Recent posts by Rivaledsouls on Kongregate

Topic: Game Programming / OpenBOR in flash - how would you do it?

Originally posted by FlashGrenade:
But Feel free to take a look, point out the missteaks, and offer as much constructive critcism as you can.

If you want to share the code to your project and especially if you expect people to help with the project, you should start a repository on something like Github and put the code up there.
Remove the giant blocks of code in that post.

Topic: Game Programming / GiTD [#24] Entries and Discussion

If there’s over $50 in prizes to be won, we should probably try to advertise the comp, we could attract some new competitors. Maybe here

Topic: Game Programming / GiTD [#24] Entries and Discussion

Okay, I’m entering this one. I’m definitely going to finish this time, if the idea I came up with is anywhere near as fun as I imagine it will be.

Considering the theme, can we have a menu,help screen, etc. or should we integrate everything into the game (e.g. starting out at the menu and then starting the game by running off the screen to the right)?

Topic: Game Programming / Javascript game dev ide

I’ve never had an issue with Eclipse. Don’t know what all the hate is about, have yet to see an actual complaint. Eclipse has saved me countless hours, especially with looking up documentation. I couldn’t imagine programming in Java without it. For example, when working with large projects (hundreds of source files), Eclipse makes it nice and easy to navigate, allowing you to quickly open files by hitting a shortcut and typing in the first few letters of the class name. This saved me from going insane at my internship last summer.

Topic: Game Programming / What are some good simple projects or games I could make?

Snake is a good place to start, begin with just the head collecting pellets. Then add growth, and then make it so they lose when the head collides with another segment.

Topic: Game Programming / Making piercing bullets?

Give each bullet an ‘insideEnemy’ property. When the bullet hits an enemy, deal damage and set insideEnemy to the enemy hit. When the bullet is no longer hitting that enemy set insideEnemy to null, or if the bullet hits a different enemy set it to the new enemy.

This is probably the most efficient method. The only shortcoming is that if you are doing pixel perfect or similar collision detection, the bullet could, for example, hit an enemy’s arm, go through a gap, and then hit the enemy’s body, doing double damage.

Topic: Game Programming / Music Streaming

Kongregate will give you 30mb for your game. You can definitely host the music files on a server and load them as the game is running, but you’re probably going to have to pay for the server if you want it to load at all fast. I think you have to reconsider some stuff if you can’t fit all of your music into 30mb. Flash games are supposed to be fairly short and load quickly. You should be using MP3s at no higher than 128 kbps bitrate.

If your game has to load 90mb of music, people will probably give up waiting for it to load before even playing it once.

Topic: Game Programming / Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code

Closest thing to music I could make

Pretty interesting

EDIT: With some tweaks I got it to change notes as the “song” progressed, still sounds awful but closely resembles music

Topic: Game Programming / Time2Game Gaming Contest

Hm, I got a Malware warning trying to go to that site, I wouldn’t trust it.

Topic: Game Programming / HTML5 engine for Empire/RPG games

Wow, this is a very “interesting” topic. del157652, while I agree with you on some points you sound completely insane and are constantly off-topic, even changing subject within a single sentence.
Ahriman, I think you should be careful before you get to invested in HTML5 and other modern web standards. You’ll find that WebSockets are hardly supported and the browsers that do support it are dropping support due to security issues. COMET should be perfectly reasonable using Node.js, there’s several libraries for that.
Canvas is still in it’s infancy and is quite slow, on top of A*, game logic, network communications, and so on, an isometric engine is going to be quite demanding. I would do some performance tests before you get too involved. My experience with canvas is that you can easily make some nice looking graphics similar to Flash, but once you try dropping in 100+ sprites performance becomes an issue.
I personally think that a PHP backend is going to create more stress and require more work than some of the alternatives. I love Ruby on Rails, and find that it makes almost every job easier. There are many tools in place to make it less vulnerable to attacks than PHP, as well as so many “gems” which do 80% of the work for you. There’s a bunch of gems for things like queuing jobs, doing jobs on timed intervals, and various CMS-related tasks which you would likely find helpful. Finally, the code produced in a RoR project is generally more organized and readable than in Java or PHP.
Anyways, looks like you got a lot done and are doing a good job so far. As long as you don’t get too far ahead of yourselves you should do great.

Topic: Game Programming / Passing a Vector as a Function Parameter

You have three options (that I’m aware of).

A) Change function to take Vector.<Sprite>

B) Change vector to be Vector.<DisplayObject> (you can add Sprites to a DisplayObject vector)

C) Change function to take * (item:*). Check if items is a Vector.<DisplayObject> or Vector.<Sprite>, 
if not return an error or something.

Topic: Game Programming / Making a game that uses scroll wheel? Read this!

Perhaps we could convince Kongregate to add a bit of javascript to their site that disables the scrollwheel when the flash game has focus. Mousewheeltrap shows that it’s definitely possible to achieve.

Topic: Game Programming / Can I use AAC in Flash?

There’s not much room for saving space on music embedded in Flash without losing quality. Pretty much your only option besides MP3 is using something like MIDI. There’s a couple of libraries that
will play music files for old consoles like NES and Commodore 64 if you’re going to do chiptunes,
and there’s as3sfxr for 8-bit sound effects.

Short of that, you need to make constant-rate MP3s (Flash limitation, last I’ve checked) at 64-96 kbps for sound effects and dialog and 96-128 kbps for music. You could also try dropping the sample rate to 22050Hz for vocals and some sound effects to get better quality at a lower bitrate, however music will usually noticeably degrade when you drop the sample rate.

