I'm trying to get a license of NGUI at work. It hasn't responded but I think it 'll be fine even though I'm not on the mobile dev team. Anyone here messed with it? Is it easy to switch over? I know c#, and I've messed with unity, but is NGUI good for 2d games, or is it mostly used for UI?

At 3/11/14 09:32 PM, MSGhero wrote: Pretty sure @VoidForce likes placing thousands of trees by hand. Already have dame planned for later, openfl if I do flixel.

Can't sleep, trees will eat me.

At 3/12/14 02:44 PM, PSvils wrote: Anyone know how long it takes for Flash Ads to be approved?

I've had a project sitting for quite some time, but finally chopped it up to a releasable state, but ads haven't been approved yet. (I have everything else setup, so whoever is evaluating stuff can see the preview)

P.

3 days on average, you can pm someone to check it out or cancel and recheck the ads to refresh it.

I recorded some gameplay footage of my current project to take with me to GDC since it's multiplayer and I can't really demo it to people without a good internet connection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rB7LPgrKUc

who else is going to GDC

At 3/15/14 02:49 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: I recorded some gameplay footage

Looks cool, the effects are great and the melee attack seems like an interesting addition

who else is going to GDC

I got a expo pass from a friend, should be neat

I found a tool that makes gapless mp3s for as3, but it puts all of the audio into a swf. I like the tool because it compresses the audio more while keeping a higher quality than what the music guy sent me in addition to the gapless bit. I've tried embedding the swf and loadBytes-ing it in, but it never dispatches an INIT or COMPLETE event for a mysterious reason.

I don't want to manually embed 100 symbols, does anyone have another way to do it?

At 3/16/14 12:15 AM, MSGhero wrote: I've tried embedding the swf and loadBytes-ing it in, but it never dispatches an INIT or COMPLETE event for a mysterious reason.

Apparently adding the listeners to the loader itself is a common issue, but I'm adding it to the right spot.

100% using haxe from now on, btw.

just went back back played my Theifer O'Greedy game for the first time since I made it. Jeses Christ, the controls are aweful. I guess when they were finalized I was already used to the speed. I might make a habit of taking a several month hiatus in the middle of every game project just to try it with a sense of unfamiliarity

I really need these 1,000,000 points for a module I'm taking.

pls halp guise

At 3/17/14 12:38 PM, Sam wrote: I really need these 1,000,000 points for a module I'm taking.

pls halp guise

The answer is 7

At 3/17/14 12:38 PM, Sam wrote: I really need these 1,000,000 points for a module I'm taking.

pls halp guise

If you answer that, you also get a million dollars. One of the 7 millennium questions or whatever.

At 3/17/14 02:05 PM, MSGhero wrote: If you answer that, you also get a million dollars. One of the 7 millennium questions or whatever.

I was attempted to anything and put a note to my lecturer saying "Can I have a point for trying?".

In other news, I hate Java. It's without a doubt the worst language I've worked with so far. :(

At 3/19/14 10:33 AM, Sam wrote: I was attempted to anything and put a note to my lecturer saying "Can I have a point for trying?".

I royally fucked that sentence up. * "I was tempted to put anything and put a note..."

First pull request. I might have gone overboard with the spelling changes, but I go big or go home.

So Flash player 11.8 introduced the ability to hook into controllers, which is great.
... And then they screwed it up.

The thumb sticks REALLY like being around the 0, 90, 180, and 270 degree marks. It "snaps" to those locations, making analog input feel terrible >:(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRQrWKIFKY&feature=youtu.be

SEE?! :(
The first bit is me rotating the stick slowly counter-clockwise, after that I'm trying to actually "play" the game (which is just a sandbox right now but whatever)

At 3/22/14 12:20 AM, egg82 wrote: So Flash player 11.8 introduced the ability to hook into controllers, which is great.
... And then they screwed it up.

The thumb sticks REALLY like being around the 0, 90, 180, and 270 degree marks. It "snaps" to those locations, making analog input feel terrible >:(

I played around with a demo a while back (pretty sure it was 11.7), and it felt fine. Maybe your controller sucks.

FP13 has enhanced textfield support, meaning emoticons. I'm likely on my last few as3 projects, but that's pretty cool. I can see one use for that in a demo I made probably.

AS4 white pages still haunt me, what could have been...

At 3/22/14 12:48 AM, MSGhero wrote: I played around with a demo a while back (pretty sure it was 11.7), and it felt fine. Maybe your controller sucks.

Nah, C# XNA framework tells me the controller's fine, aside from the right stick leaning 0.0012 magnitude down on the y-axis.

