Today I was looking into tools for stand-alone Flash applications. I'm dumping the notes here... will clean them up later with my thoughts:
SWF Tools PROJECTOR Tools listing
http://www.swftools.com/tools-category.php?cat=290
http://www.multidmedia.com/ Flash Studio PRO v2 $250
Crossplatform (through extra-cost plugin), use fscommands
http://www.northcode.com SWF Studio V2 $139
Crossplatform, uses fscommands
http://www.swfkit.com SWFKit Pro $299
http://www.swfkit.com/swfkit/doc/pro_manual/index.html
However, this doesn't look like it's native code
http://www.screentime.com mProjector $299
Claims to use
http://www.screentime.com/software/mprojector/docs/mWindow18.html
SWF STudio V2 itself is fairly cheap, and explicitly says it supports Z-order.
And it's made in america!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/hta/hta_node_entry.asp
Gotchyas:
http://www.martijndevisser.com/archives/000029.php
http://www.sti-media.com/blog/archives/2004_08.html
http://www.razorberry.com/blog/archives/2004/08/25/swf-2-exe-applications/#more-6
http://flashguru.co.uk/pipermail/extendflash_flashguru.co.uk/20040730/001156.html
Interesting:
http://flashguru.co.uk/pipermail/extendflash_flashguru.co.uk/20040730/001156.html
James, sadly, passed away late this year of old age and other complications. He was an awesome cat. When I was crashing in Cambridge at Alen's place, his cat kept me company while I worked.
This picture is from when James stayed with me years later in New Hampshire, while his owner was away on a trip. The camera was a Canon A50 with a pretty wide-angle lens, so James' face looks pointier than it really is.
I thought I had outgrown such things, but the tasty goods on Master Replicas' Site had me salivating. Who wouldn't want a durable metal Star Trek Communicator (depicted) with built in sound effects? Or their own Star Wars thermal detonator, to help bring negotiations to a tidy conclusion? Some items have interactive simulations too! The short notes on each item are an interesting read also, detailing the origin of the original props and how they were interpreted to create the final replica.
These things aren't cheap at several hundred dollars a pop, but the reviews on the net seem to hold Master Replica in hard regard. We salute you, Master Replicas!
Tommy is a Russian Blue, attached to my high school buddy Mark out in Irvine, California. I first met Tommy (who's named for a character in a play) in Boston when Mark was going to law school. He's an endearing-yet-odd cat that chirp-squeaks when you pick him up. I think the chirp means, "You have 3 seconds to put me back on the floor before you are quite dead". So far, I have not seen the time limit tested.
Just going through the famous WordPress 5-minute install to see what I need to do to do this from scratch on my server, since a few of my friends have expressed interest.
Installation
1. copy files to wp/ directory
2. create db and usernames via db admin control panel
2. copy .htaccess file with php-cgiwrap setup to root directory
3. go to http://site/wp-admin/install.php
4. on step 2 of the install, change http:/site/wp to http://site, because we're going to move the index file
5. note the admin password
6. login as admin
7. add user, bump to highest level
8. Logout
Now, set up Wordpress Options
1. Options->Reading Show 5 posts paged. Optionally, enable GZIP if I'm not going to be using the staticize plugin.
2. Options->Discussion
3. Options->Misc Upload Directory (needed by LZIL)
Next edit various files:
1. move the index.php out of the wp directory (see instructions on moving the index.php file if you've never done this before)
2. edit line 3 to point to wp directory
Create Fixed Width version of index.php
1. add center div that wraps content div
2. add right div that wraps menu div
2. copy wp-layout.css over
Update Plugins
1. Markdown
2. LZIL (setup the upload directory paths correctly)
That should do it. I can genericize the template now and deploy variations on this much quicker now.
So I've been working on a Flash game for a client. It's got a bit of everything: a little physics, a dash of GUI, and a lot of animation. Unfortunately I can't show anything because I have a "blog clause" in the work contract, which permits general discussion about the techniques used but no revealing of the process until it's released.
So this week's challenge is to refine the class hierarchy and shake out some sequence bugs. The hierarchy is based largely on the concepts we had at Qualia: Sprites, Sequences, Pieces, Players, and Controllers. The hard part is to get them all to talk together, in a specific order, without creating odd interpendencies.
The game architecture is based on timesteps, during which a number of things happen. For each timestep, the cycle goes something like this:
1. Graphic State updated to reflect piece changes from previous step
1. GameController calculates game logic conditions from all Players
1. Players get control, get information about the World
1. Players submit Inputs to their managed Pieces.
1. All Pieces modify their underlying properties according to inputs by their Players
1. All Pieces get called for a Simulation Step (movement, etc)
1. All Pieces check to see what happened to themselves, and updates their underlying status, which isn't the same as a property.
My first past implements sprites and sequences into Flash movieclips with frame scripts, which allows the artists to make changes independent of code fairly easily. Sound effects can even be embedded, and I as programmer care not.
I made a mistake by combining Pieces and Players into the same class...I will need to separate them again. I also didn't make a clean separation between the pre-step, step, and post-step actions that had to occur, so I am getting inconsistent behavior due to variables fighting each other during different parts of the cycle. So this weekend I'll be rewriting the hierarchy and interaction more tightly. This is all new code, so I'm excited about layout a new foundation for future development.
My sister passes this link along: Iron Wok Jan. I haven't checked it out yet, but it seems to be another cooking manga, like Yakitate! Japan. Browsing through it a bit on Amazon's "look inside" feature, it seemed a little on the creepy side, whereas Yakitate! Japan is a bit more on the weird side.
The excerpt of Publishers Review says:
Take the concept of television's popular Iron Chef, add a few remarkably well-endowed men wearing snug cooking gear, toss in some gratuitous violence, and you've got Iron Wok Jan.
Hm, personally I can do without the "well-endowed men" part, but YMMV. Check it out at Comics Worth Reading or Amazon.
I was organizing my digital photo collection, and found the cat pictures I've collected over several years of cat sitting. So I'm going to run a photo of a cat every day until they run out. So a warm round of applause, please, for Tommy, James, Knock, Abby, Audrey, and Jenny!
One of my favorite cats, Jenny, invited me to join her network. Jenny is a very bouncy mixed breed cat that stayed with me for a few weeks, back when my condo was a kind of cat-hotel for travelling friends.
Apparently, my email form has been broken for days, but of course no one could email me about it. I apologize to anyone who's tried to reach me over the past week through that form, and wondered why the heck they didn't get a response.
There were three problems relating to the server optimizations I'd recently made:
1. Moving wordpress into its own install directory broke some URLS on the contact form itself, so it wasn't able to execute when you clicked "submit".
2. Implementing caching: my email-dave.php file is a copy of index.php, which has all the wordpress goodness in it...including the "staticize" code that serves up cached versions of pages. So the changes I made to the URLS were not being served, because nothing triggered the "I am dirty" flag back to staticize.
3. After being staticized, the email form no longer can submit to itself and perform the actual sending of mail, with the send confirmation. It instead reloads the form, which in static form has all the PHP code stripped out! I added code to the staticize plugin to skip certain files to avoid this.
So the moral of the story is:
* Don't let Staticize touch your re-entrant PHP pages