Topic: Game Programming / Flixel not clearing screen

What’s in MenuState? That’s probably the source of your issue.

Topic: Game Programming / Additional/external files in a game

Just thought I should add, you can embed the text file into your swf and it will save you a lot of trouble. The only disadvantage to this method is that you have to recompile your game and upload the new swf every time you change the text file. This is only an issue if you plan on changing the text file often, of course.

Topic: Game Programming / Bitmap Fade while retaining alpha

I don’t really get what’s going on. Why exactly can’t you set alpha on the image?
The drawing black in place of transparent portions of images sounds like it’s losing the alpha channel because fully transparent is probably stored as 0×00000000 which is fine in ARGB but in RGB it’s fully opaque black.

Topic: Game Programming / Cool idea for a simple level editor

A lot of simple flash games need levels built out of a handful of unique tiles, and it’s quite a bit of work to throw together a level editor for your game. I came up with a technique that will work well for games that are grid based and have tiles that are more functional than decorative:
- Choose a color to represent each tile
- Create a bitmap the size of the level in Paint or whatever.
- Zoom in and draw a pixel for each tile based on the colors decided earlier
- In your game, cycle through each pixel and add the corresponding tile to the map

I’m sure it’s been done before, but just thought I’d put the idea out there. It’s a nice medium between arrays of numbers and a custom level editor.

Topic: Game Programming / GiTD [#22] Looking for interest

Everyone who would participate in a Game in Three Days should just participate in this weekend’s Ludum Dare Jam. It’s also a 3-day competition where you have to make a game related to a theme. Once the Jam is over someone can start a thread here where everyone shows off the games they made.

Topic: Game Programming / GiTD [#22] Looking for interest

Oh, Ludum Dare is this weekend? We should do a Game in 3 Days last weekend to prepare.

Topic: Game Programming / Apple Declares War on Adobe

Originally posted by skyboy:

implementation dependent.

That’s the major problem with HTML and JS, there isn’t a single implementation ported to multiple platforms. There are dozens of implementations and something that works perfectly in one browser might not work at all in another. This basically means that a feature that’s been supported by some browsers for years may still be off-limits because you have to support the significant number of people who have old and non-complaint browsers (oh IE why won’t you die?)

Topic: Game Programming / Hiring- Full Time Game Producer/Project Manager

Originally posted by FilamentGames:

Blah Blah Blah…Something about jobs… Blah Blah

[Followed by a bunch of increasingly less relevant posts moving towards programming jokes]

That’ll teach ya for posting in the Kongregate Programming Forums!

Topic: Game Programming / Apple Declares War on Adobe

Apple risks seeming manipulative and uninventive to the technically savvy to impress the less savvy public with 5 year old technology in a sleek package with a shiny UI. Apple hasn’t tried to please serious computer users since the 90s, accepting that they weren’t going to beat Microsoft at their own game. Instead Apple has invested heavily into marketing to become a trusted name in “innovative” devices, appealing to people with their consistency. Apple consistently has big announcements for products that all interact with each other and follow a similar pattern. While this equates to overpriced, under-functional and uninteresting products to those who are on top of technology, it appeals to the layman. The general public isn’t interested in getting the most powerful device for the best price. They, instead, want a device that does something new (as an excuse for why they need it) but is still very familiar and plays nice with their other devices. Apple is very in tune with that crowd, and gears their conferences towards these people with various “real world applications”. These show applications that many wouldn’t think of watching the tech demo of the same technology put out 5 years prior.

tl;dr: Apple isn’t trying to appeal to us, they make designer products that appeal to the unsavvy trend-followers. Apple would happily lose 5% of their customers by restricting what’s allowed on their devices to force the loyal customers to use Apple services.
(Apple owns the right to many proposed HTML5 technologies and would benefit from it’s adoption, not to mention they get more App Store sales when there are less application platforms)

Topic: Game Programming / FP11 beta new features

Running on the 64-bit plugin, pretty much neck and neck for encoding.

skyboy (AS3) 	 43
skyboy (AS3) 	 45
skyboy (AS3) 	 46
skyboy (AS3) 	 46
skyboy (AS3) 	 46 

Adobe Native JSON 	 SyntaxError(1132): Error #1132
Adobe Native JSON 	 0
Adobe Native JSON 	 0
Adobe Native JSON 	 0
Adobe Native JSON 	 0


Encoding...
skyboy (AS3) 	 78
skyboy (AS3) 	 51
skyboy (AS3) 	 49
skyboy (AS3) 	 49
skyboy (AS3) 	 50 

Adobe Native JSON 	 57
Adobe Native JSON 	 57
Adobe Native JSON 	 56
Adobe Native JSON 	 58
Adobe Native JSON 	 55 

Topic: Game Programming / Massive optimization help needed - Java

No, a lot of GPUs (including mobile) specialize in H264 decoding, it’s very parallelizable. What kind of video are you trying to decode?

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 Collision for 1 object

I disagree with using a quadtree or similar unless the other objects are stationary. If they’re in motion the cost of calculating the quadtree would heavily outweigh the benefits. For most cases I’d recommend doing a simple distance check. If the furthest point on the character is 30px from it’s center then it’s radius2 = 90. Do a check like:

var distance:Number = (other.x - player.x)*(other.x - player.x) + (other.y - player.y)*(other.y - player.y);
if(distance < player.radius2+other.radius2)
{
     //Check Collision
}