After a lot of research it turns out that there seems to be no way in an AIR app to use the GPU mode that is otherwise supported by Flash embedded in HTML via wmodes parameter. In fact the docs state it’s not even supported by AIR …

… Flash Player 10 introduces two window modes, direct and GPU compositing, which you can enable through the publish settings in the Flash authoring tool. These modes are not supported in AIR …

While this is a definitive must for a hopefully soon appearing update there’s another issue with fullscreen modes … AIR doesn’t really feature any decent solution for fullscreen! You can have your app to be either in fullscreen OR in windowed mode but trying to be able to switch between both looks very ugly because the system chrome isn’t being disabled automatically when switching to fullscreen which results in that the window size will simply get maximized. So creating applications where you could let the user switch between fullscreen and windowed mode seems to be impossible at the moment with AIR 1.5.

I can understand that the Flash player on the web needs it’s security restrictions in this regard but AIR should definitely not be touched by this! I hope Adobe will improve this for a future update, AIR is a great platform for (complex) game development but these two issues are serious limitations to that!

“…and a component system which lets you easily package game functionality into reusable modules. The component system draws on nearly a decade of game development history…”

This looks very promising indeed and the component structure makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been working on the hexagonLib on and off but time is sparse currently and so it seems I would never get it into a decent release state. I Might as well see how the pb engine works out for me. Let’s see how this engine fits for my current role-playing game project!

So today I finally figured out how to install the plug-ins that I really need and nothing else (well … almost nothing else). The following guide describes how you can set up your own custom Eclipse tailored for Flash/Flex development which features FDT plus Subclipse, a HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML Editor and then some. The CSS Editor becomes especially useful for Flex Stylesheets.

>> Continue reading "Setting up Eclipse for Flash Developers"

Besides that Alcon is now code-signed there is exactly one new feature in v3.1 which I called Key Tracer. You can toggle Key Tracing Mode from the Log menu. If you enable it you are able to press any keys and their key code (and if available character code) will be listed in Alcon’s output window which is a useful feature if you want to know the codes for some specific keys quickly.

More features where planned (and already started) like a Search function, Log Level Filtering and even a Calculator but these haven’t made it finished yet into v3 so most of them will come with version 4, which is – yet again – a complete re-write (I do loathe my source code that is over one year old ).

The newest version can as always be found here.

That’s right, I cannot buy the dev membership now because Apple’s site is obviously broken and thinks I’ve already bought the membership. An advice: DON’T leave the address fill-out page or empty your shopping cart! You will not have a chance later to come back and reach the page that puts the product into your cart.

But enough rant for today! I think I go and write some ActionScript … which is much more fun … and it’s FREE!

It seems that many newcomers to ActionScript still don’t understand the use of ‘this’ and that it’s only really necessary in rare cases, for example if a method parameter has the same name like it’s relative class property or in a few scope-related situations. It’s also good to have ‘this’ at hand if a dynamic property of a class needs to be accessed (this["foo"]) but other than that please do all a favor and throw out those unnecessary ‘this’! Ban it, lock it in your basement and don’t let it out unless there’s really a need for it!

override public function toString():String {
	return "[ClassName]";
}

… Sometimes adding properties to the returned String that give back information about the class, e.g.

override public function toString():String {
	return "[ImageClass, size=" + _size + "]";
}

But writing them rigid like that is a disadvantage when you decide later to refactor class names. Admittedly it’s also not a very elegant way so I got the idea to take the class name that is returned by getQualifiedClassName(). The only problem is that getQualifiedClassName not only provides the type name but also the whole package String of the class. Regular Expressions to the rescue! After twiddling around with them for a while (I’m by no means a RegExp expert) I got my toString method into the shape that I desired:

override public function toString():String {
	return "[" + getQualifiedClassName(this).match("[^:]*$")[0] + ", size=" + _size + "]";
}

This way it matches the String returned by getQualifiedClassName with the Regular Expression [^:]*$ which checks from the right end for an arbitrary text up to the first occurring colon, but without including the colon. Taking the first element of the Array returned by match() and you got what you need!

