Recent posts by zylum on Kongregate

Topic: Programming / Making a pong playing wrist watch?

well most PICs are under 10$ which is cheaper than a used razr… I’m not too sure about tiny LCDs but in general most electronics are really inexpensive.

Topic: Programming / Making a pong playing wrist watch?

Go to your local electronics shop and pick up a PIC microcontroller and a small LCD screen. Those chips are cheap as hell now a days and you can program them in C instead of assembly like in the past. You will need to know some basic computer engineering (or someone who does) though as you have to solder it to a PCB and need to know how to read resistors and capacitors and stuff like that.

Topic: Collaborations / Pixeljam is looking for an AS. 3.0 Apprentice

When is the deadline?

Topic: Programming / Should I continue AS2 or Start AS3?

OK, I have just read the first two chapters of “Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginners Guide” and I would not recommend it at all. First off, it declares that it will avoid the use of OOP and and says that it is only appropriate for large projects, and then it uses Objects all over the place and trying to briefly explain what they are afterwords without much success. For instance they claim it is difficult to pass many variables to methods so you should create a custom object (without even being explained what an object really is) like so:

var plane:Object = new Object();
plane.pitch = 0;
plane.roll = 5;
plane.yaw = 5;

Which is rather poor programming in my opinion. Why not just create a Plane class and instantiate the plane object by calling the Planes constructor? All this is preceded with a paragraph saying that you are already “neck-deep in objects” and then giving a very brief and poor explanation what they are followed by an even longer paragraph explaining what pitch roll and yaw are. WTF? And why is it so difficult to pass multiple variables to a method? Simply use ”...rest” to store any number of variables in an array! ”...rest” is only mentioned once in the entire book and it is in a method signature which was likely copied and pasted.

I encountered this type of thing throughout the first part of the book (chapters 1 and 2) which only consisted of around 30 pages. For instance they claim that “ongoing versions of ActionScript are backward compatible to support legacy projects”. Comments are used throughout the book without ever being told what they are!! This is probably what that comment was by the reader who didn’t know what some lines of code did and the code worked when the line was removed… There were many other things I noticed but have forgotten though I’m sure you know by now what my opinion of this book is.

Just to be fair, I re-read the first couple of chapters from the book by Colin Moock (which the authors of the other book said “For a more complete ActionScript 3.0 resource, we heartily recommend the incomparable Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock”) and tried to read it from the beginners point of view. The thing I noticed about this book that may deter beginners is that there are very few tangible results early on in the book. I know when I started teaching myself programming, I would read as fast as I could through the boring stuff so that I could get to the good stuff but then suffered as I didn’t fully understand the fundamentals. This book describes the fundamentals fairly thoroughly though it is quite dry to read. That being said, if you go through the book and try to understand each chapter before moving on, you will be a much better programmer (IMO) than if you did the same reading the other book.

I just wanted to add that the reason I chose to use Colin’s book over other books is that Colin is the only name I recognized out of all the authors of the other books. I knew that Colin Moock is an established and well respected Flash developer so I chose his book. On the other hand, the author of the other book is a professor at New York’s School of Visual Arts.. I’m not quite sure that qualifies them to write a book on programming.

Topic: Programming / Should I continue AS2 or Start AS3?

I found Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock to be quite good though I’m an experienced programmer. I’m sure you can find an ebook version of it somewhere…

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for a couple testers

Woah sakket, are you streaming like 5 youtube videos while testing the game? XD ‘Cause when I have nothing going on in firefox, the CPU usage is 0% even with several tabs open.. Also, my CPU usage with the demo running is only between 6% and 30% (30% is with lotsa trees in view) and I have a worse processor than you so I’d expect it to run better on your machine…

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for a couple testers

Alrighty, I have for the most part finished with optimizing the engine. I was able to double the tree count to 24 trees (trees were the biggest problem) and improve the performance at the same time! :D Let me know what numbers you guys are getting now.

You will notice that you will get differing CPU readings depending on how much crap there is on the screen. In the previous version, all transformations and all that other bologna were being performed on all objects regardless of whether they were on the screen or not :S

If speed is still an issue I will have to inline all classes and function calls which will be a real pain in the neck so I really hope the demo is running acceptably for most people…

Topic: Collaborations / Artist looking for help.

this is for another project that never went through

Hey this is still an active project XD it’s just that I am still looking for a competent artist to collaborate with as this is more of a larger scale project. In the meantime I have started another smaller project in order to stay productive.

