got hungry and wanted chinese

I actually wondered about that, too.

Don't worry, my username has about the same story.
Played Runescape as a young'n, got hungry and attempted to make my first (and pretty much only) online alias as "egg" - it was taken, and "egg82" was the first option on the suggestion list. No, I am not 30/31 years old. 10 years younger, actually, which is a bit of a coincidence.

At 7/2/13 08:51 PM, 4urentertainment wrote:

At 7/2/13 08:43 PM, MSGhero wrote: I don't have an account, still waiting on msghero to free up (damn inactive message hero). It's one of those fancy things haxe can do, so it's surprising as3 can get it done as well.

WAIT!

Your username is MESSAGE hero??? Not "Metal Gear Solid" hero except that you mixed up the letters???

MY LIFE IS A LIFE!!!

'(

I thought the metal gear solid thing too.

Also you fucked up bro, your life is a lie, not a life :P

This is a repost from the collab screenshot declaration thread. Sorry for reposting but this is really urgent...

Alright, I know this is an idiotic question, but the API is not very well documented...
How do I make the play button in the Flash ad show up, and how do I listen to whatever event it triggers?
I've tried this:
var flashAd:FlashAd = new FlashAd();
flashAd.x = stage.stageWidth / 2 - flashAd.width / 2;
flashAd.y = stage.stageHeight / 2 - flashAd.height / 2;
flashAd.initPlayButton();
but it didn't quite work.
Help is greatly appreciated with the time running out. Thanks. :)

At 7/3/13 12:21 PM, FlyingColours wrote: This is a repost from the collab screenshot declaration thread. Sorry for reposting but this is really urgent...

Alright, I know this is an idiotic question, but the API is not very well documented...
How do I make the play button in the Flash ad show up, and how do I listen to whatever event it triggers?

addChild(ad.playButton), and ad.onPlayClick = handlerFunction. If the 2nd bit doesn't work, just add your own listener to it.

At 7/3/13 04:25 PM, Innermike wrote: How have you guys changed (if at all) over the last few years with regards to your visual design sensibilities?

I gained taste
Dunno if it's good taste or bad taste, but hey.

At 7/3/13 04:25 PM, Innermike wrote:

Monthly posting time!

How have you guys changed (if at all) over the last few years with regards to your visual design sensibilities?

If wearing matching outfits counts, then that. As far as games, I feel like I know what a game should look and feel like when playing it based on the theme, genre, and such.

Spent this night watching firefly and trying to figure out this problem with rotating an array plus updating the visuals in as3isolib. After checking a dozen times, I couldn't find an issue with my logic; tracing the arrays and positions and all made perfect sense. After 3 hours of drawing arrays and what they look like rotated, I realized that the IsoGroup doesn't auto-update, and I had to call a render function to get the current visuals to show up.

Facepalm

I have the worst headache right now.

At 7/4/13 03:01 AM, MSGhero wrote: Spent this night watching firefly and trying to figure out this problem with rotating an array plus updating the visuals in as3isolib. After checking a dozen times, I couldn't find an issue with my logic; tracing the arrays and positions and all made perfect sense. After 3 hours of drawing arrays and what they look like rotated, I realized that the IsoGroup doesn't auto-update, and I had to call a render function to get the current visuals to show up.

Facepalm

I have the worst headache right now.

..i spent 2 days to figure out how to get trace() to work in flashdevelop when doing debug on android phone, and it was quite a journey, i feel like condom, wasted but fulfilled

At 7/5/13 03:11 PM, Innermike wrote:

Also Rosetta Stone is fucking inexcusably terrible.

really? I thought it was pretty damn amazing. Used it for more clases de Espanol (I own a gaming keyboard, damnit) - my friend used it to learn... Oh, god, I can't remember. Anyway, he knows English and Spanish as his two main languages (you'd never be able to tell he knew the other if you talked to him in either), French as a side, and now this other language that I can't remember.

Quick side-note: My god C# is easy to learn. Never in my life has it taken me two hours to learn a new programming language.

At 7/5/13 03:11 PM, Innermike wrote: Anyone here ever try learning a language with a different alphabet/writing system? I've been listening to Japanese audio/video lessons for a couple months now and I decided to start learning how to read/write as well, aside from being super different obviously it seems better in a lot of ways and worse in some others, but I guess it balances out so it's all good.

