January 15, 2012  

Union Platform : a multiuser environment with actionscript

While there are alternatives to actionscript for doing a multi-user application, Colin Mook and Derek Clayton had teamed up (to form User1.net) to do Union Platform. The platform itself provides alternative languages to develop application with, the most notable feature is one can create multi-user applications with actionscript only. Thats a lot of good news on itself. Well, even a sample server environment is free for 1000 users at one time! Huge! Its called “tryuion.com” and provides a testing ground to test your skills for a multiuser application.
The even bigger news is Union Platform is now on cloud in collaboration with Influxis and its at unioncloud.io. Union Cloud is free till its in Beta, so the time is now to build a multi user application with Union Cloud , the feature list looks awesome.
Happy Flashing

November 13, 2011  

The Silver lining

Whoa! What am I listening! Can not believe, its true! All this leads to what? Just because someone somewhere said we are dropping down support for Flash in Mobile or other devices !! Or the other one, Flex SDK is going to be maintained by another foundation(spoon project)? Or the HTML framework (Phonegap) is going to live somewhere else !?

Its a long post, but still I could not write everything.
Read More…

November 8, 2011  

Geting started with Starling, running Flash in GPU.

With Flash player 11 comes Stage3D, which enables us to run Flash content in GPU. While its all good, coding for a simple task looks as if something real big.

Fortunately Starling-framework makes the life easier. Its a framework on top of Stage3D(codenamed Molehill). The best part of it is one can just use it as if using flash’s own API. It has movieclip, sprite, events and displaylist. While I was trying my first handson this framework, found some must to do things, which may save someone’s time.

Minimum requirement,

To run
1. First of all, it needs Flash Player 11.
2. It must be run inside a browser. Yeah, SWF must be embedded inside a HTML page.
3. Inside the embed code, “mode” must be set to “direct”. 

<param name="wmode" value="direct">

4. Embeding the swf with SWFObjectdoes not work for me. So used the minimum default Object-embed method. To author 1. Need Flash Player 11 SDK 2. Overlap it on Flex SDK 4.5.1 , so that you got the compiler ready. 3. Compile with extra compiler argument as ” -swf-version=13 “.

The basic HTML boilerplate code to embed look as

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
        <title>HelloStarling</title>
        <meta name="google" value="notranslate">
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="600" height="600" id="movie_name" align="middle">
    <param name="movie" value="Startup.swf"/>
    <param name="wmode" value="direct">
    <!--[if !IE]>-->
    <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="Startup.swf" width="600" height="600">
        <param name="wmode" value="direct">
    </object>
    <!--<![endif]-->
</object>
   </body>
</html>

 

 

Happy Flashing.

July 14, 2011  

Flashplayer Throttle : Solving a problem or creating one !

This might be a little late, but worth keeping an eye on. As we know since Flashplayer 10.1, the player is throttled in situations. What does that mean is the FlashPlayer will run the EnterFrame and Timer based events at much lower rates, when the player is not visible. Much lower means, as low as 2 FPS (2 frames per second) and AS2 Intervals as well as AS3 timers will low down to 2 events per second!!

This throttling is best for mobile and other devices which can run FlashPlayer now. Throttling means saving of energy and increasing battery life of the device. So it seems its the best thing happened to Flashplayer, while we are making content for the devices.

The problem arises when we create stuffs for desktops or laptops, where FlashPlayer was running since a long time, conventionally. And we still think we can go on developing our applications and games with the same mind set as we used to do till now. While developing games, the most used event is ENTER_FRAME and when throttling happens, all of the logic of the application/game goes wrong!! While the logic of the game still holds good if the player is active all the time but once the player is invisible, the player starts to throttle and frame-rates and timer events start to fall. This will happen even our game is running in a browser tab and we are in another tab. This can happen if we scroll down a page and the game is on the top portion of the page! The tricky part is different browsers behave differently and there is no clear idea about when the player starts throttling. So there is no fix solution for the same too.

Read More…

May 26, 2011  

FlashDevelop goes beyond Windows only

This is good to see, finally the powerful opensource IDE for actionscript, haxe and php is targeting cross platform. With its newer community release version, apart from the major upgrade to the coding environment, the whole IDE is moving to Linux and Mac OSx. These ports are bridge based, but the intentions are clear. So exciting to see the whole of the IDE running in other platforms.

Well, the core feature of the IDE is updated to a significant level. The development and publish settings for AIR is now having a visual dialogue box. There is a project template for AIR for Android. These are some of the things apart from the whole list of features listed here.

Happy Flashing

May 11, 2011  

Exciting news from google, must watch it to believe.

