Flash 3D authoring with CopperCube

Yet another 3d authoring tool for web 3d,CopperCube. Being on beta, its quite good on features and performance is kind of ok. The most notable feature is the ease of use and the swf size. Very easy to use and one can be productive right away. The swf filesize is also small,for 6 boxes with textures,lighting and a first person camera it came to 132 kb. The thing which hurt me is the performance on ie. My browser continuously crashed with one first person camera. Being on beta, I think these issues are to be there. Hopefully a stable compilation will come on the release version. Apart from that, actionscript is supported in it and the tutorial is cool to get started. For a longtime I was searching for a tool like this. The camera can be made to collide with the objects in scene,which is a very nice way to control without any code. Overall a must try for flash 3d game developers.

Get the out put files here.

Happy Flashing

Documentation Tool, NaturalDocs

Designing a software and developing it, is might be one part of the game.But I believe without a proper documentation of a software, the product itself decays in time. I am very dissapointed to see people calling themselves developers (ohh no, very good, experienced developers) do not even know and do not want to know the necessity of documentation. One generally finds the words “fix it man.forget that comment,fix the code.who cares why?” from the know all, Mr Fixit and efficient guy in a typical flash development environment. Obviously we are here to do stuff but then imagine if the same code you are passing on to some guy would come to you without documentation, what would be your reaction to the situation.The general reaction of the typical Mr Fixit is “This is not my code. I am trying to understand some body’s F*$#ing code. This is not the way one should right the code”.
Give me a break, documentation is the key to make a product come out alive over and again with lot ease and good maintaince. For flash projects I always thought AsDoc holds a good palce. It does actually if you are a Flex developer. But what happens if your whole project is Flash only!! AsDoc can not understand “fl” package.Ohh no!Ohh yes. It does not understand the package at all.Then there are work arrounds.Why?! If Flash is a platform and eveything is a tool to produce the SWF, the Flash only projects should get equal advantage as Flex.
Well,then there are some pretty tools who can do the thing sweetly and nicely. NaturalDocs is an opensource project, which does the thing.It supports a lot of languages and produces documentation clean and sweet. It has option even to create a frame based documentation or a no-frame only HTML based documentation. It supports the standard JavaDoc type comments as well as natural english language type comments too. Over all I am happy and satisfied with NaturalDocs as I became productive in it within 15 minutes after download. I must tool for any kind of development documentation. Cheers to NaturalDocs.

Adobe CS4 Event,Mumbai

Yesterday I had been to Adobe CS4 event at Mumbai.It was exciting and pleasure to be in the event. Met a few old pals and got to see new features coming in, in Adobe products. Good to see that Adobe is promoting OpenScreen project even in sales talks. Another interesting thing was Flash Catalyst. Though I am following up with Thermo for a long time,but seeing it in person is a different experience. Gumbo is another cool stuff shown in the presentation along with FlexBuilder 4 (though mentioned that the FlexBuilder 4 IDE is far from the actual release version,but I never expected to see “Fx” componenets). Then it was all Flash CS4 new features tour and Flash player 10 feature list. Over all it was an interesting place to be.

As far as the media server is concerned the most exciting feature came in with Flash Media Server 3.5 (FMS3.5) is dynamic streaming. Dynamic Streaming does the quality decission on the run time, it actually looks for the connection speed of users’ machine and stream the higher,medium or lower quality media ones respectively.

Monster Debugger : An Opensource debugger for SWFs :)

For a long time I was searching for a debugger for my Flash applications. It was a pain to customise my own debugger for every project. Xray is a cool one, but some how my expectations were more from a debugger as far as ease of use and features are concerned. The ease of use and the functionality both are awesome in case of the new Open Source Debugger from DesignStudio De Monsters.This is called “Monster Debugger” and the name says it all. Its an AIR application and the client code is embed inside it. Once downloaded and installed, one can track any SWFs from inside Flash IDE or standalone too. I fell in love with it at the first look itself.Cheers to DesignStudio De Monsters. Keep up the good work guys.

Happy Flashing.

Getting into RED5

Hi, Happy new year to all. Hope this brings with it success, friendship, faith and hope to everybody’s life.
To start with lets start with Red5. For past some weeks I was working on Red5, yeah its just some 2 -3 weeks only. All these time I was only trying to get my first application going and running Flash remoting in it. It took me some time but its worth.

First of all to go with Red5 it is mandatory to have Flash and JAVA handy. Belive me, its the same as AS3 development in an IDE such as Eclipse. There are syntax changes but over all its the same kind of stuff. So it is fun developing in JAVA as well as in AS3. RED5 supports JAVA SPRING framework for applications out of the box. Being said that, Spring makes its easy for a beginniner developer to get going in JAVA as all one need to write is a POJO(Plain Old Java Object) and configure one XML file.Cool, so lets get started. Below are the source files, I hope it helps somebody out there.

Source Files One

Source Files Two

Flex Development on Visual Studio

Well, this is came a little late but I think anticipated. Though not from Microsoft itself, but seems developers on Visual studio are also feeling it. After all the noise regarding the new front ends from all around;  AJAX, SilverLight, JAVAFX etc, SWF seems to be on top. Here are two more IDEs for SWF development and that to on Flex Framework and on top of Visual Studio. Amethyst and Tofino.

Amethyst comes in 2 flavors Personal and Professional. Personal Edition is Free as well. According to its makers, SapphireSteel Software, The personal edition will be completely free and may optionally be installed into the free Visual Studio ‘shell’ edition. Amethyst Personal (beta) will be available from Amethyst site in the 2nd week of December 2008. Amethyst Professional will be released in beta in the first quarter of 2009 and the final version is expected to ship in the 2nd quarter.