FP13 has enhanced textfield support, meaning emoticons. I'm likely on my last few as3 projects, but that's pretty cool. I can see one use for that in a demo I made probably.

You can hack your way into doing the same thing with the TextFields we have today, but fine. I'm still waiting for that operator overloading and for them to get rid of the "final" keyword on the SoundChannel class (as well as a few others that aren't "fundamental" classes)

AS4 white pages still haunt me, what could have been...

Some of they changes they made looked amazing, I'm not sure why they stopped.

At 3/22/14 12:57 AM, egg82 wrote: Some of they changes they made looked amazing, I'm not sure why they stopped.

I do wonder. Do you think it's a money problem? I mean, there are a load of better programming workflows than the Flash IDE. I'm not sure what other animation software is like, though. Maybe they're not making the sales they want with Flash.

At 3/22/14 12:57 AM, egg82 wrote: I'm still waiting for that operator overloading and for them to get rid of the "final" keyword on the SoundChannel class (as well as a few others that aren't "fundamental" classes)

I don't even think that was gonna be a thing in as4, so it's certainly never happening now.

Well it is looking like I am going to have to do a complete rewrite of the Civillains server again. This will be my 3rd attempt. Hopefully I can build this thing in node.js without having it completely fall over with every uncaught exception. There are also some big questions about how does it scale with xx,xxx concurrent users. I think I will need to be prepared to spin up multiple servers in this case, and then in the lobby the player can choose something like "US East, US West" based on where I stick the EC2 instances. Considering the game is socket based, it requires sticky sessions, so I cannot simply have any player hit any server. I think I am going to use MongoDB to store player data, and user data with an object modeling framework to keep things more tidy. gl hf

At 3/22/14 02:47 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Well it is looking like I am going to have to do a complete rewrite of the Civillains server again.

I like SmartFox :)

At 3/23/14 06:45 PM, Rustygames wrote:

At 3/22/14 02:47 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Well it is looking like I am going to have to do a complete rewrite of the Civillains server again.

I like SmartFox :)

I like it too Rusty. My big issues with it are.

1. It is expensive. You are charged flat rates for licenses based on # of concurrent users.
2. It is closed source. No way to change anything about the underlying code.
3. It is built in Java. I only say this as a negative, because my own personal experience with Java is not incredibly strong. I have a good understanding of the language itself, but it when it comes to maintaining and debugging the application in production I feel underprepared.

There are some other things such as the fact that it only ships with a single database adapter for MYSQL, and no support for NOSQL solutions like MongoDB at all. The maintainer doesn't even have experience with these types of datastores as far as I can tell.

Another thing is that in the SFS2X version they have dropped support for raw JSON-based protocol in favor of a more strongly typed solution which sends data over the wire as raw bytes. This is great in theory, but somewhat tedious in practice. I would prefer to prioritize convenience over micro-performance as I build on the initial version of the product.

All that being said I still feel SFS is a strong product.

At 3/24/14 11:29 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote:

At 3/23/14 06:45 PM, Rustygames wrote:

At 3/22/14 02:47 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Well it is looking like I am going to have to do a complete rewrite of the Civillains server again.

I like SmartFox :)

I like it too Rusty. My big issues with it are.

1. It is expensive. You are charged flat rates for licenses based on # of concurrent users.

I thought it was quite reasonably priced. The licenses scale instantly too so you can start small and work your way up as and when you need to without down time. Only thing is I do believe they charge you for it per box. But at least you only pay once up front and it isn't a recurring thing.

2. It is closed source. No way to change anything about the underlying code.

True. I guess it's just a matter of just trusting them, and since they have games like club penguin under their belt, that's all the trust I need :)

3. It is built in Java. I only say this as a negative, because my own personal experience with Java is not incredibly strong. I have a good understanding of the language itself, but it when it comes to maintaining and debugging the application in production I feel underprepared.

Fair enough. I like their Java API is simple and fast as fook ;)

There are some other things such as the fact that it only ships with a single database adapter for MYSQL, and no support for NOSQL solutions like MongoDB at all. The maintainer doesn't even have experience with these types of datastores as far as I can tell.

I thought they do support a couple of DB's not just the one? Plus I think you can add pretty much any one you want via some convoluted method. Not sure on this though. But is the DB really a deal breaker? :(

Another thing is that in the SFS2X version they have dropped support for raw JSON-based protocol in favor of a more strongly typed solution which sends data over the wire as raw bytes. This is great in theory, but somewhat tedious in practice. I would prefer to prioritize convenience over micro-performance as I build on the initial version of the product.

