Archive for March, 2007

« Older Entries

Gaming 3.0 is totally white

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Gaming 3.0 is totally white

Here’s an IGN article on PlayStation 3’s answer to Microsoft Live called Home. Announced at the Game Developer’s Conference in SF a few weeks ago, Home is like a cross between Second Life and Battle.net and it’s so totally white inside. Everyone gets a PSP, dress slacks, and a house furnished by Crate and Barrel where you can invite your friends over to watch porn on your new virtual Sony VVega TV. Pretty soon, kids across the world will know what it means to live like a millionaire in Redmond, WA.

Beta here apparently you have to hit refresh until the page changes to “register an interest”.

little big planet

Also mentioned at GDC for PS3 was Little Big Planet where you can collaborate with your friends to create a platform-based level and then run around in it. It looks fun as hell not to mention totally cute! Eat your heart out XNA!

Posted in News, Site-seeing, Videogames | No Comments »

Order of Operations Strikes Again

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Quick AS3 hint for today. Keep learning from my mistakes! Did you know that the order of the ! operator is higher than the order of the is operator? That means that in the example:

if (!strategy is AwesomeStrategy) {...

in which I am trying to run some code if the strategy is not an instance of AwesomeStrategy, actually evaluates: 

if (null is AwesomeStrategy) {...
if (false) {...

In other words, the not binds higher and applies to strategy instead of strategy is AwesomeStrategy, the condition evaluates to false 100% of the time, and you end up puzzled as to why the block in the if statement didn’t run. Don’t make my mistake! Include parentheses when negating comparisons! Use this instead:

if (!(strategy is AwesomeStrategy)) {...

That’s right, you heard it here first. Unless you aren’t as tired as me right now and already knew that. Actually, as I look at my incorrect code now, it seems pretty obviously incorrect. OH WELL!

See the whole order of operations in AS3 here.

Posted in AS3, Flash, Flex, Programming, Tutorial | No Comments »

Adobe CS3 Launch

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

cs3launch

I’m at the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Launch Event in NYC. Click below for the live blogcast. Hit refresh cause i’m uploading every 5 mins or so.

(more…)

Posted in Flash, News | 1 Comment »

Apollo Tip: Never See the Flex Loader

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Here’s a really simple trick you can use to prevent the Flex loader from showing when you start up your application. All you have to do is hide the window, and show it when the Application is ready.

In MyApplication-app.xml:
<rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false" visible="false">[SWF reference is generated]</rootContent>

This sets your application manifest to make the root window invisible. Then, you just make it visible when everything’s ready:

In MyApplication.mxml:
<mx:MyApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" creationComplete="window.visible = true"> ...

Easy peasy!

Posted in AIR, Flex, Programming | 2 Comments »

Using E4X With XHTML? Watch Your Namespaces!

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

One of the best things about AS3 so far, for me, is the decision to make it much noisier about failing. If there was one thing that was frustrating before, it was trying to track down what failed silently and where, only seeing the effects far downstream, with a barely workable debugger. Things are sooo much better now.

Nonetheless! There are always going to be little things that trip up every new programmer until you learn them, or maybe that trip you up over and over because it’s just so hard to remember. Certainly there will be less of these in AS3, but new is exciting, right? Ok, so enough intro. I post stupid mistakes. You learn from my mistakes. Somewhere, an old woman makes waffles. Read on.

(more…)

Posted in AS3, Programming | 21 Comments »

« Older Entries