Flash CS3

Yesterday I posted my Mother's Day animation that I created for my mother on BlazingGames.com. This was kind of a milestone, as this was the first ever Flash 9 file that I released on my web site. By Flash 9, I mean that it requires the Flash Player 9 plug-in to view the animation. To create content for Flash player 9, however, there are a number of options available. The official channel is through Adobe, in which you have three choices available to you: the Flex 2 SDK, the FlexBuilder tool, or Flash CS3. The Flex 2 SDK is free (and is going to be released as open source), though is just libraries and command line compiler. The FlexBuilder program is Eclipse with a plug-in GUI. Flash CS3 is the traditional Flash animation program that comes with the various Adobe Creative Suite 3 collections. As I own CS3 Web Premium, I have Flash CS3 and used that for the creation of the animation, even though the animation was created entirely in ActionScript 3. Now is an appropriate time to go over my review of Flash CS3.

Flash CS3 has been reviewed a number of times, yet all of the reviews I have seen seem to miss the biggest reason for getting Flash CS3 which is ActionScript 3 (AS3). What is AS3? ActionScript is the scripting language that is used in flash. AS1 appeared with the release of Flash 5. Object Oriented extensions were "added" to the language with ActionScript 2 that appeared in Flash 7. The third version of ActionScript is a much larger leap over AS2 as it is actually compiled and the Flash Player uses a JIT engine to run the compiled code. This results in significantly faster code execution. The display engine was also drastically overhauled and is now much more flexible to work with. I will cover the display engine in future entries.

Writing AS3 code for me is a huge deal, though sadly the built in editor is still lacking. I suppose Adobe figures that programmers will migrate to FlexBuilder while artists and animators will stick with Flash. As code, including the code for the main timeline, can be assigned to external text files, this division of labor may make some sense. The problem is that there are people like me, who are somewhere between the two, who want the animation and drawing abilities of Flash yet want to write a lot of code so would like the code editing abilities of FlexBuilder, especially code completion. That said, the editor has improved a bit. The big improvement being collapsible code blocks and better debugging. In fact one of the neat things about CS3 is the fact that when the compiler catches an error, it will let you click on the error message and take you right to the problematic line. I, of course, intentionally left some typos in my code to test this feature out.

There are many other reasons to consider upgrading. The Photoshop like user interface, which I initially didn't care much for but am getting use to it now. The cool convert animation into ActionScript 3 code feature. Excellent support for importing Photoshop psd files, which will come in handy if Mary ever decides to do some artwork for Blazing Games. Better video exporting capability. Finally, integration with Adobe Bridge. If you have an earlier version of Flash, I think it is well worth the upgrade just for the ActionScript 3 support.

Modern Dungeon Romp functional code posted to repository

A fully functional version of Modern Dungeon Romp has been posted to the repository. If you want to play this early release you will have to compile the program yourself, as it will not be released on Blazing Games this week. Tomorrow's release is actually going to be a Mother's Day animation that I put together. The Mother's day animation that is going to be released did not take up any of the twenty hours that I allocate to Blazing Games. The Dungeon Romp game will have some additional features and there is a bug that I discovered. The changes I will be making will be the addition of a title screen, the reduction of the dungeon size so that the top and bottom of the dungeon will no longer be cut off, the map will be hidden, the graphics will be adjusted, and the new game bug will be fixed.

The title screen, while not that necessary, is a nice finishing touch. It also makes death in the game more interesting, as when you die, the title screen will come up where you will be able to choose from new game, or continue from marker. The title screen class already exists so this will actually be a fairly minor change.

The change in the dungeon size will also be a minor change. Right now the 16x16 dungeon size is just one tile too tall for the resolution used. The new version will use 16x15 floors, so the entire dungeon will fit on the screen. An alternative would be to use slightly smaller (30x30 instead of 32x32) icons, but I prefer having my icons 32x32.

The new hidden map feature will hide the areas of the map you have not explored. This will add an additional exploration aspect to the game. This will also mean that you will not be able to plan your route to the items and exits, and avoiding monsters will be more difficult.

The graphics will be touched up so that the monsters no longer blend into the floor. I am also going to try to make the background look more like a series of caves. This has the added benefit that it will make the game look distinctly different from Modern Melee Combat.

Finally, I will be fixing a bug. Right now, if you finish the game (or die and decide to start a new game) the new game starts you with all the spells that you have memorized. This bug fix will clear out the spell list when you restart the game. While this bug fix will also fix this problem with the classic version, I probably will not bother to re-post the fixed version of the classic version of the game unless someone actually complains to me about it.