After about three weeks I've got both 48 kana syllabaries down and I'm about 50 kanji and 50 vocab deep, but apparently as you get used to it your absorption rate increases dramatically especially since kanji you've learned already often show up as parts of other kanji and then the amount of combinations for vocabulary increases as well.

One of the interesting things I discovered was that in Japanese complex words more (often than in english) are easier to write and simple words are harder.

I know this is hardly flash related or whatever but I think this thread can always use the stimulation.

Also Rosetta Stone is fucking inexcusably terrible.

I've actually started learning Japanese too, I'm currently 20 characters into Hiragana and it's been about a week. My progress should be better, but I've been away the past 4 days so that's my excuse. The recommended places for learning online seem to be Tae Kim's guide as it's well constructed and proper, also Namasensei on YouTube. He's a bit more about the motivation, but his stroke order and handwriting are generally pretty bad.

I actually prefer the idea of the syllables having a consistent pronunciation unlike English letters which seem to very dependent on the words. I reckon English would be quite a hard language to learn for those who have a different first language.

At 7/5/13 08:21 PM, Innermike wrote:
Not to mention there's a chrome extension that will replace words on any webpage with their Kanji vocab equivalents, which, while it wont make things suddenly follow proper grammar it really enhances immersion.

Also, I've been using Pimsleurs audio lessons for a while now, the pace of speech in it is more accurate to real life, though of course it's pretty formal, I suppose it's better to learn to speak politely first haha. I recommend that too, and it relies less on 'set phrases' than a lot of other courses.

I'm sure you've heard of Anki by now, I'm not a fan but hey, different strokes for different folks.

WOW OKAY WELCOME TO THE NEWGROUNDS LANGUAGE FORUM

Sounds like a pretty solid app, I'll google it and see what I can find. A lot of people have told me that you'll only need to read the character, but knowing how to write it with correct stroke order and such will probably help keep it in your mind longer.

The way I've been trying to make sure I get things memorised correctly is every half hour or so I'll pick up a notepad and try to write down all of the syllables (i.e. a, ka, sa, ta, etc.) and then the hiragana character beside it. Every time I don't remember it, I write it down 30 times in a row. Works pretty well, I've found. I'm dreading Kanji though, I aim to take it at 5-10 a week.

I downloaded some program recently (the name slips my mind) that allows me to type in Japanese using the standard keyboard, it's fun to mess around with, but not a lot of use to me yet until I know all of the characters. I'll take a look into Pimsleur too, any resource I can find is generally worth checking out. I'm planning on going to Japan for two weeks next summer so I'd like to pick up as much as I can in a year.

What's your motivation for learning? Just for fun? The culture?

At 7/5/13 03:11 PM, Innermike wrote: Anyone here ever try learning a language with a different alphabet/writing system? I've been listening to Japanese audio/video lessons for a couple months now and I decided to start learning how to read/write as well, aside from being super different obviously it seems better in a lot of ways and worse in some others, but I guess it balances out so it's all good.

After about three weeks I've got both 48 kana syllabaries down and I'm about 50 kanji and 50 vocab deep, but apparently as you get used to it your absorption rate increases dramatically especially since kanji you've learned already often show up as parts of other kanji and then the amount of combinations for vocabulary increases as well.

One of the interesting things I discovered was that in Japanese complex words more (often than in english) are easier to write and simple words are harder.

I know this is hardly flash related or whatever but I think this thread can always use the stimulation.

Also Rosetta Stone is fucking inexcusably terrible.

I learned Korean, and I also speak hebrew which has its own alphabet (though technically the roman alphabet is actually the "new language alphabet" i learned, since hebrew is my native language). Korean writing system used to be based on chinese characters, like old forms of japanese. Then in the 15th century came along king Sejong who is probably the only worthy intellectual in the history of Korea; he came up with a new korean alphabet called hangul. Every syllable is formed by one letter block made out of up to one starting consonant, one vowel, and one ending consonant. Vowels are combinations of a small set of vowel constructors. All the foundational vowel constructors were presumably conceived in reference to the shape your mouth/tongue makes when you pronounce said sound.

