My friends made this, Gravity Bot, it’s fun. Go help them earn more than 45 cents.
Game Review
Not mine, but an interesting read about LA Noire. Kind of half game reivew, half discussion on story telling in games.
AS2…
is a pain the the ass. I hadn’t worked in AS2 for probably close to two years before today. I forgot how annoying it can be. All I needed to do was just replace underscores and dashes in a string, but AS2 doesn’t have String.replace() of course, that would be way too complicated. At least I didn’t have to deal with trying to figure out any run time errors, I remember lots of trace statements.
Yup
Still around, just not updating, so I guess things are the same. Anyways work is going well, although working with ads is annoying. Oh well it’s part of how I get paid so I can’t complain too much. IE still sucks, and I’m not sure IE9 is going to help much. Sure it’ll have better CSS support but it’s still going to be different enough to cause problems, such is the life of a UI developer.
Flash is odd sometimes
Like when you are embedding a swf in pretty much any non-IE browser (I had FF, Chrome, and Opera installed) and if you set the scale property after you set the salign, it ignores salign. Not sure why, but it’s really odd. So just make sure to place scale, and then salign when embedding.
Got a job
I got a job two and a half weeks ago. Guess time flies when you actually work every day and it’s actually fun. So now I work at Wild Tangent. Not actually working on video games, but it’s close. And I found out today they link to a game I made a couple years ago, Movie Matchup, that was a nice surprise.
CS5 flashvars
I’m posting this up here because I hope someone will find it and discover they did not do something stupid, Adobe did. Basically if you want to use any flashvars in Flash CS5, you must use the work around provided here: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/644057. Basically the new built in preloader (which I’m not sure if you can disable or not) causes all flashvars specified to be set to undefined. Not a handy feature at all. Not sure how that one slipped passed testing, unless no one uses flashvars anymore, but that must not be case then is it?
Work
Well I am officially looking for a full time job (or a part time job that pays decent would be even better actually). So if you know of any opportunities anywhere on the west coast let me know. I have learned a lot over the past year and a half, had some fun and worked on some great projects. I will keep this site up and running, and who knows, I may even update it more often, but I wouldn’t bet on that.
Art
Just built a simple site for showcasing my sisters art. She is attending Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland Oregon and currently on a trip to study in Parma Italy. I think she has some really amazing pieces displayed on the site, but there is even more to be scanned and uploaded later.
The site itself is just a single page using jQuery to update the content. I could have used a fully featured CMS, but for a project of this size it didn’t make sense. The biggest thing was creating a site quickly and make it simple to tweak the design. While doing updates is not lightning fast and does require some technical knowledge, it takes a lot less time than setting up a CMS with way more features than are needed. It is the second site I have designed, and while I am not a professional designer, I think I can create something that is simple but still has some stylish elements. Plus it is fun to design something from the ground up, even if I don’t create the best looking site ever.
Guess I’ll fill in some details
Turns out On the Boards is on top of the blogosphere happenings and found my previous post already and linked to it off their blog. So I figure I should actually include a few more details about how the On the Boards media player works.
I had not built a video player in Flash before this project, turns out it’s pretty simple. The basic Flash components work well and make it simple to stream video. The media player was built to handle both audio and video playback in a single player. It just made for a better user experience. Although I suppose we could have had all the audio files encoded as the soundtrack in video files, but our solution also makes it easier for On the Boards. Since Flash doesn’t support audio only playback through the FLVPlayback component, we used the FLVPlayback component for video and the standard Sound object for audio playback. The interesting bit there was coordinating the two so they didn’t overlap when switching media and making all the controls work for either audio or video. We ended up making all the controls not know about either playback controller. They raise events which are captured by our main class which knows what the active playback component is so it can then relay the button command. This chain of events also works the other way around, for example when the player needs to buffer data before continuing playback. It also makes it simple if we ever needed to add more playback controllers, not that I can think of any at this point in time, but you never know.