Recursion in assembly made me cry. But now, I understand it. msg.level++;

Meanwhile the prof is way ahead of recitation talking about C gameboy coding, which seems like it'll be easy once I get used to the language.

At 3/25/14 05:04 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote:

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.

$4800 in the grand scheme of things doesn't seem like a lot. I mean, if you have more than 5000 concurrent users then you'll probably make that in a couple of days. Don't forget your time is money :)

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.

Yeah I suppose that could be an issue. But that's the same as relying on anything third party. Seeing as SFS has so many high profile clients I imagine they'll stay pretty on the ball with technology changes though.

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.

Ah good to know

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

Ah yes now I remember. There is still the ability to pass an anonymous object through (SFSOBJECT) but personally I'd prefer to keep everything nice and data typed anyway :)

At 3/25/14 11:06 PM, GeoKureli wrote:

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*).

Well hang on now. I haven't used Unity, but I've looked into it a bit and it's my understanding that the workflow is quite rigid and sort of reminiscent of the old days of Flash where everything was attached to objects on the timeline etc. You know, you rely on the Unity IDE and have to adhere to whatever workflow they dictate. I might be wrong on this so please shout if I am, I'd be interested to know.

Second point I want to make is that the Unity web player penetration is nowhere near that of Flash, and WebGL even less. WebGL will surely suffer from the same problems as HTML5, in that you're at the complete mercy of many different browsers' implementations.

Other than the massive web (for desktop) penetration Flash has don't underestimate Air. You can build once in flash, and (if done carefully admittedly) push it to desktop web, Android, iOS and even Steam.

I don't think we can rule out Flash as dead yet, there are definitely still some uses for it.

At 3/26/14 06:27 PM, Rustygames wrote: I don't think we can rule out Flash as dead yet, there are definitely still some uses for it.

If Adobe wants it dead, it'll get there. Flash is fine, I think as3 is what's dying more quickly.

I spent ages trying to justify some reasons as to why Adobe might develop AS4 - something to do with opening the floor for other languages such as haXe to target the flash platform by writing it more "low level" or something. But in the end I kinda just realised - haXe is awesome, but the majority of the reasoning behind it is because it can target so many platforms. It'll be a real shame if the flash platform has to be crossed off that list.

I just think I have too many ties to Flash as a whole so I may be slightly biased. In my eyes, it's a really valuable asset and while it may be "dying", it isn't too late to save by any means.

At 3/26/14 06:27 PM, Rustygames wrote: Well hang on now. I haven't used Unity, but I've looked into it a bit and it's my understanding that the workflow is quite rigid and sort of reminiscent of the old days of Flash where everything was attached to objects on the timeline etc. You know, you rely on the Unity IDE and have to adhere to whatever workflow they dictate. I might be wrong on this so please shout if I am, I'd be interested to know.

Sorta, the shit part about the way old flash did it is that you had to do all the code in the flash IDE.

Unity lets you write separate C# scripts in C# files, and you create objects in the editor by mixing+matching components (including c# scripts), the fact that they're reusable is a giant step up over "old flash". For instance, I wrote a script that does a "ghost trail" effect (transparent copies of an object every so often that fade out quickly), if I want to apply this effect to different objects I can just attach that script to those objects.

There's a lot shitty about unity don't get me wrong, but at this point I do think it's better than flash for most stuff.

Second point I want to make is that the Unity web player penetration is nowhere near that of Flash, and WebGL even less. WebGL will surely suffer from the same problems as HTML5, in that you're at the complete mercy of many different browsers' implementations.

Flash penetration is going downhill though, Chrome neuters flash player more and more with every update, other browsers are starting to disable plugins by default too, tons of people use ipads or other tablets now for web browsing too.

Other than the massive web (for desktop) penetration Flash has don't underestimate Air. You can build once in flash, and (if done carefully admittedly) push it to desktop web, Android, iOS and even Steam.

I've published an AIR game on steamand I would never do it again, it's a MASSIVE headache, AIR was plagued with bugs (fullscreen on mac behaved differently than fullscreen on windows, had to fiddle with wmode setting to get it right, wmode setting had to be changed in the xml file for it manually and would reset every time I published, AIR doesn't let you switch to medium or low quality)

plus, the Linux version of AIR was outdated, and apparently has been abandoned by adobe. The linux version of this (which we had to make for Humble Bundle) was just a SWF embedded in an HTML page, with requirements "open in google chrome only", because the rest of the browsers on linux had outdated flash versions (we were using a right-click feature that was not in those versions).

Flash still has its uses don't get me wrong but uh... if you want to stay competitive you should start learning some better newer tools while you can cause I doubt flash is going to evolve much from here

Tyler is right about the neutering. In the newest version of Chrome, you can no longer see any outgoing HTTP requests that flash is making in the developers tools.

Also I've heard that Safari has switched, or is soon switching to a model whereby the user must "allow" the flash content to show, similar to how Java works on Chrome.

Any bets on the successor to Flash? The way you talk of the Unity workflow, do you think Unity player is more likely than something like HTML5, @Glaiel-Gamer?