As far as Rosetta Stone - I know nothing about the software itself, but I know there is immense progress to be made in language teaching practice when it comes to eastern asian languages. Japanese probably doesn't suffer as badly as Korean (and possibly chinese) because Japan has always been a strong world power, and people have always been interested in the culture (and consequently the language), so a considerable effort has been spent on the teaching of japanese language for foreigners. That being said, while I suspect that there must be many strong japanese learning programs, there are also undoubtedly many terrible ones, just as there are for Korean language, since those languages have a very different strategy of expressing fact from the one we are used to in western culture. Again, I don't know Rosetta Stone, and I suspect that the issue I pointed out may not be the issue that's causing you discontent with rosetta, but it is a real issue nonetheless.

Also, I agree that there is a disconcerting inconsistency between english writing and pronunciation. I've become aware of it ever since I started learning Korean and noticing how Koreans have just as hard a time (if not harder) with english as I do with korean. I would have become very frustrated with english by now if I were learning it as an adult. Naturally, as a human and also a programmer, I enjoy languages which have strong sets of rules that build up a lot of knowledge, and I would be frustrated with languages that are filled with exceptions and inconsistencies. Having to spend so much effort remembering all the arbitrary nuances of english words would be very frustrating.

Please, urgent help needed.

• Unpublished Submission

A white screen appears for like ten minutes before the preloader appears, fully loaded. Knowing the patience of newgrounders, this will probably blam our entry. How to fix this? Thanks.

At 7/5/13 11:54 PM, FlyingColours wrote: Please, urgent help needed.
http://www.newgrounds.com/projects/view/688111
A white screen appears for like ten minutes before the preloader appears, fully loaded. Knowing the patience of newgrounders, this will probably blam our entry. How to fix this? Thanks.

You're loading classes before the preloader starts, and it won't display anything till it's done. If you're using FD, use the template preloader they give you. You have to use getDefinitionByName to avoid loading everything at the start.

At 7/6/13 12:13 AM, MSGhero wrote: You're loading classes before the preloader starts, and it won't display anything till it's done. If you're using FD, use the template preloader they give you. You have to use getDefinitionByName to avoid loading everything at the start.

Ooooh thanks! I'll have to try that now.

At 7/5/13 07:20 PM, Innermike wrote:

Hey Mike!

I was about to be all pissed off that you said the Rosetta Stone sucks, then I realized you were NOT referring to the actual Egyptian artifact.

I just saw the pictures you posted on Twitter for your game. You should totally finish that and sell it and drown in money. It doesn't even need an artist. Your art style is really stylistic.

I've just finished 2 games for the jam. Also we're having a revolution.

Now that our GJ9 entry is up and running, I can read those long posts!...

At 7/5/13 03:11 PM, Innermike wrote: Anyone here ever try learning a language with a different alphabet/writing system?

I have! It's called English. :P In all seriousness, though, I've been learning English since I was a baby anyway, so I guess it doesn't count. I don't think it would be too difficult to learn a lanugage that uses the Cyrillic or Arabic alphabets, though. It's just a writing system, a way of representing ideas, like XML and HTML. The writing system is the easy part; polishing your writing (analogy: CSS) and forming sentences grammatically (analogy: JS) are the hard parts! I've been learning French for a few years, and orthography really is the least of my worries...

After about three weeks I've got both 48 kana syllabaries down and I'm about 50 kanji and 50 vocab deep, but apparently as you get used to it your absorption rate increases dramatically especially since kanji you've learned already often show up as parts of other kanji and then the amount of combinations for vocabulary increases as well.

I don't speak Japanese, but they borrowed a lot from Chinese, so I think I can give you a little tip: Research on how the characters are formed! Many online sites do that, e.g. chineseetymology.org. Searching kanji should work there (unless it's a native one without a hanzi equivalent.) Take the Chinese character cai3. At first, it may not seem like anything you know, but if you look it up, you'll find that it's a hand picking up a flower! :)

As an aside, I think there are two huge obstacles to language-learning: one is internalising the grammar (knowing is the easy part) and the other is remembering vocab. I think I'm doing fairly well in the former after the basic rules (conjugation and pluralisation, etc.) kind of 'clicked in' during my fourth year of learning French. I'm still struggling with the latter, however, and that's something I want to solve during the summer. :)

At 7/5/13 10:39 PM, Innermike wrote:
That's awesome! Do you know exactly where you're going? I think it's raining season in a lot of places right now.