Tofino is from the company named Ensemble . Its ready to be downloaded from their site and as per the company, Ensemble Tofino is available for free.

Happy Flashing

AIR Performance Issue

This came to me as a surprise while developing a current application in Adobe AIR. Let me give you some back ground of the project. This is basically a game management system along with playing of the games. All the games are made in Flash itself. I must admit that the games are not coded according to any standards. These games are just working fine as per the requirements doc of the client.There is no optimisation any where in the game. All the graphics are having groups, alphas, masks and what not effects as well. Plenty of alpha tweens, motion tweens. On top of this, we have codes, which are just at most 2 classes. One is a document class and another class is attached to a movieclip on library(whereever is necessary according to the developer!!). Ok, at this point I was being asked to make a UI for all the games to show up and playable too on the same interface. I had given a choice and I insisted on AIR as of obvious reasons, that we could give a better and personal experience for the user.I was confident as I worked with AIR apps previously(all data driven applications). Well, everybody seemed happy upon the AIR thing as we were working on transparent backgrounds, irregular user Intefaces, fullscreen SWFs with text input facility etc. I never knew I was calling trouble to myself. Once I put everything together and tried to run the games inside the AIR application, it failed. Yeah, it failed. I tried the most better coded game out of all the games in another machine from the same AIR application.The game ran fine. I got some optimism. I went ahead and tested the same game from other machines through the AIR application.But it failed.
Overall I found AIR is still not better suited for SWfs which has got a lot of graphics, sound, animation, alphas, masks and all those stuffs designers play arround regularly. Agin if there are a lot of addchild, removeChild as well, AIR applications does not respond as expected. AIR applications take up a lot of memory even for small SWFs made in Flash IDE.THe same SWF takes 30% CPU running on FLash PLayer, but Once I call the same swf from AIR, it suddenly takes upto 70% CPU.
Hope it helps somebody out there.

Horizontal Scrollbar in TileList

Well, its a long silence. I am currently developing an AIR application which will contain games. While I was trying to customise the TileList, to my surprise, it behave a little buggy. I was trying to make a horizontal scrollbar appear in the component as thelist is vast. By default Flex have me a vertical scrollbar.My first reaction was, ok.May be the default settings do that.But the only workable HOraizontal Scrollbar came in after I set  direction=”vertical”. After a googling a bit I found this( by Arno Manders), which confirmed me that this is the way to go. Thought I would share it immediately as somebody out there may be trying the same as me.

My final code looks as this

<mx:TileList id=”gamesList”
itemRenderer=”Comp_Thumbnail”
itemClick=”{this.onGameClick(event);}”
width=”658″ height=”220″ verticalCenter=”0″ horizontalCenter=”0″
direction=”vertical”
horizontalScrollPolicy=”on”/>

Happy Flashing

Custom Skins for Flex in Flash

I am currently developing an AIR application which will be high on graphics and will call games to play from inside it. After a lot of thought I made a decission to go about Flex framework for developing this and with FlexBuilder IDE. So the frist thing came to me is how custom graphics fit into the flex applications. All my previsous Flex development were having the default components with some minor modification as to put an icon in a button or stuffs like that. But currently it has to be a very custom components. Well, each button should have a different look and feel. I know this is quite easy with Flash movieclips, but in flex!! The process is made easy with “FlexComponentKit for FlashCS3″ and “Flex Skin Design Extension for Flash”. The process is quite straight forward as one has to create a flash button compoent using a default template from “Flex Skin Design Extension for Flash” and publish the SWC. Just import the SWC in FlexBuilder as “Art Work” and thats it. For a global level of change in all the buttons no other step is required. Well, if each button is having different look(as in mycase),one has to make differnt SWCs from Flash.Import as artwork to Flex. Now create a Custom component with the same name as the Flash symbol name. And use that component instead of the standard component.
The article at Seando-flex is a nice read and covers everything one needs for custom component creation in Flash for Flex.

This is another nice read .

Happy Flashing

Joined a new Job

I have joined waterford(http://www.waterford.org/) as a flash programmer. It was a good first day. While the office is small here in India, compared to other companies, the work environment is looking good. The most important thing for me is the travel time, it has been reduced tremendously. Now the workplace is at a walkable distance. Uff traffics are gone for the timebeing. The flash development team is small enough but doing quality stuff. The current project is games for kids(from KG to 2). So there are a lot of challenges. I mean it. Its on the technical side as well as UI side and designing graphics side too. I have to go through a lot of docs, answer a lot of queries. We will be working on a software where kids learn as well as play and the school/guardians control the lessons/children. There will be sequencing and multi-player games too. These are new to me as I never worked on multiplayer applications. So feeling great to be working on new technologies and on the decision making side.
The first set of questions thrown to me currently is as follows, though several of them seem obvious, I need proper explanation and reference to convince my manager and client. So, if anybody has got any feedback or suggestion, please let me know.

1. Whether to Flash-Remoting or XMLSockets (in terms of speed and multiuser and speed)
2. If remoting, which would be the serverside technology,  JAVA or PHP ? (Which one is faster?)
3. How RED5 solves our purpose?(my suggestion was to use RED5, so looking forward to resons)
4. At initial screen(registration/login), whether a simple dynamic page or a flash page (speed ?, my suggestion is flash)
5. wheter to use AIR or simple serverside pages on browser in the initial screens (my suggestion is AIR)
6. MySql or PostGRE Sql ? (i suggest : mysql but everybody else is at POSTGREs)

The list goes on. But I think these were the most crucial ones.Currently I am reading things to get a doc ready for the purpose.