Cheeky Friday screen shot of ‘Reprisal’ …
“dynamic island data thumb-nailing … ” - ok
End of day build screen grab. New graphical direction underway …
My broken jaw has almost mended and I can get back onto solids in 4 days time! woo hoo! Anyway, down to a screen shot update. The interface is gradually taking shape, with mana collection for the ‘specials’ stored under Earth, Wind and Fire options. Above screen shows a fire column just being unleashed …. boom!
On the sound front, if you need old school 8bit sound effects I found this hand 8bit SFX maker which is proper handy and easy to use:
http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr
Is there any possibility to catch the Release Outside a button event in AS3? Yes there is …
Handy AS3 releaseOutside button code.
AS3 preloading … It’s like going back to flash 4, what’s that all about then :p
- Got some new sprites in there
- Can now make fire columns, lighting storms and fire clouds
- Tree’s, populant’s and ground get scorched!
- Can add waypoint marker for your tribe to follow
- Populant’s can drown, die of old age, have battles and invade buildings!
- Populant types are in (old, middle ages, knights etc)
- Depth control of objects
I didn’t think this would be possible after daydreaming in the garden today and wanting to give the game a bit more visual styling, but here it is! It works and run’s FAST. Dynamic blurring to give the overall game view port a ‘tilt-shift’ effect. Proper simple to achieve, just reference the same view port bitmap with a new object reference, blur it and wack on a dynamic mask! Hope to get a demo version of the engine up real soon :D
So I broke my Jaw on one side and fractured it on the other, not a great thing to do. While getting used to the metal plate and eating through straws here’s a new screen shot taken from the current version. I’d managed to blitz through some land tiles which I’m quite liking.
Converted
So all the code is now converted to AS3 and the overall performance increase can really be noticed. As i geeked offin the last entry, the ms counter now barely registers 2ms even with over 100 people and 100 buildings! The conversion process took probably just over an hour, however a lot of tinkering was needed for a final version to run smoothly with all the features from the AS2 version.
(Showing 61 buildings, 41 roaming population and no slow down in the engine! The MS counter is actually 2ms it’s just when I grabbed this screen it had dropped to 0)
One of the biggest differences between AS2 and AS3 is just how strict AS3 is. All variables need to be declared and typed correctly. In the long run this is a good thing as it leads to good programming. However users of AS2 who may have become at home with AS2’s lax nature (as I had) will find the change at first frustrating. One of the biggest bits of additional code that the port needed was checks to make sure the function’s weren’t trying to access array’s out of range, something that wont tend to bother AS2 :p
Another change is the way bitmaps work and the introduction of a new object simply called ‘bitmap’. You now need to set up your bitmapData, then create a bitmap from this, and then attach this to your child! OK I’ll admit it’s only one extra line but come on! :D
In finishing up it’s fair to say that I put off opening Flash CS3 for ages, but now I have it could be that I wont go back to coding in AS2. I’ll still be using Flash 8 for drawing, but the performance increase in AS3 is well worth the investment.