What do you mean about the JSON thing? Because they do all the compressing and decompressing for you so you still get JSON objects out the other end. The performance improvements really add up and there is a very noticeable speed difference in 2X.

All that being said I still feel SFS is a strong product.

I'm pretty sure they're still the number 1 off-the-shelf solution; I think writing your own back end completely from scratch is a huge undertaking and there may be a lot of wheel re-invention going on since these guys have been doing it for a long time.

Having said this, it's your project and ultimately you know better than anyone what the right solution for you is :)
Best of luck mate

At 3/25/14 03:50 PM, Rustygames wrote: I thought it was quite reasonably priced. The licenses scale instantly too so you can start small and work your way up as and when you need to without down time. Only thing is I do believe they charge you for it per box. But at least you only pay once up front and it isn't a recurring thing.

It is 3400 USD for 5000 concurrents or 4800 USD for unlimited. I guess it depends on your budget whether you think this is reasonably priced or not.

True. I guess it's just a matter of just trusting them, and since they have games like club penguin under their belt, that's all the trust I need :)

It's not about trust. No denying they have built a solid product. It's just that the freedom isn't there to change things. What if I build something and then in 3 years some new protocol comes out and I want to implement it ? That won't be possible without the source.

I thought they do support a couple of DB's not just the one? Plus I think you can add pretty much any one you want via some convoluted method. Not sure on this though. But is the DB really a deal breaker? :(

Nope I believe it's just MYSQL, and maybe PostgreSQL. It's not a deal breaker. Just a PITA to build my own adapter, manage connection pooling, etc.

What do you mean about the JSON thing? Because they do all the compressing and decompressing for you so you still get JSON objects out the other end. The performance improvements really add up and there is a very noticeable speed difference in 2X.

See here: http://docs2x.smartfoxserver.com/DevelopmentBasics/sfsobject-sfsarray

At 3/22/14 09:02 AM, Sam wrote:

At 3/22/14 12:57 AM, egg82 wrote: Some of they changes they made looked amazing, I'm not sure why they stopped.

I do wonder. Do you think it's a money problem? I mean, there are a load of better programming workflows than the Flash IDE. I'm not sure what other animation software is like, though. Maybe they're not making the sales they want with Flash.

probably its a result of flash dying. I wasn't a proponent of the idea that "Flash was dead" that was circulating a few years ago when HTML5 video started to become popular, but man a lot of the major players in the tech industry (apple, google) really did their job to make sure flash was going to die, and unity is just so much better for games right now (though I still have a ton of problems with Unity)

C# is a drastically better language than AS3 too, it has a very similar feature set so it's pretty easy to make the switch, and it's becoming really popular lately thanks to xna/unity/mono/.net

It's a bit of a shame if flash dies out as a worthwhile platform to make games with. I don't know any other way of making games that's as easy as Flash, both to produce and to distribute (pre-smartphone era for the latter, at least). There's no doubt that I'm not an objective source for commenting on how easy it is to make games in flash compared to other environments, because I grew up on flash and pretty much made games on nothing else, but I still don't think I'm so far off the truth even if I'm a little biased.

Unity seems fairly daunting and much heavier in comparison to flash.

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/adobe-experience-manager-mobile-app-announcement/

Adobe didn't mention AIR at all. Considering it was just voted the best/most used/something cross-platform authoring tool, this is a bit surprising.

then again it's adobe so it's not very surprising

Flash is totally dying. I too wasn't a big fan of the "flash is dead" meme that seemed to be so popular a few years ago. After all - it certainly isn't dead, but at this point it is very clearly dying.

Imagine if Adobe made a push to export Flash to WebGL in the same manner as Unity. They could figure out a way to relicense things to make some money off of it. It seems like they've resigned to maintenance mode and not much else at this point.

Fortunately Unity is really awesome, and they have their heads in the right place. Although, I am really skeptical about investing my time into any proprietary platform anymore. I really got my soul crushed with Flash, and I feel it's the same mistake again.

OpenFL is pretty awesome. I am also a big fan of HTML5 and WebGL.

So yeah. Flash is biting the dust hard. In fact, if you only have flash skills, I would definitely encourage you to start branching out, like, yesterday.

At 3/25/14 07:08 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: C# is a drastically better language than AS3 too, it has a very similar feature set so it's pretty easy to make the switch, and it's becoming really popular lately thanks to xna/unity/mono/.net

now that Unity has a WebGl exporter, there's no reason to ever use AS3, I might look into HAXE, but I doubt it holds up to C#. The big thing that made AS3 a major player was the accessibility of your finished product, and that's what died.

Shit if there was no flash, I'd probably be a fucking architect or something (shivers*).