Felipe Orellana - Code Mania

While searching for flash game competitions I stumbled on NONOBA a new website offering a Multiplater API written in .NET, and they are offering $15,000 to the most popular game built around their API by November, 2008.  What’s interesting about their API is that they are offering to host these multiplayer games at no cost to the developer. In a way they are trying to be come another KONGREGATE but with their multiplayer API.

While looking at their developer forum all last week, it seems to me that they are quickly aquiring interest from the flash game development community.  Considering that they are tring to provide most(if not all) the tools needed to build multiplayer games, their forum support is quite nice. Getting answers from the founders themselves as the API developers, you can pick their brains on what every you want about the APIs.

Though I have talked about the Multiplayer API written in .NET, they also have a high score & ranking API, a Data API, Achievements API, a distribution system, and statistics and tracking available.

Here are some examples of the multiplayer api in action:

While I have no affiliations to them, I am quite excited to try out their APIs and see how they drive this new medium.

Its been a little while since the last post, but I have some code I have been wanting to share. A little while ago I had written a business card template editor with client/admin areas for a shopping cart solution I had been working on.

The editor needed to create JPG images on the fly and send the full resolution images back to the server. It also picked up the template descriptions from a mysql database through PHP and passed it to the AS3 App all through AMFPHP.

It became clear to me, that it was quite anoying having to put my method calls on a string every time I need some data, and go through they whole process of creating a listener for the call. So I wrote two classes to help me out roll out the code faster. The code allows calls to an AMFPHP gateway just as if it was part of the AS3 code with namespaces and methods. So calls can now be written in one or two lines of code like this:

— AS3 CODE: –
[cc lang="actionscript" tab_size="2" lines="40"]
import com.orellana.speed.remote.Remoting;
import com.orellana.speed.remote.Callback;
var remote:Remoting = new Remoting(’http://www.yourdomain.com/AMFPHP_gateway.php’);
remote.myservicefolder.myservice(args…).callback(__myCallbackFunc, __myErrorEventFunc);
[/cc]

So, service folders become namespaces, the php classes become as3 class, and the php function behaves just like a function in as3. The only difference is the callback object returned by that method which is used handle returned values and optionally error events.

More information about AMFPHP can be found here: http://osflash.org/projects/amfphp
I also I just found this Post on code czar about remote calls and type safety, but I’m not sure if its the same thing.

Here are the classes:
Remoting.as
CallBack.as