Command-line AIR support ~ September 29, 2014
Running an Actionscript project from the command-line is not something that is frequently required (and I would certainly not recommend using Actionscript as a general scripting language), but there are corner cases where it is occasionally useful...
>> CommentLessons Learned from Diablo 3 ~ September 19, 2014
Launching a Bad Game
Diablo 3 has had a rocky history, to say the least. The initial release date was May 15, 2012. The first night, a horde of enthusiasts descended on the game, which was consequently completely unplayable because the servers...
>> CommentDealing with Stage3D Error 3702 ~ July 23, 2014
The Update (2014-07-24)
Today, I updated my Starling to the latest on github, and discovered what I wish I’d known a week ago: this solution has been in place in Starling proper for a couple of months. Still, I went to the trouble of typing it all...
>> CommentGoogle Spreadsheets for Game Configuration ~ September 2, 2013
Dynamic game configuration is always useful, and doing it cheaply and easily is especially important for small indy studios. Setting up a Google Spreadsheet with your runtime configuration data enables easy collaborative editing, and having a process that can read that data and export JSON makes it easy to use that data at runtime in whatever client language you find suitable. In this article I’m using Gson for JSON serialization, but it wouldn’t be difficult to use Jackson instead, if that’s how you roll.
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Authentication in Ember.js ~ July 12, 2013
This post is about authentication, but it also covers a more general topic: setting up a framework for ajax calls that accepts errors and reacts to them appropriately. When implementing my own Ember app, I decided against ember-data and ember-auth because they’re both new enough that the rough edges were causing me more headache than good while learning my way around Ember to begin with. I also really struggled with getting basic auth such as this working while learning Ember, so hopefully this will be useful to a few other Ember newbies out there.
This guide was written for Ember 1.0.0-rc4, and originally published in May as a gist.
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Alpha hit testing in Starling ~ July 8, 2013
In Starling’s display stack, the default behavior for DisplayObject.hitTest is to use the DisplayObject’s defined bounds, and only its defined bounds to determine if a touch hits that sprite. My current game has levels with very tightly packed assets, resulting in severely overlapping bounding boxes. Furthermore, on mobile devices, we have tight memory constraints, making it impractical to keep the source BitmapData for an uploaded texture in memory.
The Rogue Codewright ~ July 3, 2013
I’ve wanted to get a blog going for awhile. Every so often (more so recently), I have an idea or solve a technical problem and wish I had somewhere to put it. These are mostly incredibly specific to my own projects, and I don’t want to forget how I...
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