March 17, 2011  

My second iphone game is now on appstore

This is to add up my excitement that my second opensource game is approved by apple and now its in appstore.

The game is CatchthemAll v1

Its kind of kid’s education and entertainment game. Multitouch is the core of the game play here.

More about the game is here.

Hope you enjoy it as I enjoyed making it.

February 22, 2011  

My first iphone game is in appstore

This is very exciting for me to see my first opensource iphone game, MathIsFun2,  is now in appstore. Its a free app and would love to get any and all kind of feedback.

Well, it took me more than the time I expected it should for some unavoidable reasons, but finally its up.

More about the game is available here.

The link to appstore is this.

Thanks a lot to all of you, who helped me with developing, testing and pushing it to the Appstore, you all rock.

February 14, 2011  

Steps for pushing an app to iPhone appstore

1. First of all there are some one time certificates install. These certificates are named as development certificate and distribution certificate. Use iOS provisioning portal, go to certificates and then Generate development certificate. The same process is for creating a distribution certificate. This will need to use “keychain” app, which is stored in utilities inside application folder. Once created the certificates through keychain, one need to upload it through provisioning portal. In provisioning portal the development and distribution tab will have options to upload them to the portal. Once uploaded, the tabs will process and provide options to download the development and deployment certificates.

2. Open these 2 (developer and distribution) certificates through key-chain. Now inside keychain application these two keys should be visible.

3. Create provisioning profile. This is also possible through developer.apple.com portal. The confusion is, the first certificates and installing to keychain application install will happen only once. But the provisioning profiles will keep on adding to the profiles, as each profile may be targeted to one version of one application. To add to the confusion there are 2 types of provisioning profiles available. One is development and one is distribution. Inside distribution, we have option of adhoc and appstore. So to push your app to appstore, one must use the appstore option while creating the profile. If you are intended to test the app in other iOS devices, then create the certificate using ad-hoc as the selected option. This will allow to install the application into other devices. Well, all these were happening in the distribution tab. Now if we talk about the development tab, the new profile creation will help one test and debug the application in a connected device to a mac. So all in all there are 3 kinds of profiles available for 3 different uses.

4. Next, one has to download the profile and install in XCode.

5. Once installed you can see all the profiles, developer profiles and provisioning profiles in the “Organiser” application. This will give you details regarding the profile activation and expiration dates too.

Thats it, bundle your application and push it to the store / other devices / connected device as per the application provision profile you use / intend.

Appart from all these certificate creation, you need to follow some online instructions to do some stuffs as get a png/jpg file of certain size, name these images and put them on server.

Thats the bare minimum about the appstore and sending your app to it.

Hope that helps someone out there.

December 2, 2010  

My first experience of making opensource game and iPhone appstore

It all started, when I dove into the iphone development, almost a year back. As of my curious self, I started to dove into it more and more. It is all fun. Then came the time to see the approval process, it was the scary part of the whole development cycle for me. The steps were quite defined, but for a novice like me, it was just too intimidating. The motivation came, when one of my friends’ game, which was made in FlashIDE, got approved in 10 days.

I set myself up for some real iphone game development and finished up 2 opensource games, MathIsFun2 and CatchThemAll . Must say making opensource games is fun, exciting and gives one a lot of satisfaction. Even one fail to make an impression of idea or implementation, its never too late, and the community always helps you and pushes you forward. Then there is responsibility upon the self to finish things up with the same amount of enthusiasm as when you started the project. A lot of times it will feel to just leave it, but then it teaches one to be focused, motivated and keep on going till the end. Not an easy task but once put into practice, there is no more satisfaction than giving back to community.

A little about the games. MathIsFun, is a game where the game play takes the device orientation into account. Rotating the device, gives the player to play a different mode or state of the game. There are 4 types of questions ( addition, subtraction, multiplication and division ) Each side of the device is a different mode. And the user has to choose from the three options displayed on screen. the second game is about multi-touch. There are different colours on the screen and one has to choose, which colour is displayed for the maximum time currently on the screen. Since there are only five colours to choose from, one can choose with a single touch for one type of colour, a two finger touch for another and a three finger touch for another and it goes till five finger touch. While I myself is quite excited about the games, the community itself is also helping me out in the process.

The approval process has got its own story. I am not having an appstore license yet. One of my friends’ helped me by taking the first game (MathIsFun2) and pushing it to the appstore. Now, after sending it for more than 25 days (almost a month) and waiting till date, the game is in the cue !! Thats such a long time ! I am not sure what and how to fix, if there are errors in my code or something else.  Anyway, this is just to make things in perspective for others, who might be preparing their apps for the store.

Hope that helps someone and wishing you all the best for your application approval on Apple’s Appstore.

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