On topic though… I have not programmed a card game before but from my general programming experience, I would imagine that programming it would be fairly straight forward. On the other hand, a card game (especially the with animations like you described) will need a lot of art assets which take a lot of time to create. Not only this but the design of the game with all the rules and balancing the game will also take a lot of time. There is another thread somewhere around here where someone had an idea to make a card game. One of the suggestions was to make a mock game with physical cards and test it and refine it with a friend until it’s fun to play as well as unique. Then you can start creating the art. Once you have some of the art done you can post your progress and look for a programmer to collaborate with. Showing that you have put effort into this will motivate the programmer as they don’t want to waste their time investment into a project that will flop.

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for a couple testers

Cmputer specs? RAM/CPU? For me it’s taking up 35% CPU and about the same memory which is expected.. Dunno why I would ask for that :P I’m on a 1.83GHz core 2 duo with 2GB or RAM.

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for a couple testers

What is what called? The blog post you are looking for is “Some Progress”. The game itself is currently nameless.

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for a couple testers

Hey everyone. I am nearing the completion of a game engine I am working on and am a little concerned with its performance. That being said, I’d like to know how well it is running on your computer. Sooo open up your task manager, find your browser process and write down the memory and cpu usage before you run the engine demo. The visit my blog at http://zylum.net and go to the recent post to find the demo. Once the demo is launched, write down the same stats as before and post your results here or as a comment on the blog. If you have a better way of measuring the performance to do that instead XD

These stats will help me determine how much I need to optimize the engine such that it runs appropriately on the majority of computers (oh yeah, dont forget to post your computer specs!).

As the game is nearing completion, I will also need a few beta testers but this will be in about a weeks time.

Thanks in advance!

Topic: Art / Banner Arts (no more requests)

Using epic four times in one post sorta makes the word lose its value – _ -

Topic: Art / need help with logo for upcoming site

Yes… That is exactly what I am… o____O

Topic: Art / need help with logo for upcoming site

OK I redid the leaf and text. Enjoy ;)

Topic: Art / need help with logo for upcoming site

I had a finished one with a leaf and text but illustrator crashed as I was tweaking it.. Luckily I saved it after finishing the beetle.

RAWR!!!

MoonlaughMaster >> put exclamation marks around the url to make the image appear in the forums.

EDIT I redid the leaf and text XD

Topic: Collaborations / Can someone make a "click" game?

Well there are many free hosts out there. Hosting an xml file and reading it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Topic: Collaborations / Can someone make a "click" game?

In order to not have to update the swf every week, you can make it read an xml file or a database to load dynamic content everytime.

Topic: Collaborations / Skills sticky - Input needed

I like the current format suggested by arcaneCoder. Though I would suggest adding primary and secondary skills as some people might have a thorough knowledge of their skill of choice as well as partial knowledge in other skills that would be beneficial for a team. I agree that email should not be one of the pieces of info posted since this can usually be found in the portfolio, or if not, the shout system can be used.

Topic: Art / SAKKET's ARToRAMATHON (art on evry page aug 21!)

Amazing as usual.. btw, what are furries?

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for an artist

Hey it’s not bad.. Have any more?

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for an artist

Alrighty, I have finally posted a really basic demo of the game engine on my blog.

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for an artist

That’s pretty good. Right now I am just looking for a bunch of different badies from which I will choose to go in my game. You don’t necessarily have to make the characters with vector art, you can sketch them if you want as well. None of the art is final as the game will likely be in an isometric view.

Topic: Programming / Rotation

Check out my latest blog post at http://zylum.net for an example of simple 3D in flash as well as all source. You are welcome to modify it for your own purposes :)

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for an artist

That, my friend, is top secret at the moment. I should have a small demo of the engine up soon though. I spent my last free time making that concept art rather than finishing up the demo.

Topic: Collaborations / Looking for an artist

It’s not that I don’t like what I come up with, it’s just that I’d rather do what I’m good at. That piece I posted in the art forum took me a good few hours :S Now doing the graphics for an entire game would take me forever, especially with animation. To put that into perspective, the games I made on my blog took a couple hours each as well, though most programmers I know would spend significantly more time than I would. Also, I’m assuming most artists wouldn’t spend hours on something as simple as I’ve done for the concept art.