I’ve been experimenting with physics engines for Flash AS3 with a mind to upgrading the one I made from scratch for my parallax scrolling game.
Box2D is well known, very powerful and has extensive documentation, but after taking a look at the manual, I decided that it left out too many common tasks for the sake of flexibility. Also I do not like converting pixels to meters. I may return to this if they get some more advanced features implemented for as3.
APE was ridiculously easy to use and wonderfully documented. I was able to set up my game engine to use this is just a few hours, however, I quickly ran into a wall† when it came to the features I needed.
Glaze is what I’m tinkering with currently. It has little to no AS3 documentation, but it is based on the chipmunk physics library and documented in it’s daddy’s C language. It’s amazingly fast, and so far, it’s making some sense to me. I’ve made it parse a MovieClip to build rigid bodies out of it’s children, sleep off screen bodies, and I’ve extended the RigidBody Class to handle different types of collisions.
Here is a little demo of where I am so far: (use keys: WASD, SPACEBAR)
adapting glaze physics as3
It’s still missing a ton of features present in my current game work in progress.
† What is the word for when a metaphor has 2 meanings? Like an idiomatic pun, but not a pun. UPDATE: it’s double Entendre or innuendo.
AS3, glaze physics
I’m familiarizing myself with Zend Framework 1.7 and it’s fancy AMF abilities. Ideally, adhering to to the model-view-controller design will facilitate mobile or flash-less users to interact in some ways with an application without requiring much recoding. My PHP coding skills may be slowing me up a bit, but I’ve recently made some good progress…
Update: Unfortunately, encountering pitfalls can sometimes be more demoralizing than overcoming them is satisfying… I think I’ll stick with the simpler AMFPHP 2 for a while. It can’t be too hard to migrate the services if the need should arise. For now I just need to hack some stuff together. Technical debt be damned!
actionscript, amf, flash, php, Zend Framework
Yesterday my brother and I spent the sunny, fall day hiking to Ramona falls. We passed several serious looking foragers bearing pointed sticks and oversized backpacks, alerting us to the presence of an esteemed macrofungus. Among the plethora of mushrooms fruiting along the trail, I was eventually able to find several large and new Tricholoma Magnivelare. The distinctive piney odor of the species seemed to me much fainter than the descriptions I read indicated. The slightness of the scent, the white, domed cap and white gills would have made me more sceptical, but I’d recently gathered and identified it’s dangerous look-alike: Aminita Smithiana in the hills near the north fork reservoir of the Clackamas on the 18th.
This is how some of them ended up:
The texture of the mushrooms improved and lent a subtle taste to the broth. I used canned stock, a splash of white wine and a hunk of pork fat, I imagine it would be much better with homemade beef or chicken stock. The matsutake flavor and aroma is becoming more and more robust with my repeated exposures to it. I had not tasted or smelled matsutakes until I collected these on Wednesday. Maybe my brain had to make the necessary connections to fully experience this mushroom.
hiking, matsutake, mushrooms, oregon
Here is a little environmental animation I made for my flash game:
animation, flash
I managed to drag myself onto the bus and rode to the Oregon Mycological Society meeting last night. I had never been to Washington Park MAX Station and for a guy who’s only ever had one experience on a subway it’s kind of neat. I was alone at the station. The wailing echoes of the light rail train and the steady rush of cold underground air it pushes emanate long before and after the trains arrive. Pressting the “S” button on the elevator took me over 500 feet up in just a few seconds, depositing me in the mostly deserted zoo parking lot.
My brother has just pointed out that there is only one real way to arrive at this train station in style:
http://jaketastic.com/blog/vid/max2.swf
Anyway, Gary Slone of the Audobon Society gave a little talk covering mushroom basics. Fortunately he let slip a few tidbits here and there for those of us who’ve met a mushroom before. It looks like Sauvie island is a good place to look for Verpa Bohemica, which Gary claims are edible and good in moderation if cooked thoroughly.
mushrooms, oregon mycological society
It looks like pretty straightforward platformer– The hook being (for those of a mycological inclination) you play as a Bolete fungi and battle poisonous Amanita and Lepiota foes with your intelligent Morelle allies. The concept art and premise intrigue, but the game still appears to be in the mycelium stage. I have hopes that this game will achieve full flush alongside an excellent natural mushroom crop when it’s released in Fall.
I can’t let Ross get so many more blog posts than me!
Also, I checked out last.fm to try to find some new music and found out that I am getting seriously lazy. I’m not sure I have the patience to hunt down something I can enjoy or want to share. I need to work on being a better consumer/leech!
I guess I was expecting to find a radio station type thing, what with the “.fm” They need (or probably already have but I can’t find) a few radio stations that just play whatever their users are into. Maybe just select a random user and play her last 40 listens.
editzors: Ok, i guess you can just find a user who likes a band you like and click on their name. That is how you use last.fm.
I found something that’s ok. — http://www.last.fm/music/Zero+7
That goth chick from dead can dance that I’ve heard sampled in a few songs I like
– http://www.last.fm/music/Lisa+Gerrard
I’m tired of the MF’n shrimps in my space!
So I blast them!
Well anyway, shrimps now collide with walls and are pushed back by bullets!
Let me know if you want me to set you up with a blog so you can join our awesome weblog ring!
Oh boy I am so excited.
Let me see here… How is this supposed to work…
Kewl..