At 3/27/14 04:51 PM, Sam wrote: Any bets on the successor to Flash? The way you talk of the Unity workflow, do you think Unity player is more likely than something like HTML5, @Glaiel-Gamer?

Flash as in the Flash Player, not the Flash IDE and its workflow.

At 3/27/14 04:52 PM, Sam wrote:

At 3/27/14 04:51 PM, Sam wrote: Any bets on the successor to Flash? Flash as in the Flash Player, not the Flash IDE and its workflow.

It will be HTML5. It's already HTML5 as canvas is supported at 82% (source: http://caniuse.com/canvas) it shows just how fast it has penetrated browsers. WebGL will certainly be the successor, as it allows near native speed with hardware acceleration. Even Unity announced a WebGL target a couple of weeks ago.

Unity player penetration causes too much friction to become a big player unless browser vendors start shipping it with the browsers.

That's my opinion from this vantage point anyways.

At 3/27/14 07:46 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Unity player penetration causes too much friction to become a big player unless browser vendors start shipping it with the browsers.

Unity 5 is supposed to target WebGL, I don't know if that means an HTML5 export, or they're going to continue with the lame unity web plugin that I don't even want to download. If it can create html 5 game, than unity will replace flash. And yes, HTML5 has replaced flash player. Current large scale flash applications are really only targeting the people who already play similar flash games on a browser.

At 3/27/14 08:44 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Unity 5 is supposed to target WebGL, I don't know if that means an HTML5 export, or they're going to continue with the lame unity web plugin that I don't even want to download.

quick google. No plugin required, flash is dead.

At 3/27/14 08:45 PM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 3/27/14 08:44 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Unity 5 is supposed to target WebGL, I don't know if that means an HTML5 export, or they're going to continue with the lame unity web plugin that I don't even want to download.

quick google. No plugin required, flash is dead.

I mean they're working on a plugin-less flash player as well...

At 3/27/14 04:51 PM, Sam wrote: Any bets on the successor to Flash? The way you talk of the Unity workflow, do you think Unity player is more likely than something like HTML5, @Glaiel-Gamer?

HTML5, though I've moved on to making steam+playstation games instead of web, it's a bit more reliable, and possible to actually earn a living off of, though a ton more work

At 3/27/14 10:02 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 3/27/14 08:45 PM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 3/27/14 08:44 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Unity 5 is supposed to target WebGL, I don't know if that means an HTML5 export, or they're going to continue with the lame unity web plugin that I don't even want to download.

quick google. No plugin required, flash is dead.

I mean they're working on a plugin-less flash player as well...

First off, I'm surprised; it really seems like Adobe was just getting ready to let Flash die, they announced this a long time ago and I never anything about it after words.

Second, why code in as3 when you can code in C#, the answer might become more apparent as I learn Unity, but I doubt I'll go back to as3.

@Glaiel-Gamer, cheers for the insight, some interesting points.

For anyone who is interested: HTML5 is horrible. I've been working with it for the past year or so and I can safely say it is an utter nightmare to work with!

I had to downgrade FD to 4.5.2 in order to compile. None of the in-between versions exist for download (4.5.2 is the previous master version, dev versions are continuously compiled). Haxe support is worse in this version, though.

The issue was that FD wasn't setting Xmx, java's max heap size, and my project exceeds the default. I've never been able to use the new versions of flex until now.

At 3/28/14 04:29 PM, MSGhero wrote: The issue was that FD wasn't setting Xmx, java's max heap size, and my project exceeds the default. I've never been able to use the new versions of flex until now.

I seem to have been able to make the upgrade with only a few errors regarding my choice of dark theme, which I reset back to after I fixed the problem.

So what does everyone's FD plugins folder look like?
http://prntscr.com/35612g
I'm surprised half of these still work.

At 3/29/14 11:01 AM, egg82 wrote:

So what does everyone's FD plugins folder look like?
http://prntscr.com/35612g

I'm forgetting a ton but I know I have:
CompactMax
Duplicate - similar to default Ctrl+d but changes x to y, width to height and vice versa
Navigation Bar
ASDoc - but i've never used it.

Num to color looks cool, and I think I'll get 'Highlight Selection' if I can toggle it easily. 'Previous Edit' would fit my workflow nicely.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=3rd_Party_Plugins_FD4

At 3/29/14 11:01 AM, egg82 wrote: So what does everyone's FD plugins folder look like?
http://prntscr.com/35612g
I'm surprised half of these still work.

Line counter is stupid because it counts all the lines in my Misc folder, even for files that I'm not even using. I have num2color or something similar, advanced telemetry enabler, and config::toggle which is by far the most useful plugin. It makes editing compiler constants easy.

Anyone have a stance on static public vs public static?

It's some nit-picky shit of course, but just curious.

At 3/30/14 05:42 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Anyone have a stance on static public vs public static?

I prefer public static because that's simply the way I organize my stuff. I tend not to have static members in the same class as public members, and I separate public and private with a blank line; so having "public" be the first thing I read is more useful to me.

