as seen on d-visions.com

As I said in the previous post moving on. Unfortunately heading in the wrong direction. I can no longer dictate what I want to do in this industry. Instead I am TOLD, sometimes by clients who don’t know anything BUT buzzwords. I thought I was the expert?

Anywho, here’s a game I did in HTML5 using EaselJS. Twas pretty simple and painless using that library.

Next up WebGL. You are probably wondering why not use Unity? See above. Can’t sell Unity either. I had a job where they used Unity and was stuck doing Flash.

Lather, rinse, repeat,
(-o|o-)

Well I finally bit the bullet and bought an iphone developers license. I am fairly anti-Apple and the requirement to have such a thing just for development is a little appalling to me. But I figured hell ’tis the way of the industry and either adapt or get left behind. Now I would love to develop Android apps, but the lack of hardware makes its irrelevant for myself currently.

So, I am here today to document my hell to begin iphone apps made with Flash on PC. Now let me start with some animosity towards Adobe here. I was thoroughly unimpressed by CS5′s “features” as it was nothing more than a maintenance build with its biggest boasted about feature being iphone packaging. I won’t go into the known debacle, that was comical from both sides, but my initial concern remained which was a lack of updating Flash in CS5. They bet the bank on iphone packaging, days before its release Apple killed that with legalese and it was still another 6 weeks until CS5 was released!? WTF? I think Apple did Adobe a favor by making such a deal out of it. I can’t believe with the current incarnation of the tool, which has been updated since Apple coyly changed their legal stance to allow tools like Flash to make Apps, was ready to make such an impact.

Being a PC I decided to take the Windows only approach to development. HUGE mistake! While I believe it is possible to get everything done and ready on PC, if you really want to do this, just save yourself the hassle and find a Mac! I went thru the trouble of getting BirdKey & adding OpenSSL to my system to do all this, but there are caveats. None of which I found entire solutions to by going this route. I went thru a bunch of iBrent tuts only to come up short every time. I finally said to hell with this and decided to jump on my wifes Mac. Well here’s the main lesson. No matter how you go about doing this whole thing chose one method or another, don’t try to mix & match. Lost about half day or so to that mess. I figured I had made a CSR with BirdKey, had a Dev cert on Apple’s dev site and all I needed was to convert it to a P12 on a Mac and life would be good. NOPE! Again, let me chastise Adobe here: WHY DO I NEED TO CONVERT THIS THING!? WHY CAN’T I USE WHAT APPLE MADE/GAVE ME!? Whatever, STFU! I finally went back to square one . I also want to note that Adobe’s documentation even on the Mac side of this whole thing sucks, as per usual. It wasn’t until I followed this guys step by step instructions that I achieved success. Notice how he recommends using a Mac too.

Finally, I am up & running and can begin making apps. Let me say the biggest thing here is once you do this initial Dev cert & P12 cert you really shouldn’t need to do that again until they expire. This was like 90% of my work just to start dev! :/ Provisioning profiles are much simpler. In the end my Windows/PC issues with BirdKey stemmed from OpenSSL issues. I skipped the whole “Vista” revolution and the need to do everything as an admin on Win7 is a hassle. I mean isn’t my user an admin? Shouldn’t I already have all these privileges? Anywho can’t digress on M$!

Let me take another moment and rip into the oh so helpful comments on a lot of iBrent’s sites & Adobe’s forums. If you know the info or where to find it just post the mofo! No need for snarky comments or the classic search this “phrase”. By all means say whatever you want, just be more helpful when you know something!

iPwnd,
(-o|o-)

I entered a contest over at MuseGames, my entry is En Fuego! The goal was to construct a flamethrower for the Unity community to use. Feel free to grab my files and use them in your own work, learn from or expand upon. All of the entries provided me with inspiration to step it up as each new one came in. Congrats to all the participants, but I hope to win!

As you can tell from the contest I have moved on to Unity. I purchased a license and have been using it extensively over the past 6 months. It’s an amazing piece of software and should provide me with work for years to come. I know it’s already pushed Adobe to add a “next-generation 3D API” to Flash, but I have my doubts.  Sorry been burned once before, what’s my name?

On fire,
(-o|o-)

It appears that in newer browsers the KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN is being perpetually dispatched when a key is being held down. Older browsers behavior would only execute once, when it was initially pressed. When I ran into this issue I couldn’t find any information about it, but is partly why Keith is eating crow ;) However in my simple implementation it was easy enough to removeEventListener on KEY_DOWN and addEventListener on KEY_UP. Now I am not sure who to blame here on this one, new browser standards or Adobe? I will avoid the blame Adobe first attitude here, as the player versions were the same just in different browser generations.

Holding down,
(-o|o-)

Dear Adobe,

WTF does this DisplayObject property actually do? And why does it only seem to work when done with code and not the check mark in the IDE? Here’s what I think it should be doing it should be taking a snapshot of that DisplayObject and all its nested children and displaying it as a bitmap, much like Director’s image property. Now when should that snapshot change? I’d assume it’d change only when anything in it actually changed. However I don’t find this to be the case. A perfect example is a TextField nested in a MovieClip. I set cacheAsBitmap to true, both in the IDE & code to both the TextField & MovieClip, animate it and get all those known issues of animating TextFields on subpixels. This shouldn’t be the case if it were a bitmap and if you zoom in (rt-click) on the object you can see the text is still vector and not raster. So as per usual the workaround here is to create a bitmapData and take your own snapshot of the DisplayObject, but isn’t this exactly what cacheAsBitmap is supposed to do? The only success I ever had with this property is for creating alpha masks, but again this MUST be done in code cause it doesn’t work if you do it in the IDE. Flash is akin to What You See Might Not Be What You Get or better yet don’t believe your eyes, or mind, when it comes to Flash.

Flashing you,
(-o|o-)