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.

Andy Zupko has some pretty awesome experiments developed for papervision3d. They where recently featured on papervision3d’s developers blog.

First the fog filter:

The filter works by generating simple colored fill layers in the render pipeline. It adds these layers, at slightly increasing alpha, evenly from the minDepth to the maxDepth of your current view.

and the LOD experiment:

There was some talk of being able to do to handle LOD (Level of Detail) in Papervision. While this is a far cry from a true LOD filter, I whipped it together hoping it might help someone out. The idea is this: YOU pass in the models you want to swap between. This allows you to control the geometry you want to keep, and more importantly, it is really easy to use.

So, slowly we are seeing papervision3d become the mainstream platform for 3d rendering in flash. Hopefully we’ll see a flash10 version(of papervision3d) soon!

Anyways, soon I’ll have some of my own work to show regarding 3d engines. SO STAY TUNED!

Excelent news from Alternative Platform! They have won the Russian Flash Awards, and will be representing Russian at AdobeMax in Milan. Through I am not Russian, I quite happy to see our global Flash community grow. Can’t wait to see what they do next!

Here is a link to their post: LINK

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

I don’t know how I missed it, but a new demo from the Alternativa Platform team was posted a couple days ago. In case you missed it too, here is the link: http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/05/16/alternativa-3d-flash-player-10-astro/

It looks very nice! and the speed improvements show nicely!

So here is the promised meatier content!

I’ve been playing with 3d lately. Now there are plenty of 3d engine/api implementations out there like papervision3d, alternativaplatform and sandy3d just to name the recently more popular. However, these engines are truly full featured engines with real 3d positions, calculations and what not. This make them a bit slow and sluggish on older systems and there isn’t much you can do when it comes to fast game action play (event on more current system).  Now that flash10 is fast approaching with some nice texturing support, it will ease the job of these engines to make them faster. But for now, I thought about the good old days of Doom and Duke Nukem, and was wondering why no one has tried anything like it on flash.

So, I did some experiments, and have a short demo of what I’ve been working on. Now it’s not much competition to the other engines, but I thought it could actually be faster at this type of stuff, since it does no true 3D calculations other than screen projection. It currently has no textures, but that is coming soon. It is basically a portal engine, with convex sectors. I did it this way because it could be nice for level streaming. Any ways, check it out and let me know how it runs on your system (if any one is reading this).

demo