At 3/30/14 05:42 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Anyone have a stance on static public vs public static?

It's some nit-picky shit of course, but just curious.

Public is more useful to me at first glance, and it looks odd when everything else has private/public as the first word except that one static thing. I do like override before public, though, because that's more important to me.

Depth sorting was the slowest thing in the as3 iso engine I used, O(n^2) with a massive frame drop when panning and fading. I have an iso engine in haxeflixel minus depth sorting, and I was thinking about using some kind of search tree to sort the depths. Remove everything from the screen, add them to the tree, remove them from the tree in order, and add them back to the screen in that order.

O(logn) adding and O(1) removing the last node = O(nlogn) for all nodes. In theory, it should work better than swapping depths.

i hope

At 3/30/14 09:38 PM, Innermike wrote: iOS Game

I'm not a huge fan of the font, but the UI as a whole looks really clean. Any chance we could get a video of the gameplay?

I've been reading a lot for the last few weeks, trying to get uh, not inspired necessarily but some perspective I guess.

This is something I've been trying to do as well. I've read a few books on recommendations from friends, but some of them just aren't my style I suppose. I've visited 4chan's /lit/ board and picked up their "starter kit" of books, and will probably start reading them during summer. A handful of them being: "A Clockwork Orange", "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" and "Fahrenheit 451".

Forum rename
Considering the posts about Flash dying and stuff, it reminded me of when Tom was thinking about renaming this forum to just "Game Design" or something similar. What are your (as regulars) views on this?

In other news, brushing up on my Python (and then hopefully transition into Python for server-side work) after I did some web work in PHP and came across more and more problems that @Diki has pointed out to me in the past. I'm sure there are people who can write PHP well, but to me, the language feels utterly broken and because of how large the programmer base is, the percentage of people who can actually write"good" PHP has become smaller and smaller. I also feel the same about Java, but I feel it's less broken and more "trying to do too much" and partially inconsistent from my own experience.

So this also leads me to ask: What are your favourite languages and why?

At 3/31/14 02:08 PM, Sam wrote: Forum rename
Considering the posts about Flash dying and stuff, it reminded me of when Tom was thinking about renaming this forum to just "Game Design" or something similar. What are your (as regulars) views on this?

I'm all for it. right now this forum is either questions about game design/mechanics, programming, and stupid flash questions about as2 or frame programming, that no one wants to answer. The general "how do i for loop" questions would flood the programming forum, as2 flash IDE programming will whittle down to zero any time now. So that would be awesome, and It'd be great to see a lot of non-language-specific game design tutorials pop up in here.

So this also leads me to ask: What are your favourite languages and why?

C++ is my favorite, I miss unmanaged languages. C# is a close second. I'd have to say as3 is next, but I think if I learned some more as3 would take a back seat easily.

Finally, I use static public. I generally have many constants in each class, as I avoid duplicate string/num literals. all of my constants are static. and static methods/var/const are always segregated from instance ones. so it's important for me to easily distinguish where statics end and instance things begin, especially if the static section is too small to justify the use of a region comment. Also FD's default is static public, and I've never found out how to change it (we use public static at work). In a nutshell, I always lead with the most interesting attribute of a declaration, which in my mind is whether it's static. Yeah it depends on the class's use, but It's nice to have consistency across the entire engine.</rant>

At 3/31/14 06:35 PM, Innermike wrote:

At 3/31/14 02:08 PM, Sam wrote: Forum rename

Game Development I think, Game Design seems too specific.

I prefer it being specific, we already have a programming forum, we have an art and audio forum already, all that's left is a game design forum. people would still ask questions about collision and stuff here, we would just have less intro to programming type threads.

On the other hand, if it was called Game Development, it would have extend to fields beyond, design and programming, like monetization, or game distribution... I guess I'm on the fence now.

Could anybody with haXeFlixel or flixel experience take a look at this thread? Me and my house mate are trying it out but this problem seems really strange. We have no flixel experience, so we might be doing something obviously wrong but the demos don't seem to do anything special. Cheers!

At 4/1/14 01:59 PM, Sam wrote: Could anybody with haXeFlixel or flixel experience take a look at this thread? Me and my house mate are trying it out but this problem seems really strange. We have no flixel experience, so we might be doing something obviously wrong but the demos don't seem to do anything special. Cheers!

Trace something in your init() in Main.hx to see when it's being called. If it's not called until you resize, then create a new openfl project and copy the template Main to yours.

I don't call super in the create method of FlxState, I just override it and add content.

At 4/1/14 02:38 PM, MSGhero wrote: I don't call super in the create method of FlxState, I just override it and add content.

isn't FlxState.create empty anyways?

So I just released this. My worst project to date, but strangely satisfying.

Be sure to blam it!

At 4/1/14 02:38 PM, MSGhero wrote: I don't call super in the create method of FlxState, I just override it and add content.

Turns out it was due to our zoom level being < 1 - also removed the super.create() in our classes extending FlxState.