I'm not certain yet, most likely Tokyo so I can do the typical touristy things. I've been posting around 4chan's travel board (an actually civilised board) and talking with people on there about their trips and language learning which has helped out a good bit in terms of ideas.

What's your motivation for learning? Just for fun? The culture?

I really like Monster Hunter? Haha but seriously, I've been interested in Japanese culture since I was 8-9 and everyone had to do a like a report thing on a country, I did Japan and I was instantly (rice)bowled over. Sure who doesn't love anime n shit but it's beyond that really at this point, there are a lot of fundamental things about Japanese culture I love and I would definitely like to live there one day, even if it's only brief. I've only been there twice but damn did I love every second of it, I liked it more than Disneyworld for sure!

1 in 3? Jeez, that's pretty crazy. Might need to pick myself up 3 Ultimate, haha. I'm pretty similar to be honest, always enjoyed Japanese games, shows, anime, etc. The more I grew up, the more I got interested in other aspects like the food, tea, festivals and such so it'd be nice to experience that stuff first hand. What places have you been to?

To keep the thread a bit more on topic, going to toss out a screenshot of the latest project I've been working on. Sort of a Pokemon/Digimon monster collecting project:

At 7/6/13 12:08 PM, VoidForce wrote: To keep the thread a bit more on topic, going to toss out a screenshot of the latest project I've been working on. Sort of a Pokemon/Digimon monster collecting project:

This is why we need WIP Wednesday or Screenshot Saturday on this site: so we can reserve this thread for tangents and not game dev stuff.

I learned Latin and Spanish in high school. Spanish was kinda meh, but I really liked Latin, especially my teachers and how they taught it. Junior year we translated most of the Aeneid, and senior year, since we were done with Catullus, Virgil, etc, we translated the funniest, most low-down poems. The teacher wouldn't let us take home the quizzes for fear that our parents would see them and complain to the principal.

I like Spanish as a language, but learning it just seemed fundamentally different than Latin. Year 3 of that class, we weren't allowed to talk in English which I guess is a good way to get everyone to shut up. Even before high school, I had like ~8 years of Spanish class, like once or twice a week, and I learned nothing but vocab. I didn't even know how to conjugate "to be" until 7th grade. Dora the Explorer helped a good deal. As far as latin class, we learned the common conjugations and declinations before going past 10 vocab which made it stick.

Heyy guys. Been away for awhile. Got a job as a grounds keeper at a golf course so have not had to much time to do cool things. I finished my one game and it has been up on FGL for quite awhile, no bids yet, a lot of views, and one sponsor tracking it. Not sure what to do next to help get my game sold.

Ohhh, and I made an icon for myself, kinda. How does it look?

At 7/6/13 06:43 PM, swishcheese wrote: Heyy guys. Been away for awhile. Got a job as a grounds keeper at a golf course so have not had to much time to do cool things. I finished my one game and it has been up on FGL for quite awhile, no bids yet, a lot of views, and one sponsor tracking it. Not sure what to do next to help get my game sold.

Ohhh, and I made an icon for myself, kinda. How does it look?

How long has it been on fgl? A trailer usually gives the game more hype, and you could pm site admins asking them as well.

What does a genie lamp have to do with swish or cheese? lol

At 7/6/13 06:46 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 7/6/13 06:43 PM, swishcheese wrote: Heyy guys. Been away for awhile. Got a job as a grounds keeper at a golf course so have not had to much time to do cool things. I finished my one game and it has been up on FGL for quite awhile, no bids yet, a lot of views, and one sponsor tracking it. Not sure what to do next to help get my game sold.

Ohhh, and I made an icon for myself, kinda. How does it look?

How long has it been on fgl? A trailer usually gives the game more hype, and you could pm site admins asking them as well.

What does a genie lamp have to do with swish or cheese? lol

LOL. welll.. idk. swish kinda like a wish... Genie grants wishes... cheese coming out... makes it swishcheese. It is a stretch, but I do not really have any other ideas. I got that nickname awhile ago from playing basketball. I am terrible at shooting but okay at the other things. But one day i was making every shoot i took and friends calling me swishcheese. Swish as the noise it made when i made the basket. I want a new name, but I wanna keep all my stuff still.

and it has been on for a month now. I put a walkthrough video up as the trailer. It has 22 views. I got an email saying that I should place a buy it now option on my game. I am not sure how to go about that and what price I should select for it.