A nice way of using this is when writing abstract classes that contain the toString method and any subclass can use that toString method without the need to override it … that is of course unless you want ot add other output information.

Chrome installs right onto your system from the website and then takes over (or if you are cynical: steals) all the bookmarks, history, passwords etc. from Firefox (to make your life easier). It then opens with a slick and slender window that lacks all the tackiness of a plugin-convoluted Firefox. When opening a new tab it shows a neat history list with thumbnails of your most recent visited websites. Chrome starts up as fast as a finger snap! Maybe even faster! Can it get any better?

>> Continue reading "Aw Snap! This site is not meant for you!"

I recommend to check out the Alcon Page for more details and of course the download link. Enjoy your debugging!

Then there’s the Options dialog with Trace options opened where you will be able to set font, colors etc. On the File Loggers Options you will be able to optionally enable up to two File Loggers that can be used for example to log the flashlog.txt to see output made by ActionScript’s own trace method.
There’s of course the new Object Inspector and a new Help panel for Quickstart Help and API Docs. Alcon 3 is being written 99% in ActionScript 3 using FDT (the 1% left being the Main.mxml that is necessary to compile a Flex application). It’s only a matter of a few days now until release, some bug fixing, finishing touches and a few more documentation to write and it will be out so please endure!

Some of the new features besides the already existing Trace Command and File Loggers are a Memory Consumption and Frames-Per-Second Monitor, a completely new and improved Object Inspector that is finally useful for Debugging, an Options dialog to comfortably configure Alcon, proper AS2 support and a couple of other minorities here and there.

The progress moves on quick enough that I dare to say that the release date is only a few weeks away from now so sit tight, it’ll be there in a heartbeat.

In case you’re wondering what happened on this site besides that it has been visually overhauled … two of my older blogs have now been merged with Hidden Resource. One, Dataleak, was my very first blog that I used for mainly writing about computer games, especially old ones. However Dataleak turned more and more into a abandoned net corpse and because there were quite some articles on it which I found have nostalgic value I decided to take them over to HDRS. Then there was Vista Tweaking, a blog I’ve started to post tweaks for Windows Vista. The few postings from that site have been consolidated into HDRS as well. I also had the idea on the back burner about starting an audio blog since audio production is one of my many interests. But a man has only so much time and maintaining three or four blogs is clearly a chore. Just think about all the updates, handling Spam etc.

>> Continue reading "Dude, where is my blog?"

In this tutorial I will explain how to create a relatively realistic looking galaxy with Photoshop. I was searching the web up- and downwards to find any tutorials that could tell me how to get a similar fantastic result. There are like 100.000 planet tutorials out there and the few tutorials which were about creating a galaxy where either very basic or the result looked like everything but a realistic galaxy. The galaxy I wanted should have looked massive and intricate … just like the real ones but with a slightly more artistic touch. I’ve needed a galaxy that I could use as a star map for a space-themed roleplaying game design and the image you see above is a part of the result. Let’s go try to do such one …

>> Continue reading "Creating a Galaxy in Photoshop"

Kore 2 from Native Instruments is probably every sound organizer’s wet dream with sugar on top. Not only  can it control a multitude of Softsynths but it’s database makes it easy to organize sounds and find them quickly when needed. I’ve purchased this nice tool last December and what’s better than telling a few details on how I put it’s features to good use?!

>> Continue reading "Using Kore 2 more efficiently with User Tags"

A while back I’ve created a custom skin for Ableton Live with this handy freeware skin editor. The editor dates back to Live 6 but it seems that skins made with it work just fine in Live 7. Live’s approach to UI design is very minimalistic which I think is a step into the right direction but the default color palettes are not everyone’s taste. I’ve been using this skin since a couple of months and it works nicely so here is Dark2008, a dark – but readable – theme for Ableton Live 6 and 7.

>> Continue reading "Facelift for Ableton Live"

In game development randomness is often necessary for certain tasks, be it the random distribution of graphic tiles, a random factor in NPC AI or random stats in a roleplaying game. Especially for the latter purpose the static Dice class provides a set of methods to roll dice as it is common in a Role-playing game, to be exact four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, twenty-sided and percentile dice.

>> Continue reading "ActionScript3 Dice Class"