At 7/6/13 06:53 PM, swishcheese wrote: LOL. welll.. idk. swish kinda like a wish... Genie grants wishes... cheese coming out... makes it swishcheese. It is a stretch, but I do not really have any other ideas. I got that nickname awhile ago from playing basketball. I am terrible at shooting but okay at the other things. But one day i was making every shoot i took and friends calling me swishcheese. Swish as the noise it made when i made the basket. I want a new name, but I wanna keep all my stuff still.

and it has been on for a month now. I put a walkthrough video up as the trailer. It has 22 views. I got an email saying that I should place a buy it now option on my game. I am not sure how to go about that and what price I should select for it.

Well it's cheesy, I'll give you that. I have no idea, I was pretty much in the same boat with one lurker and a fair number of views. PSvils game that was on fgl got a starting bid of $50, but his game is more arcade-y than yours, so idk.

At 7/6/13 06:59 PM, MSGhero wrote: Well it's cheesy, I'll give you that. I have no idea, I was pretty much in the same boat with one lurker and a fair number of views. PSvils game that was on fgl got a starting bid of $50, but his game is more arcade-y than yours, so idk.

lol. yeahh. Think I might make another icon that just 3D letters involved spelling out swishcheese.

And okay. I maybe just add flash ads and submit it to NG. I worked a long while on it tho, but it started off being an experiment. Then after it turned into a full game, I decided to see if I could make some money on it.

At 7/7/13 04:53 PM, Innermike wrote: Do you guys share the position that the gender/race of the main character in a game makes no difference to you?
I hear about the whole connecting to demographics thing but it sounds silly to me. I feel like as long as it isn't forced, stupid and jam-packed with stereotypes it shouldn't matter right? It's not like I'm saying "Down with the white male protagonists!" but I'm just saying, it seems like a bit of a cop out.

Been bumping a lot of civil rights beat poetry recently

I care a lot more about whether it's a good character or not, not what race or gender they are. I'd rather play as a well written lesbian black woman than a poorly written straight white man.

http://prntscr.com/1e4znw
oh, for fuck's sake, Microsoft.

full article

Well if someone wants to use IE then they deserve to view broken web pages that don't function correctly. Using IE is like driving a car with square wheels; sure it "works" but why not just use normal wheels?
Though that really sucks for people whom are working for businesses and are being forced to support IE. Fortunately I don't need to support it for anything I work on so I can just continue to not care about IE users. :)

At 7/7/13 08:53 PM, egg82 wrote: full article

Wow, sounds like this.

At 7/8/13 12:01 AM, Innermike wrote: I don't see the problem.

The problem is Microsoft's hiding their browser from anyone trying to code for it. Currently, you're able to say "if IE then do this, else do this" because IE follows its own rules instead of the standards every other browser uses.
With IE 11, they're now hiding their browser so you can no longer say "if IE do this" because apparently they're so confident in their browser that they're going "you don't need to know which browser the client is using" - which is really, really bad for developers.

Look, no browser's perfect. Each one has their own things you may need to deal with (most of which are minor and are hardly ever used, thankfully) - hiding your platform from people trying to work with your platform isn't good. At all.

Say, for example, that something goes wrong and it turns out IE doesn't follow some standard you need it to? Well, you're screwed, because now you can't check and accommodate.
Every other browser has information regarding which browser it is. In case, you know, god forbid something happens and you need to accommodate.
Now let's pretend we're data mining and are trying to see how many people are using the new browser- oh, wait, we can't.

Basically, they're pretending their next browser's perfect in every way and screwing developers over just to try to prove a point. Which they statistically will almost assuredly fail at.

At 7/8/13 12:22 AM, egg82 wrote: Say, for example, that something goes wrong and it turns out IE doesn't follow some standard you need it to? Well, you're screwed

No you're not. IE11 still has a user agent; it's just not a comparable one used by all previous versions. It just means that legacy code won't be able to detect IE11. You will still be able to write new code to do it: instead of searching for MSIE in the user agent you will now need to search for the existence of Trident, or rv 11.0, or both. It's incredibly stupid on Microsoft's part (they've been doing a lot of stupid things lately) but it's not impossible to detect IE11.